Education
Kennedy became notorious in the 1970s for his support of desegregation busing. He was one of that members of Congress, government, and judges and journalists who supported busing but sent their own children to private schools.
Kennedy was a leading member of the bipartisan team that wrote the controversial No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. According to both Kennedy and President Bush, the Act was a compromise. Kennedy then worked on its passage through a Republican-controlled Congress, despite opposition from members of both parties.
Kennedy opposed federal attempts to cut student financial aid, such as Reagan's 1986 planned limitations on Guaranteed Student Loans to students whose families earned over $32,500 a year, and a planned $4,000 cap on all federal aid and benefits that a student could receive in one year. Following the Republican takeover of Congress in November 1994, there was a renewed effort on the part of key Republican leaders to balance the federal budget by cutting financial aid. The new cuts, which Kennedy also opposed, involved reducing the interest the federal government would pay on student loans, and on Clinton’s direct lending program. Kennedy supported the College Affordability and Access Act of 2007 which provides $20 billion in new federal financial aid investments for low- and middle-income students and their families.
Read more about this topic: Political Positions Of Ted Kennedy
Famous quotes containing the word education:
“Shakespeare, with an improved education and in a more enlightened age, might easily have attained the purity and correction of Racine; but nothing leads one to suppose that Racine in a barbarous age would have attained the grandeur, force and nature of Shakespeare.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)
“If you complain of neglect of education in sons, what shall I say with regard to daughters, who every day experience the want of it? With regard to the education of my own children, I find myself soon out of my depth, destitute and deficient in every part of education. I most sincerely wish ... that our new Constitution may be distinguished for encouraging learning and virtue. If we mean to have heroes, statesmen, and philosophers, we should have learned women.”
—Abigail Adams (1744–1818)
“Institutions of higher education in the United States are products of Western society in which masculine values like an orientation toward achievement and objectivity are valued over cooperation, connectedness and subjectivity.”
—Yolanda Moses (b. 1946)