Joe Cunningham: “But just like in education, if we get so little money out of the Federal Government down to the classroom, and I would…”

“But just like in education, if we get so little money out of the Federal Government down to the classroom, and I would say, Mr. Speaker, a State bureaucracy is just as bad as a Federal bureaucracy if it keeps the dollars away from the classroom. But if we get so little money, and I do not know, Mr. Speaker, if my colleagues have ever tried to pass a school bond in their districts, but I know in California it takes two-thirds, it is very difficult. So if we have very little money from the Federal Government, if we cannot pass a school bond, how are we going to bring those classrooms up when we are last of the industrialized nations, 15th in math and science? And that was duplicated in a major study just this last month, where over half of the 4th graders could not identify the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean, and we got over half of our students coming out functionally illiterate.”