Political Quotes

“When this legislation was passed, special education is a mandate that every child receives the same kind of education, the same quality of education. Some people with serious problems are a lot more expensive to educate than those who do not have those difficulties. Yet, just back in 1996, if I look at this correctly, we were only paying 3.5 percent of special education costs. If my memory is correct, the legislation that was passed by this Congress before that some years said we would pay 40 percent of the costs of special education. We were at 3.5, and I think we are up to, looking at that chart it is a little hard to tell, it is over 6. So we have almost doubled the Federal commitment. These are dollars that follow the student and go to all of our schools. That is not true of all Federal money. Much of the Federal education dollar is not spread equally across this country. Some large urban districts do pretty well. There are a few suburban districts which do pretty well. I have lots of districts that get 1 percent of their funding. Yet, we say we are funding 6.8 percent of education. So the biggest frustration I have had with Federal programs is the complexity.”