Political Quotes

“Madam Chair, I rise today in support of my amendment to H.R. 2740, which advocates for funding for the Department of Education's comprehensive literacy development grants. The LEARN Program provides competitive grants to States to help local educational agencies develop comprehensive literacy plans to ensure high-quality instruction and evidence-based intervention strategies for all students from birth through grade 12. This program is the only Federal funding stream to support these statewide efforts. This funding allows local school districts to support high-quality professional development for teachers, teacher leaders, principals, and specialized instructional support personnel to improve literacy instruction for struggling readers and writers, including English language learners and students with disabilities. The state of literacy in our country is alarming. Before coming to Congress, I taught high school chemistry, and what I found was that most of my high school students couldn't read above a third or fourth grade level. How could my students learn chemistry if they couldn't read? How could they expect to, later in life, be able to pursue a quality and rewarding life? It was a wake-up call for me, and I spent the next 4 years, as a consequence, building a nonprofit that focused on early childhood literacy in our most disadvantaged communities. According to the National Institute of Literacy, approximately 32 million adults in the U.S. cannot read.…”