Political Quotes

“Mr. Chairman, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Chair, I rise to offer an amendment to H.R. 10, which reauthorizes our Nation's charter school program. I would just like to start out by saying this is a great improvement over the charter school legislation that we have seen in past times. When the charter school movement began, as many of you may recall, lawmakers exempted those schools from many of the rules governing traditional public schools in order to allow educators their ability to explore new, innovative methods and models of teaching. This yielding of exempting them from this rule yielded some unintended consequences. There have been stories in many States, and you just heard Ms. Castor of Florida talk about financial waste, fraud, murky funders or managers, conflicts of interest. It is a problem, notwithstanding our desire to see innovation. This has got to be addressed because taxpayer dollars are, in fact, lost along with private funds, as well as innovation. The greatest cost, of course, is our children, who become, sometimes, puppets of other folks' financial interests. A new report from the Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education released just this month examined 15 of the largest charter markets and found $100 million in losses to taxpayers since charter schools entered these markets. It is very important to put sensible oversight into place to ensure that public funds are not being wasted or misused.…”