Burgess Owens

The skills gap is the growing disconnect between employer needs and employee competencies.

If these past three years have proven anything, it is that America has an extremely resilient workforce.

I thank my friend for her remarks. The gentlewoman is a great addition to our Conference. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Florida (Mr. Bilirakis), who is my good friend.

If a system is not working... it is not working.

It is time for us to stop putting down parents.

If it is a bad school system, why should we put our kids in there?

They think that the system is not for them.

This is a civil rights issue. Every child has a right for an education.

Educational freedom can give someone a second chance in life, and passion, and will not stop fighting until every child, regardless of his or her race, socioeconomic status, family situation, or neighborhood has the right to educational…

Representative Messer long ago caught the vision of school choice, and how transformative educational freedom is for families.

Educational freedom is a civil rights issue of our time.

I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting school choice. Let us give parents and students the power to choose the education that works best for them.

If they do not believe the ideas that they do not like are worthy of hearing, then our society, our whole constitutional order is lost.

Far too many higher education institutions claim to uphold this right, accept funding from the American taxpayer, and then purposefully turn their backs and betray us.

Freedom of speech is a constitutionally protected God-given Right ensconced in our founding documents.

The role of American government has always been to defend the freedom of the students.

The Biden administration proposal is a patchwork attempt to fix a structural problem that will only make worse the issues of rising prices and low-quality educations.

Blanket bailouts that turn loans into targeted grants and saddle future generations with someone else's debt is not a solution.

It's time we face our soaring college prices head on, not to kick the can down the road for another day.

Let's make sure we're getting back to the family unit where these kids can be raised right, where they understand discipline and respect.

What are we trying to accomplish? Do we want to make sure we just focus on the Second Amendment, or do we want to take care of our kids first?

Why would anyone vote against that? Take care of our kids. Let's get that done with first so every fall we take our kids to school, we know they're going to be okay.

Every day we put our kids in a school system, our grandkids, we expect to be able to pick them up, that they're going to be safe.

How about this? Securing Our Students Act, using billions of dollars of unused and already allocated funds from the American Rescue Plan...

We have two topics here, my friends. One is the Second Amendment rights, and that's going to be a discussion for years to come.