Charlie Crist Quotes

As the son of a union activist and a lifelong Democrat, I've always thought that privatizing our public schools is not the answer. We must strengthen public schools.

I believe there ought to be school choice, so that parents can choose within the public school system.

And there should not be a limit on the creation of new public schools. We ought to expand choices for parents.

There is a growing acceptance and interest in publicly funded school choice as a catalyst for education reform in general and a way to empower parents to be education reformers.

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 …

Keep the Federal skunk out of our schools.

I trust Colorado families and teachers way more than I trust D.C. central planners who think they know better than parents do.

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.

No Child Left Behind's fourth-grade gains aren't learning gains, they're testing gains. That's why they don't last. The law is a distraction from things that really count.

I believe public education is the new civil rights battle and I support charter schools.

Many of those who argue for vouchers say that they simply want to use competition to improve public education. I don't think it works that way, and I've been watching this for a longtime.

I'm totally opposed to vouchers. I will fight them tooth and nail.

Yes, I believe in school choice. Parents know far better than government bureaucrats what their children need from an education standpoint, and they should be permitted to make that choice.

I just have a position that any child that's in a failing school should be able to get out, or be in a position to have that school fixed.

Republicans get a lot of money from big business, but they are not tied to the union dollar. As a result they have been aggressive advocates of school reform, charter schools and vouchers for private schools.

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

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.

Federal and State mandates don’t do anything for local schools other than to protect failure.

One of my main legislative efforts in education is to help expand and replicate successful charter schools. Charter schools are public schools with site-based governance.

Competitive programs such as Race to the Top provide incentives for communities to develop new solutions for old problems. Because of Race to the Top, states have raised their standards and committed to fixing schools that have persistently failed students.

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

Get rid of Betsy DeVos.

Bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., shouldn't know how to better educate my kids than I do.

You can't improve what you can't measure, and liberals have resisted any kind of meaningful measurement of success in the classroom for decades. Instead of focusing on the three R's, liberals have thrown up a barrage of silly things designed to distract us all from their awful stewardship of the schools.

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.