Public Education Funding Quotes

Policymakers can draw much from 'The Need for Roots': such clear prescriptions as that employers ought to provide an adequate vocational training for their employees, education should be compulsory and publicly funded, and include technical as well as elementary education.

The taxpayers have a right to say what shall be taught ... to direct or dismiss those whom they employ as teachers and school authorities .... The hand that writes the paycheck rules the school.

As elite attitudes towards public education over time illustrate, simple formulas are far from adequate. There are conflicting tendencies.

As more government functions are privatized, we find political leaders defunding the public school system, shifting government funds to the private, for-profit school industry.

I could never allow [tax] cuts that devastate education for our children, that pollute our environment, that end the guarantee of health care for those who are served under Medicaid, that end our duty or violate our duty to our parents through Medicare. I just couldn't do that. As long as I'm president, I'll never let it happen.

The very wealthy have little need for state-provided education or health care... They have even less reason to support health insurance for everyone or to worry about the low quality of public schools that plagues much of the country.

In our town meetings, and in our school district meetings, wealthy and substantial men oppose the grant of $15 to a school library, and of $30 for both library and apparatus; while at West Point they spend $50 in a single lesson at target firing, and the government keeps a hundred horses, and grooms and blacksmiths to take care of them, as an indispensable part of the apparatus of the academy. The pupils of our Normal schools, who are preparing to become teachers, must maintain themselves; the cadets at the academy receive $28 a month, during their entire term, as a compensation for being educated at the public expense.

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.

You have a situation in which the U.S. is fighting three unjust wars and wasting trillions of dollars in public funds, all the while draining money from important social services and public and higher education.

Much of the criticism centered around Betsy DeVos focuses on her lack of experience with public schools. While she has shown some interest in 'protecting' students from the non-existent threat of grizzlies wandering onto their campuses, she has never run, taught in, attended, or sent a child to a public school.

If you just believe in our democracy, and you want an informed electorate, public schools are in your interest, and I think our country is dependent on public schools, whether or not you personally have a kid in the public school system.

Washington flourished but the people did not share in its wealth. Politicians prospered, but the jobs left Americans want great schools for their children, safe neighborhoods for their families, but for too many of our citizens, a different reality exists. An education system flushed with cash but which leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of all knowledge. We've defended other nation's borders while refusing to defend our own.