Political Quotes

“I think it is a great day for American children today. The debate the last couple of weeks should have had nothing to do with show and tell. It should have had nothing to do with who better understands how important education is to the future of this country. The whole issue, of course, was one of who knows better how to bring about quality education, people on the local level, the teachers, the administrators, the parents, or we in Washington, D.C.? And as I have said to my committee so many times, if all of those programs from Washington, D.C., down would have worked, we would not have a problem with literacy in this country. We would not have a problem with drugs in this country. We would not have a problem with dropouts in this country. We would not have a problem with people graduating who cannot do math and cannot do science very well. If they had worked. They did not work. The reason they did not work was because nobody paid any attention about quality. We said one size fits all. ``Take it from us, we know better than anybody else.'' We also said, ``Let's cover numbers. Don't worry about whether you're covering them with quality. Just cover numbers.'' And so we did a lot of different things. As a new majority we said in our higher education bill, no longer universities and colleges who support pupil-teacher preparation. We want you to produce quality teachers.…”