Political Quotes

“before we start discussing the bill, I would like to offer a debt of gratitude to my colleagues on the other side for allowing this bill to go forward. And we can make it better, I am sure. But I have a few points that were mentioned. This bill is building on existing programs that our Committee on Education and the Workforce in a bipartisan fashion passed a couple years ago. There is a $5,000 student loan forgiveness program in existence today if they will go into teaching in a Title I school. What does that mean? A Title I school is a school where 30 percent of the students are at the poverty level or below. That is usually a rural poor school, an urban poor school, the places that is very hard to recruit. As the chairman said, there is going to be a two-million person teacher shortage facing this Nation. And how do we get the best and the brightest into the teaching profession and how do we get them into the hardest-to-recruit area, rural poor, urban poor? We give them a signing bonus. But the law that exists today has the same requirement as this bill. We just do not want to get bodies into the classroom. We want to have quality teachers in the classroom. Under the current program, they cannot get any loan forgiveness until they teach 3 years. That is exactly what this bill does. But what it does is it goes beyond $5,000.…”