Washington, D.C. - Mr. Chairman, I want to begin by commending the committee leadership on both sides of the aisle for their efforts on this bipartisan bill, the chairman of the committee, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Boehner); the ranking member, the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller); the subcommittee leadership, the gentleman from California (Mr. McKeon); and the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Kildee); and the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) for all his work on this piece of legislation.
It is critical that we improve teacher training in this country to make sure that the children in our classrooms get the best possible results. I want to thank the committee for adopting an amendment that I submitted along with the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey) to make it clear that these teacher-training funds could be used to train the teachers who train our youngest children because we all understand the importance of early, early education.
I must say, however, I am very concerned about the growing gap between what we say we want to do as an authorizing committee and what we are willing to pay for as a Congress. We can talk all day long about the good things we are going to do; but at the end of the day, if we are not going to pay for them, all we have is talk. And I think this gap, this credibility gap, cannot be made more clear between what we are going to do here today and what we will do tomorrow when we take up the education appropriations bill.
Today we will pass an authorizing bill, Ready to Teach, calling for a $300 million authorization to do the things we are talking about on this floor. Tomorrow we will have a Republican appropriations bill that has less than one-third of that money, $300 million authorized, $90 million appropriated. Today we are talking about how important it is to teach teachers, but tomorrow we will take up an education appropriations bill that underfunds No Child Left Behind by $8 billion. It is great to have trained teachers; but we if we do not provide the schools with the money to hire them, our kids will not get the benefit of those teachers, and that is $8 billion short.
Today we are talking about training special education teachers so they can provide a good education to the children in this country who have disabilities. But tomorrow we will take up an education appropriations bill that provides less than 50 percent of what this committee, the Committee on Education and the Workforce, said we should be providing.
Now, the chairman said we can look at that as a cup half full or half empty. The fact of the matter is we promised a full cup; and we, as a Congress, are not delivering. I think the chairman of the committee is absolutely right, we came here to make decisions to establish priorities. Let us do it. The reason we are falling short tomorrow in the appropriations bill and not meeting the commitments that we are making today in this authorizing bill is because the priority of the majority party here was to provide huge tax cuts that disproportionately benefit the very wealthiest Americans. Let us get our priorities straight and truly pass not only an authorizing bill but an appropriations bill that leaves no child behind.