On the recordFebruary 26, 2015
I thank the gentleman from Colorado and the gentlewoman from North Carolina for their leadership. Mr. Speaker, I think you can look at me and understand the importance of the Federal Government, for when I went to school, those of us of minority status, African Americans and Hispanics, were not protected by our States. It had to be those in the Federal Government who indicated that no matter what you looked like, what your race was, or what your disability was, you had the right to equal education. That is what the Federal Government can do. That is what this involvement of the Federal Government is. It is to ensure that no child is denied an education. Yet, Mr. Speaker, we find ourselves today with a decrease in funding to education across America. Parents should understand that, with a 3.2 million student enrollment increase, this bill flatlines any increase in education. It does not support teachers, and it does not support highly qualified teachers in providing for them an incentive to teach. More importantly, my fellow students who may be called disabled, do you know what they do to them? They raise the numbers of those who can be sent to those classes that in the old days we called slow classes, so that they are not mainstreamed, they are just thrown over to the side. We stopped doing that decades ago, but this bill brings it right back home again.…
