David Obey: “I would simply like to make one point about the term ``whole school reform.'' We see some people in this country who say…”

“I would simply like to make one point about the term ``whole school reform.'' We see some people in this country who say the only answer is to bring in computers. We see other people who look at a school and they say the only answer is to have the teacher retrained. We have someone else say the only answer is some other partial approach to the problem. What our leading American businessmen have discovered through research that they financed on their own is that schools usually produce better performance if they think through how the entire school works rather than just thinking single shot, such as whether we need more computers or whether we need retraining for reading teachers and things like that. That is all whole school reform means. It means to take a look at the way the entire school operates rather than having some single shot, slap-dash approach at which we have usually thrown money through the years, and it seems to me that conservatives would be far more interested in promoting this than they would be in simply continuing to shovel out large amounts of money without reviewing the way, in fact, we produce the best results for the children we are supposed to be here working for.”