Joe Cunningham: “there is a vision for education and a vision that could be bipartisan, but it chooses not to, unfortunately, because of…”

“there is a vision for education and a vision that could be bipartisan, but it chooses not to, unfortunately, because of partisan politics. We can have big government control of education or we can have it where parents, teachers, local administrators can control that. We talk about voluntary national testing. The gentleman from Michigan Mr. Dale Kildee, who was the ranking minority member on the subcommittee, he and I killed national history standards. Why? As a previous history teacher, the gentleman from Michigan saw they were teaching more about Madonna than they were the Magna Carta, and that the Federal Government was getting involved in socialized history and the standards that went into it. And the worst part was that the textbook companies, before that bill was ever passed, had set forth that liberal agenda into our schools. And that is wrong. The President talks about more money for school construction, but yet the other side of the aisle denied the average age of D.C. schools is 60 years. And when they talk about school construction and more tax dollars for it, the other side rejected that all we had to do is waive Davis-Bacon and we would save 35 percent of school construction. But yet the union bosses controlled the other side of the aisle and they rejected it. So there is a difference in vision. The Democrats had 40 years to establish the foundation of public education. Public education should be the foundation of this country.”