President Obama made a trip to the battleground state of Pennsylvania on Tuesday to unveil new initiatives on early childhood education. Speaking in Philadelphia, Obama announced that education centers preparing children for kindergarten under Head Start will receive further evaluations in order to receive federal funding. Obama also blasted Republicans for opposing his education policies.

President Obama: “The Republicans in Washington have been trying to gut our investments in education. Earlier this year, nearly every Republican in the House voted for a budget that would have cut hundreds of thousands of children from Head Start. They’ve tried to cut Pell Grants for college students. They just voted against a jobs bill that would have put 400,000 teachers back in the classroom. Their argument is that we don’t have the money. And what I’ve said is we can make these investments in our children without adding to the deficit simply by asking people who make more than a million dollars a year to pay a little more in taxes — not right now, but starting in 2013.”