Political Quotes

“we have more than 1 million people in our prisons around the country. Let us just round it off and say we have 1 million people in prison. Eight hundred twenty thousand of those prisoners have no high school education; 82 percent of the people in our prisons today are without a high school education. That is why Senator Bingaman and I have offered an amendment to create within the Department of Education someone to specialize, to work on, to keep these kids in school. Every day 3,000 children drop out of school in America. Since we started the debate on this legislation, 15,000 children have dropped out of high school. Every one of those children dropping out of high school are less than they could be. I have heard statements here the last several days saying, well, why do we need to talk about kids dropping out of school? Why don't we talk about the children who are handicapped who need money? I acknowledge that. The fact of the matter is, we have tried on this side of the aisle to get more funding for special education and have been unable to do so because of not having enough votes on that side of the aisle. It is not an either/or situation. We need to help local school districts with more funding for handicapped children, and I recognize that. I will do that. If we had a vote on that today, I would vote for it. That does not take away from the fact that we need to do something about high school dropouts.”