Political Quotes

“Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative Haley Stevens for this opportunity to speak on behalf of this really important legislation. Imagine, if you will, the ability to model a manufacturing process to design a basketball shoe, maybe modeling the opportunity to cure a disease, maybe modeling market behavior, perhaps modeling a system to be able to equitably donate organs to people or molecules to cure a disease, modeling energy sources so that we can have a more safe and healthy planet, or maybe even, unfortunately, having to model the destruction of our infrastructure so that we can make sure that we have the national security resources to be able to protect our fine Nation. H.R. 730, the Mathematical and Statistical Modeling Education Act, is designed to address all of these different issues in our society, but I come to the floor with really bad news, as though we needed more. America's K-12 students are falling further and further behind, particularly behind China's students, academically. This lag is particularly concerning when we talk about the STEM fields because our industrial base continues to tell us that we are not educating and preparing the designers, engineers, and modelers of the future in order to be able to compete with our adversaries. The National Assessment on Education Progress, which is colloquially known as the Nation's report card, has shown us that this knowledge and talent shortage is a nationwide challenge.…”