Charles Best Quotes

… while they're adding teachers in places like South Korea, we're laying them off in droves. It's unfair to our kids. It undermines their future and ours. And it has to stop. Pass this bill, and put our teachers back in the classroom where they belong.

I haven't met one parent or one teacher in Missouri who thinks we should balance the budget by taking money from kids' classrooms.

Education should be one of our top funding priorities; talking about it does not help the teachers and students who desperately need promises fulfilled.

I am deeply concerned with the diminution of the teaching strength of the country as a result of the disproportionately low salaries that are paid to teachers throughout the country.

You can’t reform education without spending some money.

I chose to keep teachers in classrooms rather than prisoners in prison..

We don’t get the quality of people going into teaching that other nations do…. When people go teacher bashing, they are making the problem worse.

As a former teacher, it pains me to watch such an essential and rewarding profession suffer due to government neglect.

We should empower teachers to do their job by cutting wasteful spending and crippling bureaucracy, not classroom resources our educators and students need.

Teachers should not need to have to buy books for the kids, or pencils and pens. That's absurd.

I think good teachers are underpaid.

We need to increase education budgets.

As a Member of Congress from one of the fastest growing States in the country, we hire close to 2,500 new teachers a year, close to 5,000 support staff and faculty.

In many ways, education is a lousy business. Teachers are not normal economic actors; almost all of them work for less money than they might fetch in some other industry, given their skills and advanced degrees.

Our public education system does a great job. I don't think it's broken. We aren't interested in doing reform for reform's sake. I believe in public education; it did a great job for me. It deserves our support and encouragement.

I worship teachers. They can't be paid enough. It depresses me that society sees them as somehow expendable.

Given the professionalism of Michigan teachers, I think they're not teaching because of the financial rewards.

If teaching isn't rewarding and challenging, we're going to continue to lose our best teachers to work in other fields.

Common sense tells us that we should focus our resources to benefit children, teachers and taxpayers by keeping dollars in the classroom.

I have been in more classrooms than any legislator will ever walk into in their lives, and I see wonderful, caring, dedicated teaching out there.

The biggest barrier we've seen to student progress is this: School policies and practices often prevent good teachers from doing great work and even dissuade some talented Americans from entering the profession. This needs to change.

As they work hard for our children, America's teachers often reach into their own pockets to make sure they have the best classroom supplies. I feel strongly that the federal government should help make up for their personal financial burden.

The fundamental problem for the teaching profession is how undervalued it is and how underpaid teachers are.

We cannot expect systemic success when our teachers are underpaid and under-resourced, or when they split time being caretakers and counselors for our children as well.

I do recognise that, where recruitment difficulties persist, teachers can be put under great pressure.