Jim Jeffords Quotes

Americans thinking that America will continue to lead the world in innovation and quality of life without some quick and serious educational improvements are dangerously delusional.

I am going to use every rostrum and every forum and every searchlight that I can to tell the people of the country and their elected representatives that we can no longer afford overcrowded classrooms and half-day sessions. We just must not, we just cannot afford the great waste that comes from the neglect of a single child.

If we get public education right, everything else will follow. But if we get it wrong, not much else will matter.

Although children are only 24 percent of the population, they're 100 percent of our future and we cannot afford to provide any child with a substandard education.

I have said it on several occasions, several times from this podium, that providing a quality education for our children is high on my priority list. I will not stop now.

The single greatest investment we can make in the economy is to make sure that each person has a good education.

We cannot, as a country, improve economically, socially, and culturally without quality education.

Our nation's commitment is to provide a quality education to every child to serve the public common good. Accordingly, we must shift the paradigm to think of education funding as investments made in individual children, not in institutions or buildings.

We can't afford to sacrifice another generation of American children to bureaucratic politics. We've got to get it done. The future, the health, the life - our nation depends on it and it's just foolish to think or act otherwise.

If all the rich and all of the church people should send their children to the public schools they would feel bound to concentrate their money on improving these schools until they met the highest ideals.

It is a sad commentary that today we face a choice between having schools that are a monument to our past - or schools that will be the lifeblood of our future. But since that is our choice, let us resolve to choose wisely.

All you've got to do is go back and look in the early 1900s and see what we had in Texas without public education and realize what it has done for the state.

Economic prosperity and quality education for our children are inexorably linked.

May this plain statement of facts prevail on the friends of the rising generation to interpose for their welfare; that the education of children may no longer be to parent and master a lottery, in which the prizes bear no proportion to the enormous number of blanks.

Our nation's security, economy, and place on the world stage depends on the success our educational system.

It's not easy for the average family to ensure that their child receives a quality education. And the federal government is not making it any easier.

Over-reliance on strictly economic justifications has already begun to hurt the quality and range of education at every level of American life.

For every challenge we face - unemployment, poverty, crime, income growth, income inequality, productivity, competitiveness - a great education is a major component of the solution.

Improving our nation's education system has long been the cornerstone of my policy agenda.

When we set up our kids for failure, we set up our workforce for failure, and we set up our economy for failure. I can't emphasize enough the importance, the absolute importance, of education in achieving long-term economic growth.

There's no silver bullet when it comes to helping all children achieve. Great public schools are our best shot.

What we need is an education system that works for every child, not a select few. This starts with providing a quality education for our youngest Americans so they can learn, grow, and become prosperous citizens.

I didn't design schools for poor kids. I'm designing schools to be world-class.

It's very easy for people to say what's wrong with education in Arizona, but if I'm elected as governor, I want to focus on what we're doing well and maximizing the impact of what we know is working.

Economic growth is important. But we cannot count on economic growth alone to fund the public education system our children need and deserve.