Pete Sessions: “Mr. President, my daughters have graduated from public schools. My wife and I have graduated from public schools. We…”

“Mr. President, my daughters have graduated from public schools. My wife and I have graduated from public schools. We want to strengthen our public schools. We want to improve schools; certainly, we do. What we really want to do is improve public education. We want to make it better. I believe that so strongly. It is curious to me that there are some in this body who think there is only one way to do it--to spend an extra billion or so--and that is to spend it on 100,000 teachers, which I suppose is an issue that somebody poll tested and ran surveys on and thought that sounded like a good political way to fix education. We have to be responsible. We have to think these thing through. The Gorton amendment says, OK, we want to do more than we have done. The Senator from Washington says, I will sponsor an amendment that spends more for education than the President has requested. But he wants to give the local school systems the ability to decide how to use that money.”