Political Quotes

“what I learned more than anything else in the 20 years I sat in the minority on the Committee on Education and the Workforce, and even I am reminded today as the chairman of that committee, the approach that we took all those years positively did not help children, and that is what this is all about. We sat there year after year after year and we said, if we just had one more program, if we just had another billion dollars, if we could just cover another 100,000 children, everything would be better. And what are the results? Well, the results are that the achievement gap has grown. It has not decreased at all. Because over and over again we said we have the programs, from Washington, D.C. One size will fit all. We know better than anybody else. But, more importantly, what we did was we took all of the money and divided it up over and over and over again, because we kept adding new programs. So now we are down to the point where they do not have enough money to do anything worthwhile unless they commingle funds. And what were our auditors doing during this time? The auditors did not ask whether it is a quality program; they did not say is this program succeeding. What they said was, ``If you commingle one penny, you have had it. Boy, we will be down your throat.'' So a local district, who could take a couple small programs and make them into a worthwhile program, could not do it. So as I said, the achievement gap just gets wider.”