[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 128 (Tuesday, September 17, 1996)]
[House]
[Pages H10507-H10513]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                  EDUCATION CUTS IN THE 104TH CONGRESS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Meyers of Kansas). Under the Speaker's 
announced policy of May 12, 1995, the gentleman from New York [Mr. 
Owens] is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority 
leader.
  Mr. OWENS. Madam Speaker, we are moving toward adjournment. There is 
a rumor that we may be adjourning the 27th or the 28th of September. 
And there are some very important unfinished business items that relate 
to education which I would like to discuss tonight. The session is 
coming to an end, and it is kind of hard to get information. We seem to 
be treading water, and I suppose behind the scenes there are some 
fruitful negotiations taking place.
  This is the end of the 104th Congress, the Congress that came in like 
lightning in January 1995. We came in and we had sessions at one point 
every day of the week and for 6 months a nonstop agenda. Now as we draw 
to the end of the session, the close of the session, there is a great 
calm that has settled over us. I hope it is not the calm before the 
storm. But the last few months, things have been sort of slowing down.
  I want to congratulate the American people for having made that 
happen. Things have slowed down. The rapidity of the movement, the 
extremism that characterized the first few months of this session, we 
can all do without. It is just as well that we do not have it anymore. 
It is the public; it is the people out there with the common sense that 
should take the credit.
  Everybody in Congress, everybody who is in politics knows how to 
measure public opinion. They listen to public opinion, and what 
happened in this case is that the extreme agenda was not a subtle 
agenda. It was quite open and honest. I congratulate the leaders of the 
104th Congress, the majority Republicans, they were honest with their 
agenda. They laid it out there and people knew just what was going on.
  They knew that drastic cuts were going to be made in education, 
drastic cuts would be made in jobs programs, drastic cuts would be made 
in housing programs. They knew that Medicare, Medicaid would be cut. 
They knew the agenda and, with the help of some spokespersons from the 
Democratic side to get them to understand it, slowly public opinion 
began to manifest itself and the people who listened to it on both 
sides, including the Republican majority, have come to the conclusion, 
I think, that in certain areas they are not going to hold, they are not 
going to continue the kinds of contempt for public opinion that was 
manifested in the first half of the 104th Congress.
  Public opinion had been out there all the time making certain things 
clear. It is not that this is some new development. The public has 
always made it clear that they prefer education to be a priority of the 
government at every level. The polls have shown that for the last 5 
years. Education has always been one of the top five priorities. It 
moved to the top, last 2 years one of the top three priorities. So for 
the leadership of the 104th Congress to insist that drastic cuts were 
going to be made in education was to sort of hold the public opinion 
process in contempt and to turn their back on the common sense of the 
American people.
  Finally they have heard. Finally, as we move toward the resolution of 
the first budget, the budget for fiscal year 1996, after the two 
shutdowns and a lot of drama, one of the things that happened was that 
the cuts in education

[[Page H10508]]

were rescinded. They were given up they gave up on the cuts in 
education.
  Yes, there were humongous cuts in other areas, extreme cuts in other 
areas. I think the most extreme cuts probably took place in housing. 
But there were cuts in job programs, job programs. There were a number 
of cuts, 22 billion dollars' worth of cuts still took place, despite 
the retreat on education, $4.5 billion for education and labor, and 
they retreated on most of those related to education. Head Start was 
not cut. The title I program was not cut.
  So we had an acknowledgment by the Republican majority that the 
common sense of the American people, which said over and over again 
education should not be cut, education is priority, they bowed to that.

                              {time}  2045

  They bowed to that, and I hope they continue to bow to it. We do not 
know for certain, because in the appropriations bill that passed the 
House of Representatives before we went out for recess, there was an 
appropriations bill for the health and human services, education, 
health and human services, and in that bill there were still some 
drastic cuts for education programs.
  No, they did not cut Head Start any more, and they did not cut title 
I any more. Those are too highly visible. They did cut Goals 2000. They 
did a number of other cuts, and you still had a kind of war with the 
common sense of the American people in respect to education being made 
a priority.
  That situation still exists today. The appropriations bill passed by 
the House of Representatives is there waiting for action by the Senate, 
and we have heard that there is good news. Rumors are that the Senate 
may agree with the Democratic amendment that proposes to restore the 
cuts made by the House of Representatives in the House of 
Representatives budget, and not only to restore them, but to increase 
them. It means that the leadership of the Senate, the Republican 
leadership of the Senate, is listening, above the heads of the 
Democrats in the Senate, to the vast majority of the American people 
out there.
  Madam Speaker, public opinion, common sense is registering. They have 
heard, and it looks at if we may come out of the 104th Congress with 
all the cuts restored and, perhaps, an increase. There is a rumor that 
the amount of money for education may be increased above what the House 
bill passed, substantially above that amount. It is very good news, and 
it is a victory for the common sense of the American people. The 
American people are to be congratulated for consistently insisting that 
education is a priority.
  We came into this 104th Congress with the Republican majority 
proposing that the Department of Education be eradicated. It was that 
extreme; in 1995 we had a proposal on the table that the Department of 
Education be eradicated. The superpower of the world was going to do 
without a Department of Education at the Federal level. It will be the 
only government of any of the industrialized nations that has no 
central agency at all relating to education. It would have been a very 
barbaric and primitive kind of action to take, but it was proposed. It 
was proposed seriously.

  I serve on the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities. 
That is the name that it has now, but for the other 12 years that I 
have been here it was called the Education and Labor Committee; and 
before our committee earlier in the session, in 1995, we had two men 
who should have known better come before the committee and testify that 
they wanted to abolish, eradicate, the Department of Education.
  We had Lamar Alexander, the ex-Secretary of Education. He was the 
Secretary of Education under George Bush in his last 2 years. Mr. 
Alexander was proposing that we abolish, eradicate, the Department of 
Education. We had Mr. Bennett, who had been the Drug Czar, and he had 
once also been head of the Department of Education before also 
proposing that this civilized Nation, the leader of the industrialized 
free world, should not have a Department of Education.
  So we are a long way from that kind of extremism; you know, the kind 
of extremism which followed that proposal with a proposal that we cut 
school lunches to the bone and that we take title I, one-seventh of the 
funding for title I, $1.1 billion; that we cut Head Start, which has 
never been cut in the history of its existence. That kind of extremism 
was rampant in the first half of the 104th Congress.
  As we come to a halt, as we near the end, I am pleased to observe 
that we are going out not with a bang, but with a whimper. We 
appreciate the whimper. We have had enough extremism. Extremism is not 
good, and the Founding Fathers understood the need to have a check on 
any kind of rapid movement, any kind of blitzkrieg of ideas, a 
blitzkrieg of programs when they created the two Houses. They knew that 
one House would have sort of a calming effect on the other. Certainly 
the Senate, a more deliberative body with a longer term, was to be kind 
of a brake on extremism, and I think we should applaud the Founding 
Fathers again. It has worked; the other body has been a brake on the 
extremism in this House.
  And now the other body has come to the rescue of the education 
appropriations. We are probably, according to rumors, going to get from 
the other body an increase in the education budget paid for by some 
very innovative program that I had mentioned 6 months ago, the 
possibility of using the income from the spectrum to help with our 
revenue problems, and I see that that is coming to pass. It is a 
concrete proposal in the Senate that the income from the spectrum 
should be used to fund this additional amount of money for education.

  So we hope this key bill will really move forward in accordance with 
the rumors, that the positive kinds of things that are being talked 
about in the rumors will become reality and that the next few days, 
before we leave, we will see an appropriations bill emerge from the 
floor of the Senate, which will then go to conference, and we will 
have--we hope that the Members of the House will still be listening to 
the voice of the people, the common sense of the American people, and 
that they will be reasonable about returning education to a status of 
being nonpartisan activity.
  Probably more important than foreign policy, education should be a 
bipartisan and nonpartisan activity.
  You know, we used to have a sort of unwritten rule that was 
understood that foreign policy was bipartisan, you know, or even 
nonpartisan. That rule has been broken quite a bit by this present 
Congress, but maybe it applies, or should apply more so, to education. 
And we return to a situation that did exist when I first came to 
Congress where on the Committee on Economic and Educational 
Opportunities there would be intense arguments about how to do 
something, about which way we wanted to proceed to improve education, 
but there was no argument about the fact that we needed an education 
department.
  We needed a Department of Education, and we needed to have an 
investment in education. How we would do it was a great bone of 
contention, but nobody ever proposed that we have drastic reductions in 
the role of the Federal Government in education.
  Congress must keep its eye on this prize. Education ranks high in the 
minds of the people because they understand, they have a wisdom that 
endures, and they understand what is important and what is not 
important.
  This has now been translated into the platforms of both parties. I 
think both parties have some strong statements about commitment to 
education. I do not think you still have in the Republican Party 
platform anything about eradicating the Department of Education. I 
think you have very strong statements in the Democratic platform, and 
you have very strong statements that are being made every day by 
the President about the commitment we need to make further to advance 
this Nation on its education agenda.

  It is understood that national security, a great part of national 
security, is what we do in education. It is understood that the H.G. 
Wells statement that history is a race between education and 
catastrophe is truer than ever before, that we will have catastrophe if 
we do not rise to the occasion and make certain that this leader of the 
free world, this leader of the industrialized world, has the best 
possible education. An educated populace is our

[[Page H10509]]

most valuable asset. An educated populace is our first line of 
security.
  We should not have what has occurred in this 104th Congress; that is, 
a Congress proposing a $13 billion increase in the defense budget while 
it proposes a $4 billion cut in education programs. That is exactly the 
opposite of what we should be doing. Our defense, our security, is very 
much tied up with education.
  And I want to note, you know, that there are many people who 
understand this. Because there are so many different groups in America 
who understand this and have become more and more vocal, they have 
heard the call for help, they have heard the call to protect. We needed 
to protect ourselves from the extremism, and more and more the 
widespread and diverse support for education has manifested itself, and 
that is good. You know, let all flowers bloom; you know, let everybody 
who is interested in education come forward and participate in the 
process of getting a clear sense of direction as to where we should go 
with education.
  It is not enough just to support it, it is not enough just to applaud 
the restoration of the funding at the Federal level. We must have a 
clear sense of direction as to where it is going to go. We must have a 
clear sense of how we are going to behave in our localities, the 
municipal governments, and a clear sense of how we are going to behave 
with our State governments and just what kind of commitment we are 
going to make for education as we go toward the 21st century.
  The President has a good vision, but the Federal Government is only a 
small player in the whole education drama. The Federal Government, at 
most, has spent about 8 percent of the total education budget. At the 
height of Federal spending for education it did not get beyond 8 
percent. The rest of the money is provided by local governments and 
State governments.
  What is most important for the Federal Government is that it be the 
role model, that it be the drum major, that it set the tone; and that 
has been a positive development over the years that came to a halt with 
the advent of the 104th Congress. The tone was just the opposite. That 
the tone here in Washington was that the Federal Government should back 
away from the commitment, and, as a result, you have had commitments, 
retreat from commitments, in a number of States and a number of 
localities.

  Certainly in the locality that I represent in New York City there has 
been a great retreat, a movement away from the commitment to education 
of the kind needed. We have in New York right now a good example for 
all of America to take a hard look at as to what happens when you have 
a retreat from a commitment to an investment in education.
  There were 91,000 young people who reported for school on the opening 
school day who had no place to sit in New York City. This is hard to 
describe to most people throughout the country because 91,000 people, 
91,000 students, is greater than the number of most school districts. 
Most school districts, you know, are in the 10,000 to 20,000 range, and 
many are much smaller than that, school districts. But here we have the 
New York City school district which has more than a million pupils. You 
know, at the height of the New York City enrollment, it once reached 
1.2 million.
  So we are not at a point now where there are more children than the 
city has ever had. We once had 1.2 million in the enrollment of the New 
York City schools. But the city is not prepared right now to take care 
of 1.6 million pupils. It is not because they have never had the 
situation before; it is because we have leadership that has no vision, 
a leadership that chose to not listen to the voices of common sense, to 
not listen to the constituency of the city, to the parents.
  We had a chancellor of the schools who laid out the problem very well 
2 years ago. He laid out the problem, he proposed a solution; he 
proposed a program to make the kind of repairs that were necessary so 
schools could be repaired, he proposed to build schools where they were 
needed, and it was all there.
  So it was not that the vision had not been laid out by someone, an 
educator who understood what was going to happen. His name was Ray 
Cortines. He spent some time in Washington. He was a superintendent on 
the west coast at one point. He was well respected as an educator.
  Well, he was kicked out of the city hierarchy. He was hounded to the 
point where he had to resign because he insisted that you have to 
prepare for the problems that you are going to face with respect to 
schools that are too old and crumbling, not safe, and we need to 
replace those, and we have a situation where, in certain areas of the 
city, the population is growing at a rapid rate.

                              {time}  2100

  So we were not prepared. Came the opening of school, and 91,000 young 
people had no place to sit, because the vision was not there.
  If, in a highly visible situation like this, if there are no places 
to sit, if space, if the capacity to seat the children is not there, 
then you know that many other elements of the educational system also 
are in disarray. You cannot see the quality of teaching, you cannot 
easily see the quality of equipment and supplies, but if the basic 
space capacity is not there, then everything else is suspect.
  There is a collapse in the education system in New York because of 
bad leadership, because leadership was extreme in another direction. 
The mayor was intent upon making tax cuts. The mayor was intent on 
sending a message that we would not spend as much for education as we 
have been spending in the past. It was a new mayor, a Republican mayor. 
He had some extremist views on certain items, and he put blinders on. 
Now the reality is there, the children had nowhere to sit.
  In the midst of the reality, what has happened? We have had a refusal 
to recognize the reality. There is a great debate that the mayor has 
started about placing 1,000 of the 91,000 youngsters in parochial 
schools. There is a great debate about the fact that the parochial 
schools, the Catholic schools, have specifically said, we will take 
1,000 youngsters, not just for this year but we will take them and we 
will take your worst youngsters, your most difficult in learning, et 
cetera, and we will keep them through our whole 6 years or a whole 8 
years of schooling. You have to pay for them, though. You pay us what 
you spend per child.
  That is another form of choice. In this case a religious school is 
involved, and there are questions of the constitutionality of it 
arising. All of that was pushed to the side because private industry 
said, we will pay for them. We will raise the money. You do not have to 
use public funds.
  The mayor is busy applauding himself and going on to take care of 
1,000 youngsters, and I want to congratulate him publicly for getting 
the private sector to put up money to educate 1,000 young people. I 
hope the private sector is going to provide $2 million per year, not 
just for this year but to keep the kids in the Catholic schools.
  We are interested in children being educated. I do not think anybody 
should stand on ceremony and say this is not the right solution, it 
sets a precedent.
  One thousand of the 91,000, good luck. We congratulate the mayor for 
saving 1,000. But what about the other 90,000? What are we going to do 
about them?
  So I come back to my original concern here; that is, that if the 
Federal Government is going to drift back on track, if the public 
common sense is going to penetrate the beltway, if the public common 
sense is going to penetrate the House of Representatives' leadership, 
if we are going to come back to the reality that the people want 
education to be made a priority, that the people want an investment in 
education by every level of government, starting with the Federal 
Government, that the Federal Government is going to begin to set an 
example and become a role model again, then my concern is that we 
understand that this is not enough.
  We applaud the President and his long platform related to education. 
We applaud the proposal that something be done about construction. It 
is a proposal that comes kind of late, but let us hope we can get it 
off the ground next year, with a small amount of money the Federal 
Government proposes to stimulate investment and construction for 
schools.
  Senator Carol Moseley-Braun and I, 3 years ago, authored a provision 
in

[[Page H10510]]

the Elementary and Secondary Education Act which called for $600 
million to be spent for construction and repairs, especially in 
situations where you had asbestos and you have lead in the water and 
you have unsafe conditions in the schools.
  The $600 million that was authorized was cut down immediately in the 
appropriation process to $100 million. That was in the 103rd Congress. 
When the 104th Congress came in, one of the things they zeroed out 
right away was the $100 million for emergency repairs and construction. 
So there is nothing existing in Federal law right now which will give 
any aid to localities that need help with buildings, with space, with 
asbestos problems, with lead poisoning problems, with fire violations.
  The city of Washington, DC, had several schools closed down on the 
opening day of school because they had fire code violations.
  The mayor of New York says that, really, we do not have a problem 
with 91,000 youngsters; that really there are places for them to sit on 
the floor. There are just not desks for all of them; or that maybe 
there are places for them in other schools. New York is a big city. It 
has 8 million people. If you bus kids around to places where they have 
a few empty classrooms or empty seats, if you get it all together, you 
can find seats for half of the students.
  Madam Speaker, I applaud that. If you can get it together, Mr. Mayor, 
please do, because you have 1,000 that you have taken to parochial 
schools; there are 90,000 left. If you can take half, move them around 
in buses, however expensive that may be, or however disadvantageous 
that may be for young children, if you can do that, then you have 
45,000 taken care of. But what about the other 45,000?
  And when you get through placing them, you acknowledge, the mayor 
acknowledges, the school board acknowledges, that many of them are in 
gyms. And they consider that normal now, because they have been in gyms 
holding classes for several years now. Many of them are in closets. 
Many of them are part-time in the cafeteria. Many of them are in small 
auditoriums. There are various innovations that have been accepted as 
normal.
  So what if you began to meet the fire code violations, the fire code, 
and end some of the violations which must exist if you have youngsters 
packed into some of these spaces? Or health code violations, 
ventilation problems, where you do not have youngsters in a room with 
the proper ventilation? If you ended all those, our 45,000 of student 
problems would increase back up to 60,000 easily.
  We have a major problem. We have a major problem. No matter what 
happens here in Washington, no matter how positive the appropriations 
bill is when it comes finally to the floor, and we will be finished 
with the appropriations process for this year, it will not help that 
situation very much, because we do not have anything in the 
appropriations bill for construction, for repairs. So there is a need 
to call upon the Federal Government in the future, yes, but there is a 
need right now at the local level, at the State level, to deal with an 
emergency.
  We have got a generation of children, we have 90,000 young people, 
who, if we do not solve the problem this year, we partially solve it 
and it impacts them next year and the next year, what kind of education 
are you providing for those 90,000 young people? They cannot wait.
  The Mayor has said this situation is going to be with us for quite 
some time. Let us understand, we cannot solve it overnight.
  Whose children are involved? If your child was involved, would you be 
as calm as the mayor is, and say you cannot solve the problem 
overnight? Or would you be angry? Because we had a chance with Abe 
Cortines who predicted 2 years ago that we have a problem, and he was 
driven out of town by the harassment of this same mayor.
  One of the items that I have on my agenda tonight is a discussion of 
National Education Funding Support Day, and that has a lot to do with 
Washington, of course, but it has more to do with the local level.
  What I am trying to do, and this is a project that was conceived of 
by the National Commission for African American Education, the project 
was designed to try to engage local communities in the fight for 
getting more funding for education, to wake up people to the fact that 
education is something that is very essential, but we cannot take it 
for granted.
  You cannot take for granted that the local officials are going to do 
what they have to do to plan to avoid having 90,000 kids in New York 
City not have seats. You cannot take for granted. There must be an 
involvement at all times by citizens, not just the parents but all of 
the citizens.
  So National Education Funding Day, Funding Support Day, is designed 
to try to allow an opportunity for the businesses, for the labor 
unions, for the churches, sororities, all of them to get involved. We 
encourage them to do something for education. It is kind of a 
plagiarism on the National Night Out Against Crime.
  The National Night Out Against Crime started, and it leaves it up to 
the locality to be innovative. You decide what you want to do to show 
that you are not afraid of criminals. You decide what you want to do to 
protect the fact that maybe the government is not doing enough about 
crime.
  So we saw that phenomenon take place across the country and it caught 
on. People came out and they are very much active in the National Night 
Out Against Crime. I think it is on a Tuesday night in August.
  So we are calling for a National Morning Out for Education. The date 
is October 23 this year. It was earlier than last year, which was 
November 14. National Morning Out for Education is what we are calling 
for National Funding Support Day.
  Let any organization take part. Hopefully they will relate to an 
education institution, not just schools, but day care enters, Head 
Start centers, colleges, from kindergarten to graduate school. Let us 
do some things as laymen which show that everybody is concerned about 
education, we understand the importance of education.
  By doing that as laymen, we send a message to the decision-makers. 
The elected officials, the people who are supposed to make decisions, 
will maybe begin to understand that what we have read in the polls is 
real. They have ignored the polls. The polls say that people at every 
level set education as one of the high priorities for government 
investment. They keep saying that. But for some reason the decision-
makers are blind, or refuse to recognize that fact.
  I do recall with great joy that we had a problem with libraries in 
New York City for years, getting enough funding. Public libraries were 
not being funded properly. I am very close to the situation because I 
am a librarian. I worked for the Brooklyn Public Library for 8 years 
before I went into city government.
  We organized and we showed the elected officials for the first time 
that the best bang for the buck that you get in public life is through 
public libraries. You get more out of what you spend for public 
libraries than you do for any other activity, certainly any other 
educational activity. More people participate, use the books, use the 
facilities. The ratio of the dollars you spend to the good you achieve 
to the kind of help you give people is fantastic.

  We finally made a breakthrough, and in the last mayoral election both 
candidates were vying with each other to see who could do the most for 
the libraries. That is the kind of breakthrough that I am optimistic 
about for education in general.
  I think we are facing a golden age, that we have seen the worst. The 
early days of the 104th Congress were the worst days for education. 
Nobody in the future will ever propose that we eradicate the Department 
of Education again. I do not believe that is going to happen again.
  I think we are on the verge of a new education-industrial alliance, 
that business understands that it is not going to be able to just offer 
rhetoric about the need to have improvements in education. It is going 
to have to be consistently more involved, that business is going to 
have to be involved in terms of supporting the kind of government 
investment in education that is necessary, which if that means more 
taxes, maybe they will follow the example of the Senate and come up 
with more creative ways to get taxes, like using the sale of the 
spectrum.

[[Page H10511]]

  Why not? The spectrum belongs to all of us. Why have we allowed it to 
be used for free all these years? The big broadcast industries have 
used the spectrum up there. It belongs to all of us. They have made 
billions of dollars. Why did it have to be given away to them for free?
  Yes, we did, in the early days of the Nation, we had land grants. We 
had various ways that we gave land to people, so I guess giving the 
spectrum away was sort of following that.
  The only problem with giving the spectrum away to the broadcasters is 
that there were only about four major broadcasters. Land grants went to 
thousands and thousands of people, and the grants of the spectrum, 
which were not seen as grants, they were given away to four major big 
broadcasting networks.
  So we ought to come back to using that kind of revenue, capturing 
that revenue to put it into productive activities like education. 
People like Felix Rohatyn, I like to cite him because he is no wild-
eyed liberal, he is a businessman, a multimillionaire, maybe a 
billionaire, and when he makes proposals people listen, because he has 
demonstrated in their milieu, the hard-nosed milieu of finance and 
business, that he knows what he is doing.
  So the latest proposal of Felix Rohatyn, who was considered at one 
point for the Federal Reserve Board, but the name was dropped because 
of opposition it was felt it would meet from the Republican-controlled 
Senate, but Felix Rohatyn's ideas have been talked about for quite a 
while in a number of circles, conservative and liberal. He has come up 
with a simple proposal that ought to strike home here.

                              {time}  2115

  Viewing the chaos in New York in respect to schools and space and 
knowing that we have an extreme situation in New York, but it is not so 
different in Chicago, in Philadelphia, in Los Angeles, all of our big 
cities are in trouble in terms of aging infrastructures for schools. 
Big cities happen to be where most of Americans live. Most people want 
to dismiss cities as being lost causes. If you dismiss cities as being 
lost causes in America, what you are doing is dismissing the majority 
of the American population as being a lost cause, because the majority 
of the American population, overwhelmingly they live in cities.
  Cities drive our cultures and cities have a lot to do across the 
world and throughout history with progress and advancement and the 
cities' role, you cannot substitute any other entity for the kind of 
role that cities play. If cities decline and cities decay and cities 
are no longer functional, then nations will no longer be functional. I 
hope that some day that gets through to our political decisionmakers.
  Rohatyn understands this. Rohatyn has been involved when New York 
City was in fiscal trouble, he became the head of the Municipal 
Assistance Corporation, which is something like the Washington 
Financial Control Board that we have in this city now, and after his 
term there, he was still interested in the city and he proposed some 
concrete proposals that were not listened to. One of them related to 
schools.
  I am going to read from an article that Rohatyn wrote for the 
Wednesday, September 11 issue of the New York Times, an op-ed piece by 
Felix Rohatyn. I will just read some sections of it. Rohatyn says that 
a decade ago, and, remember, he is responding now to the fact that 
91,000 young people did not have a place to sit in New York city 
schools when they went to school.

       A decade ago, in response to the abysmal state of New York 
     City's public school buildings, the Municipal Assistance 
     Corporation, with the support of Mayor Edward I. Koch and 
     Gov. Mario Cuomo, committed $400 million of its surplus funds 
     to creating a new School Construction Authority. This became 
     the cornerstone of a five-year, $4.5 billion construction 
     program aimed at providing decent schools and allowing for 
     increasing enrollments over the next few years.
       Yet today the system is more overcrowded than ever. The 
     buildings are often decrepit and, in many cases, dangerous 
     for the children and the teachers. In part, this is the 
     result of poor management * * *.
       In 1994, Ramon Cortines, then the Schools Chancellor, and 
     the city's Commission on School Facilities and Maintenance 
     Reform, led by Harold O. Levy, submitted a $7.5 billion, 5-
     year capital request. Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, struggling with 
     the city's budget gap, gradually reduced this request to $2.9 
     billion, and later to $1.4 billion, and even the $1.4 billion 
     is now no longer guaranteed.
       Such problems are not limited to New York City or to 
     schools. Practically, every large city and state face 
     deteriorating schools, roads, bridges, mass transit systems, 
     sewers, and pollution-control plants. Few have the money to 
     make repairs or build anew, and many have legal restrictions 
     on their debt capacity. They need Federal assistance--
     specifically a program that would return an existing source 
     of Federal revenue over to state and local governments.
       During the Presidential campaign, the 4.3 cent-a-gallon 
     increase in the gas tax that was included in President 
     Clinton's 1993 budget package has come under attack. 
     Repealing it would be bad energy policy and bad economic 
     policy. But it is worth considering a better use for the 
     gas tax than Federal deficit reduction: making it 
     available to state and local governments for public 
     investment.
       Localities could spend the money directly on construction 
     and renovation, or leverage the funds with secured borrowing. 
     State and city governments have been cutting back on public 
     investment because of budgetary problems and legal limits on 
     their abilities to issue bonds.
       The income from a 4.3 cent Federal gasoline tax has the 
     benefit of being highly predictable. It would provide about 
     $5 billion to States every year, making it ideal for very 
     long-term bonds issued for public investment.
       Nationwide, this could comfortably support from $75 billion 
     to $100 billion in new programs by state and local 
     governments over 5 years, assuming that they would pay an 
     additional 20 percent to 25 percent of the cost beyond their 
     take on the gasoline tax.
       With its share, New York State could generate $5 billion to 
     $7 billion over the period. Each state would decide how best 
     to use the money, but a significant portion would be 
     committed to new schools and education technology.
       Such a program could result in more than buildings. It 
     could create at least 2 million new jobs, public and private. 
     Most would likely be well-paying jobs related to 
     construction. Others would be less specialized jobs that 
     could be opportunities for young people who need a chance to 
     break the cycle of welfare.
       Under the new Federal law, finding work for welfare 
     dependents is a hidden time bomb for state governments.
       Yes, the money will be lost to the Federal treasury. But 
     replacing $5 billion each year in a $1.5 trillion Federal 
     budget is a small challenge compared with the benefits of 
     $100 billion of additional investment in cities over 5 years. 
     The program would undoubtedly receive strong support from 
     mayors and governors, Republicans and Democrats, business and 
     labor.
       A program that would give city and state governments $75 
     billion to $100 billion would provide only a fraction of the 
     more than $2 trillion needed nationwide for public 
     improvements. But, if successful, the program could be 
     extended and increased over time.
       President Clinton has recognized the need for Federal 
     assistance to state and local governments by signing the bill 
     sponsored by Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, Democrat of 
     Illinois, providing interest rate subsidies for local school 
     construction. This was a good beginning, but it is not nearly 
     enough.
       Mr. Clinton has long called for public investment, yet 
     neither party has put forth a program to meet the challenges 
     facing urban America.
       Turning the revenue from the gas tax into schools and other 
     badly needed public buildings would be a large part of Bill 
     Clinton's bridge to the 21st century.

  End of the article by Felix Rohatyn in the September 11th New York 
Times.
  I said before Mr. Rohatyn is a businessman. He is a millionaire, he 
has to pay lots of taxes. He understands very well what he is 
proposing. The gas tax exists already. We have had a lot of controversy 
about repealing it. He says leave it in place, distribute it to the 
States and local governments, and he thinks the State governors and the 
mayors of municipalities will be quite happy to have this kind of 
innovative action by the Federal Government which will stimulate them 
to match them it to a certain degree and move for some improvements, 
including improvements on much needed educational facilities.
  I have not even talked about the deterioration of the infrastructure 
of our colleges. We have a municipal college system, city college, City 
University of New York has 200,000 students. They have a problem with 
buildings, too. I have not talked about that.
  My point is that I hope that we can look forward to some good news in 
the appropriations bill that comes from the conference of the Senate 
and the House. I hope that that will be a signal that we are ending the 
era of the attacks on the Federal role in education. I hope it will be 
signal that we are back on track, that education will again be a 
bipartisan activity. If nothing else comes out of this election year

[[Page H10512]]

except that one positive feature, it will have a lasting impact on 
where the country is going.
  We are talking about a revolutionary time where education is really 
as important as the rhetoric says it is. We have had rhetoric about how 
important education is for decades, for centuries, but it has never 
been more important than it is now.
  I was fortunate enough to visit Russia, the former Soviet Union, this 
past summer, a seminar in Leningrad. Among the many things that I 
noted, one is of course the entrepreneurial spirit that has blossomed 
so quickly among Russians. Human beings are natural entrepreneurs and 
decades and decades of communism does not wipe out that spirit. So you 
are very impressed with how quickly it comes alive.
  The other thing that is most impressive is the tremendous degree to 
which the population is educated. It is a tremendously educated 
population. I do not just mean literacy. This is an industrial nation. 
This is a nation with a population that has an industrial education, a 
technological, scientific education.
  Yes, they had the worst political scientists in the world, but do not 
take that to mean that they do not have good scientists otherwise. The 
problem was political scientists are never given much credit, they are 
not celebrated like the other scientists, but the Soviet Union existed 
and plodded along and finally collapsed the way it did because they had 
the worst political scientists in the world. But they had scientists 
who put the space station up there that we are now rendezvousing, our 
astronauts are now going to their space station, and we should not 
forget that, that the kind of education, higher order education, 
theoretical, physics, chemistry, metallurgy, whatever you want to name, 
in a modern, industrialized, scientific society, it exists in Russia.
  They understand computers very well. They are far behind us because 
their political scientists did not want to have an Internet. They did 
not want to allow a mass production of computers. They did not want to 
have decent telephones because they did not want people to communicate 
with each other. The political scientists wrecked the economy and 
almost wrecked the society once and for all, but it did not wreck it to 
the point where the education, especially the scientific and 
technological education, is not there. So you have Russia, you have 
other eastern European countries, you have Germany, you have numerous 
stations where education is far superior for the masses, far superior 
to the education that we provide here.
  We talk about global competition, we talk about a small world, we 
talk about being able to hold our own in very loose terms, but it is 
very real. An educated population is our only guarantee that our 
society will be able to hold its own in terms of maintaining its market 
share, maintaining its standard of living. It can be drastically 
undercut. If you can have mass production of computer scientists in 
some other country, not just the Soviet Union, Russia, or Germany and 
the industrialized nations but in a nation which is a developing nation 
like India.
  India has computer scientists on a par with computer scientists 
anywhere in the English-speaking world. So you have many computer 
companies who need computer programmers hiring people from India to 
work for wages of one year which is equal to one month's salary for 
American computer programmers. In fact, they call Bangalore, India the 
capital--and I have mentioned this before--Bangalore, India, is called 
one of the capitals of computer programming because if they do not 
bring the Indians from there to our companies here, if they have a 
problem getting them past immigration and getting enough into the 
country to do the things they want to do, they take the work to 
Bangalore.
  Large numbers of American corporations are taking their computer 
programming work to Bangalore, India. They speak English, they 
understand science, computer science and so forth, and they are major 
competitors to people in the computer programming world in America. 
There will be more of these kinds of developments.
  So education in terms of market share, in terms of staying ahead of 
the curve scientifically, et cetera, it becomes of utmost importance. 
Of course last night at the Committee for Education Funding dinner 
where 5 retiring Members of Congress were honored, Pat Williams spoke 
about education to prevent civic decay. That is not a small thing. In 
our country, which is a democracy, if we do not educate the populace, 
the very democracy itself will become an enemy if we do not have people 
who understand how this democracy works. So nothing is more important. 
We have activities that are going forward to try to get this across at 
many levels. Within the beltway and among people who know what the 
education agenda is, there are certain kinds of activities at work.
  The Committee for Education Funding has a National Education Call-In 
Day which is tomorrow, September 18, 1996. They are giving everybody 
the capital switchboard, 202/225-3121, asking them to call the Members 
of Congress--Members of the House and Members of the Senate--and talk 
about the fact that we need help from the Federal Government to meet 
the challenges of growing enrollments, more students with special 
needs, new educational technology and a changing economy. That will 
work for certain groups of people as it has in the past and we hope 
that folks will call in and alert their Congressman to the fact that 
the appropriations bill for this year has not been passed.

                              {time}  2130

  Fiscal year 1997 begins on October 1st, and the education programs 
are not funded. We hope that either through a continuing resolution or 
an agreement on the appropriations bill we are going to reach the point 
where this is resolved, but it will not come automatically. So call in. 
Call in and remember that the Committee for Education Funding has some 
very hard facts that you ought to bear in mind.
  Madam Speaker, I am going to read a few of those facts that the 
Committee for Education Funding put forward. Committee for Education 
Funding has about 80 different organizations in the country, national 
organizations, which have united under one umbrella to fight for more 
investment in education. So, they speak with great authority. School 
boards are represented, teacher unions, all kinds of organizations 
concerned with education. At high education level, at the preschool 
level, they are all there.
  The fact sheet of the Committee for Education Funding reads as 
follows: It wants to remind us that over the last 2 years, education 
suffered cuts of more than $1.1 billion. Despite the fact that we 
stopped many cuts, it still suffered cuts of more than $1.1 billion 
over the last 2 years.
  The fiscal year 1997 budget resolution, which is the one I am talking 
about now, passed by Congress this year, cuts education and--I am 
sorry, the budget resolution; in the budget resolution, which guides 
the appropriations process, we cut education and training by 17 percent 
in real terms over the next 6 years according to the Senate Committee 
on the Budget.
  While calling for some program consolidation reductions, President 
Clinton's fiscal year 1997 budget request does propose to increase the 
investment of education back to $2.8 billion in fiscal year 1997 and 
maintains that level of investment over the next 6 years.
  Madam Speaker, I will not go on and on with these facts. I just 
wanted to say that the call-in sponsored by the Committee for Education 
Funding is a very good idea. It is one way to have people demonstrate 
that the public opinions are real, the public opinion polls are real; 
that there are real human beings out there behind those public opinion 
polls. Every politician is concerned about public opinion polls and 
focus groups and really being in sync with public opinion. So it is 
kind of a contradiction, a paradox, that they will not listen to the 
public when it comes to education.

  We have to end that paradox. We have to hit the politicians, the 
decision-makers, and elected officials, the candidates, hit them with a 
sledgehammer and make them understand we mean business when we say 
education is a priority, ought to be a priority. One way you hit them 
with the sledgehammer is to keep banging away in every way possible.

[[Page H10513]]

  Make the telephone calls on October 23rd when we have the National 
Education Funding Support Day. Organize some kind of group and 
demonstrate your concern by going to a school and linking up with a 
school. Some people have gone to schools and provided books, gifts. 
Other people have helped programs in schools. There is one group of 
parking agents who have said they will provide a week of safe conduct 
to certain schools in certain parts of the cities that have had trouble 
with kids not being able to get to school safely.
  Whatever your particular organization can do, do it. We are urging 
that churches adopt a school and link up with what we call net day. 
There is a net day project that most of you have heard about. Net day 
means that that is a day when a locale or a State pledges to wire all 
of its schools, to provide the wiring necessary for the schools to have 
appropriate computers and for the schools to link up with the Internet.
  A minimum net day effort is to wire the library of the school and 
five classrooms. So let us have some net days on October 23. If you 
cannot do it by October 23, then for the period between October 23 and 
the middle of November, in the middle of November we have National 
Education Week, from October 23 to the middle of November. Try to 
mobilize and get together the necessary ingredients and elements to 
wire your school, to wire the library and wire four classrooms. That is 
what net day is all about.
  At the same time, you might consider the fact that there is a 
campaign on called the campaign to get the E rate. The E rate means a 
rate for the wired schools, for their being able to utilize the 
services, whether they are online services or whatever to come in the 
future at a reduced rate.
  All schools and libraries, according to the law passed by the 
Congress, we passed the law which says the FCC must work out a way for 
all schools and libraries to get a reduced rate, to be accommodated. It 
does not spell out how the FCC should do that, so the Secretary of 
Labor has proposed that they do it for free to all schools and 
libraries. It will be easier to administer that way, and what the 
companies will be doing is developing future customers.
  Madam Speaker, we have massive numbers of customers that, if they 
make it easy for them to get the necessary wiring and the cost of using 
the Internet and the various services is zero for the schools, then the 
kinds of people they will develop in the schools will be customers in 
the future forever. People spend 12 years in school, but they live two 
or three times that long. If they learn how to use these various 
facilities, they will be creating a market for themselves.
  So we say the E rate should not just be a discount rate, but for 
schools and libraries why not have it completely free? And that is one 
proposal I would like to see us support. Secretary Riley has a 
proposal. If we do not get that, then there are various discounts that 
are being proposed that we will also fight for.
  The FCC will make this decision sometime within the next 2 months, so 
it is important, as we participate in National Education Funding 
Support Day, to understand how important that is. That is a once in a 
generation time activity. Once you get that kind of benefit, it goes on 
and on, and it has implications for many years and many generations to 
come.

  We talk a lot about how costly these new educational technology items 
are, computers, et cetera. And it is true they cost so much more than a 
desk and chair and book. In New York City we are struggling with the 
problem of just providing a desk and a chair. But we cannot get locked 
into a situation where we do not discuss educational technology, 
computers, online Internet, because we have not solved the problem of 
the desk and the chair. If every city in America had decided it would 
not build an airport until it fixed all the roads and all the 
sidewalks, then very few cities in America would have airports. They 
would be in very bad shape if they did not have airports.
  So you have to look to the future and get involved in the new 
technology and what it can do for the imaginations of the youngsters 
who are in our schools and make certain that the schools in the inner 
city communities, like New York City, like my district in Brooklyn, one 
of the poorest districts, is not left behind because they do not have 
the computers and they do not have the access to the Internet.
  Madam Speaker, all of it has to go together. We have to fight for the 
desk and fight for the chair, fight for the space in a building, fight 
for the safety in the building, the end of the violations related to 
asbestos or lead poisoning, ventilation. We have to fight for it all at 
one time.
  It costs money. It will cost money, but it is not half as costly as 
some of the modern expenditures that we are accustomed to. We are ready 
to appropriate $13 billion more to the Department of Defense. In fact, 
that is what the majority, Republican majority has done. They have 
added $13 billion to the President's request for defense. A new attack 
submarine costs $775 million. A B-2 bomber, we can give 7 million more 
children an opportunity to become productive citizens for the cost of 
three B-2 bombers. We could double the safe and drug-free schools 
program for the cost of the Seawolf submarine program. America could 
hire an additional 267,000 elementary and secondary schoolteachers for 
a billion dollars. For a billion dollars we could spend an extra $23 on 
every elementary and secondary school child in the country. We could 
purchase 398,000 multimedia computers for a billion dollars.
  You say a billion dollars is a lot of money. A billion dollars is 
what--the CIA had $2 billion in its slush fund that they could not 
account for. It had gotten lost. To let you know, $2 billion for the 
CIA was not very much, but $2 billion would go a long way in terms of 
spending for our school children.
  Modern costs are high, but we should not get overwhelmed. We should 
understand that, if education is a number one national security item, 
if the people of the country, in their commonsense wisdom, have decided 
education ought to be the highest priority, then let us not hesitate to 
make the investment in education, to take us across that bridge to the 
21st century. Our children deserve it, our great Nation needs it. I 
think we can do not less than what our capacity allows us to do.

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