Political Quotes

“I am delighted with the debate thus far because it really does come down to some pretty important concepts as to how we best approach a problem that I believe is the most threatening we have today, as we look into the decade, the next century; that is, the education of our children. As has been said again and again, we are failing. We are absolutely failing today. If we look at our education for kindergarten through the twelfth grade, statistics have been given. Let me review those. This is the fourth grade. This is the eighth grade. This is the twelfth. This looks at just mathematics. We could put science, math, reading, English, any number of things in these columns. Each of these green bars--it is hard to read--is a country. The red bar is the United States of America. That is our performance in the fourth grade in mathematics compared to Singapore, South Korea, Hong Kong, Austria, Slovenia, Ireland, Australia. You can see in the fourth grade, we are at about that level, about seventh or eighth. In the eighth grade--the longer you stay in school--in mathematics, we drop further. And by the time you get to the twelfth grade--the black line is the average--you can see we fall below the average in the eighth grade. In the twelfth grade, we are down further. People agree with the data. That is the good thing about this debate.”