Burgess Owens: “I hope that all the Members of Congress will not let the present discussion that has been launched by the President in…”

“I hope that all the Members of Congress will not let the present discussion that has been launched by the President in his State of the Union address, a list of items that he gave there related to education, I hope that that wonderful list will not get lost. I hope that we will not have a fragmentation of the discussions about education to the point where we have all these tiny, separate discussions going on and there is no focus, no unity and no sense of priorities. I want to hold on to a sense of priorities within that education list that the President offered. Some things are more important than others. One thing is key to everything else. Unless we understand that, I think we are going to lose out in our efforts to improve the schools, those schools that need improvement; and the great majority of American schools do need improvement, some more than others.”