Chuck Schumer: “I rise in strong support of her amendment. My State and our Nation are on the verge of an education crisis. At the end…”

“I rise in strong support of her amendment. My State and our Nation are on the verge of an education crisis. At the end of the last school year, test scores showed that half of New York's fourth grade students could barely handle basic written and oral work. If you look at the studies, what is one of the best ways to remedy that? It is the method of the Murray amendment--to reduce class size. If her amendment is not passed, in New York State, 3,497 teachers in the next fiscal year will get pink slips. Why are we doing that? We have a program that works. It is reducing class size. The same things were said about the Cops on the Beat Program, the 100,000 police, that it wouldn't work or needed targets or would create bureaucracy. It has helped bring crime rates way down. Now we have a chance to do the same thing for education. It makes such eminent sense to support a proposal that is aimed at the heart of the problem: too many students; not enough teachers.”