Mitch Daniels Quotes

The problems of public schools will not be solved by cutting off the source of their funding, which is what vouchers are.

Millennials are not deeply familiar with school choice, and have some reservations, especially about the types of institutions that a student might choose to attend with taxpayer dollars.

If we allow public funds to be used to support our relatively benign, morally grounded schools, we will have to allow those public funds to be used for any type of private school.

President Bush and I had asked Congress to appropriate a half-billion dollars to school vouchers. We didn't get it, and we were disappointed. But we did not go out and form a corporation to pay for it. That would have been a problem.

I hope to see the day when as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools. The churches will have taken them over …

To me, it looks like an opportunity for school choice. I'd also like to see a pilot program to allow true school choice ? vouchers.

Arizona is a national leader in school choice with both charter schools and tuition tax credits giving parents and their children more school choices than ever before.

Legislatures not driven to desperation by the problems of public education may be able to see the threat in vouchers negotiable in sectarian schools.

If you're going to have a public subsidy to education, vouchers are clearly a better way of delivering it. They should result in some loosening up and privatization of the government school system.

I'd propose that each central-city child should have an entitlement from the state to attend any school in the metropolitan area outside his own district - with per pupil funds going with him.

Continued adherence to a policy of compulsory education is utterly incompatible with efforts to establish lasting peace…. the state, the government, the laws must not in any way concern themselves with schooling or education. Public funds must not be used for such purposes. The rearing and instruction of youth must be left entirely to parents and to private associations and institutions.

While the public school rewards failure by throwing more government money at failing school systems, the voucher system does the opposite.

Charter schools are not a panacea.

The bigger goal of giving all parents more choices is one that will have to be discussed and undoubtedly roundly debated, but we are going to have to continue to build the case. The momentum is there on the state level in many states. That's where the energy needs to be harnessed in a new way.

We're not proposing any shifting of funding from public schools to private schools.

Take Washington, D.C., which spends over $10,000 per student for education whose student achievement would be dead last if Mississippi chose to secede from the Union. Suppose Washington gave each parent even a $5,000 voucher - that wouldn't mean less money available per student. To the contrary, holding total education expenditures constant, it'd mean more money per student remaining in public schools.

The White House, in advancing the agenda for a [school] "choice" plan, rests its faith on market mechanisms. What reason have the black and very poor to lend their credence to a market system that has proved so obdurate and so resistant to their pleas at every turn?

In the education debate, people are so passionate about their ideas that we often end up expending more energy shouting at each other than we do pushing for the fundamentals to success in all schools.

The key for all cities is whether you turn the public schools around.

Keep the Federal skunk out of our schools.

The most important domestic issue we face is education…and education is so broken.

I'm not knocking private schools, but I owe it to my kids to let them grow up in a place where private school isn't required. They're only in school 6-8 hours a day; they have to live in their neighborhood 24 hours a day. I didn't want them growing up in a place where anybody with the means had abandoned their public schools.

These day schools did invaluable service in the days of the Colony and Commonwealth, and, indeed, in the early days of the Republic; but to their continuation must undoubtedly be ascribed the tardy recognition of the government and people of the fact that no agency for the education of the masses is as effective as the public school.... There is not one public school building owned by the government or by any city or township.

To restore our public schools, we must put an end to the selfish agenda of the union bosses.

I am increasingly ready to junk the public school system.