Burgess Owens: “When Europe needed to be rebuilt after World War II, we came forward with a massive Marshall Plan, $20 billion to start…”

“When Europe needed to be rebuilt after World War II, we came forward with a massive Marshall Plan, $20 billion to start and much more afterwards. When we needed to educate our GIs coming home from World War II, we passed a massive GI Bill of Rights education program and it did the job. Now we need to retool our schools. We really need a massive investment in education. What we are doing is playing Republican Chinese checkers, trivializing the whole problem by shifting money around, abolishing the Department of Education's authority and playing games by promising more money when it is the same amount of money basically that we have always had. I think the seriousness of the situation is better reflected in the statement being prepared for the superintendents who will be convening here from some of the country's most challenged school districts on Saturday. They have prepared a statement which reads as follows: 'We believe that there is a great necessity for an immediate meaningful Federal increased investment in education.'”