Political Quotes

“I rise this now-early morning, on a new day, to talk about this nomination, which has been the subject of so much debate, so much contention and, I believe, so much concern across the country and in my home State of Pennsylvania. I spoke earlier today of some of the basic history of my State that principally involves public education. In the 1830s--the early 1830s, to be exact--a debate started in Pennsylvania about public education, the culmination of which led to the enactment under State law of the Free School Act in 1834 in Pennsylvania. We have had a bedrock foundation of free public education all these generations. It is part of who we are as a State. In our Commonwealth, even today with all of the changes in education and all of the change in policy over time, we are still a State where 92 percent of our schoolchildren are educated in public schools. That is the State we are. We don't have any for-profit charter schools, and that has been the subject of debate in this nomination. We have, by law, public nonprofit entities as charter schools. It is a significant point of difference between what is law in Pennsylvania and what is part of our education traditions and what the nominee has stood for in her time as a private citizen. We will get to that a little bit later. I wanted to start tonight with a basic assessment, and then I will go through a series of issues.…”