[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 13 (Wednesday, February 5, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H334-H336]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       EDUCATION AT A CROSSROADS

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Hoekstra] is recognized for 60 minutes.

[[Page H335]]

  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I want to continue the dialog on 
education.
  In my role in Congress I have the opportunity to serve as chairman of 
the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on 
Education and the Workforce. In that committee last year, we researched 
the Office of Management and Budget documents to get a better 
understanding of how the executive branch defined education at the 
Federal level. In researching their documents we found out that when 
you take a look at education from a Washington level, you find 760 
programs spread over 39 different agencies spending about $120 billion 
per year.
  Our work in the last Congress has led us to initiate a new project 
here in 1997. We call that project Education At A Crossroads: What 
Works and What is Wasted.
  What we are really saying is before we begin any major new 
initiatives in the education area, let us take a look at this broad 
range of Federal programs and find out what really is working and what 
is not working. Let us go around the country and take a look at local 
school districts, at parents, at teachers, and at school boards that 
are educating kids and providing a good environment where kids can 
learn.
  Last night the President really did not spend a lot of time talking 
about it, the specific problems, but he did highlight, obviously, the 
area of education. At many different levels we can say that education 
may be in somewhat of a crisis, or there are symptoms that say we may 
have a significant problem.
  Statistics tell us that one-half of all adult Americans are 
functionally illiterate. This includes not being able to write a letter 
to explain a billing error or figure out a departure on a bus schedule. 
Sixty-four percent of 12th graders do not read at a proficient level. 
In many cases these students cannot read their own high school 
diplomas. In international comparisons, United States students scored 
worse in math than any other major industrialized country except for 
Jordan.
  Now, if we take that down another level, last week we had a hearing 
out in California. In California, think about this, 25 percent of all 
the students entering higher education need remedial education. They 
have graduated from high school, they have been accepted into college, 
and now they need remedial education. What does that mean? It means 
that they cannot read or write at an eighth grade level.
  In Michigan, our Governor may propose that he needs and the State 
needs to take over eight failing school districts because they have 
high dropout rates, low test scores, and low graduation rates.
  Right here in Washington, DC, right outside of this building, we are 
spending $8,300 per student and we are getting some of the lowest test 
scores in the country.
  What is the vision or what is the picture that many people have of 
education today when they are asked about it? The general public see 
three recurring images: They see metal detectors in high schools, they 
see kids outside of the school during school hours, and they see 
checkout clerks who cannot make change. You put this all together, it 
is clear something needs to be done in education.
  We have known this for quite some time. The Federal Government's 
solution, as I outlined earlier, 760 bureaucracies or programs spread 
across 39 departments, agencies, and commissions, spending 120 billion 
in taxpayers' dollars on education in 1995.
  What are these programs focused on? Of the programs, 3.6 percent are 
science related, 1.9 percent are reading related, and 1.1 percent are 
math related. Less than 10 percent of these programs are focused on 
either science, reading, or math. What else do they do? One of the 
programs pays for closed captioning of things like ``Baywatch.''
  That is an educational program. Perhaps the problem we have in 
Washington is not that we are not spending enough dollars or that we 
have too many programs, we are spending it on the wrong things. That is 
why we are saying before we embark on major new programs and major new 
initiatives, let us take a look at what we are doing today.
  I think we all believe that when it comes to education we can do 
better, we need to do better. Our children only begin to receive a high 
quality education--we have heard this from hearings, we have gone into 
a number of areas around the country--when what? When we focus on basic 
academics, where we have strong parental involvement, and where dollars 
end up in the classroom and do not get sucked up by a bureaucracy.
  Let us talk about some of the goals and some of the programs that we 
are working on and some of the process that we are going to go through. 
In Crossroads With Education, we are going around the country taking a 
look at classes and at schools that work where kids learn.
  We have had the opportunity to go to east Harlem, some of the 
toughest neighborhoods in the country. We have gone to schools in 
public housing projects in Chicago. Last week we were in south central 
L.A. The exciting thing about each one of these areas and each one of 
these neighborhoods is we saw schools that were providing a wonderful 
environment for learning, and they were not doing it because of Federal 
programs. In most cases they were doing it in spite of Federal 
programs.
  They were experimenting and they were doing innovative things where 
there was a barrier to them getting Federal dollars. The Federal 
Government, in many of its laws, is actually stopping innovation and 
creativity at the local level rather than facilitating it.
  Again, what works? Basic academics, parental involvement. Each one of 
these schools really has had parental involvement. Parents feel like 
they have control of their school. And when parents have the 
opportunity to control their school and to be involved with their kids, 
it makes a difference. Each one of these had a strong inspirational 
leader who had a vision for their school and is driving to make that 
school serve the patients and the kids and not a bureaucracy.
  We are focusing on dollars to the classroom. A study that was just 
completed said that when a dollar comes to Washington, only 85 cents of 
it makes it back into the classroom. And that is when you are only 
taking a look at the Federal bureaucracy. If you take a look at the 
applications that local school districts and States have to spend time 
and effort and energy on to get these Federal dollars, if you take a 
look at the time and expense that they have to monitor their programs 
and send reports back to Washington, I am sure that you could take a 
look at these dollars that go to Washington and say for every dollar 
that goes to Washington, probably less than 60 or 65 cents of it makes 
it back into the classroom.
  This is not about moving more money and bigger programs into 
Washington, this is about taking the dollars that Washington has 
committed to spending on education and getting them back in the 
classroom.
  One of the exciting things we are going to be doing is we are going 
to be going back to the Department of Education, these other 38 
agencies, and saying how hard is it to apply for these grants? How 
complex is the process? How many people are applying for how many 
grants? What kind of paperwork is involved once people receive these 
grants? When they file reports back to Washington, when they send them 
back to the Education Department, does anybody read them? Is any action 
taken off of these reports?
  The Federal dollars going into the District. We have done 
superintendent surveys and the one message we get back consistently is, 
yeah, the broad outlines and the things that you are trying to solve 
from Washington work, but when you send us the dollars, the parameters 
are so tight, yeah, we do what you tell us to do, but that does not 
really enable us to do what we need to do and what we want to do in our 
schools.
  It leads to the comment of one of the principals that we talked to 
last week. When she was talking she said, when I worked in the public 
school district and I was a public school principal, before I became a 
public school principal in a charter school, I had to worry about not 
the 3 R's, I had to worry about the 3 B's. That is kind of like her 
reaction working either with her school district or working with the 
Federal Government.

[[Page H336]]

  The 3 B's. What are they? I had to worry about bussing. Are the buses 
running on time?

                              {time}  1645

  I had to worry about budgets to make sure that the dollars fell in 
the right categories and that I stayed within the budget. And then I 
had to worry about the buts. What are the buts? The buts are every time 
I had a good idea and every time my parents came into the school with a 
good idea about what they wanted to do in this school and I went to the 
centralized administration, I would get the comment back, ``That is a 
good idea, but if we let you do it, everybody else will have to be able 
to do it.''
  ``But the rules don't allow for that.''
  ``But yet we can't do that.''
  ``But we've never done that before.''
  When the parents took over that school and created a public school, 
but a charter public school with parental involvement, the buts went 
away and we now have a high quality, high performing school in one of 
the toughest areas in one of our major cities.
  We want to minimize what is wasted in education. We want dollars back 
into the classroom. We want the dollars focused on what really works. 
And it is really important that we work in a collaborative fashion, 
that we work in a collaborative fashion with parents, with school 
boards, with local school boards to ensure that they are given the 
tools and the control to create the schools that best meet the needs of 
their kids.
  What we are going to be doing, we are going to be continuing this 
process for the next 12 months. Obviously we have done a lot of work in 
1996. We have already done a lot of work in 1997. But before we go out 
and spend another $50 billion as Band-Aids on a system that is 
currently broken, we need to evaluate the current system and put the 
money into things that work.
  There are wonderful success stories out there, there are wonderful 
environments, there are wonderful schools, and they are all wonderful 
kids and they are learning. What we need to do is to make sure that we 
help them and do not continue to hurt them with programs from 
Washington that do not work.
  Why are we experiencing some of the failure today? Too often we have 
put bureaucrats ahead of kids. When we get done with education reform 
in this Congress, we are going to put kids ahead of bureaucrats. Too 
often we have put social engineering ahead of the basics. It is time to 
focus on reading, writing, and math. It is time to focus on the basics.
  We have put money into the bureaucracy, not into the classroom. We 
need to move the dollars out of the bureaucracy. We need to move the 
dollars to the local level so that they can get into the classroom.
  Before we put 1 million new tutors on the streets, we need to ask the 
basic question, Why are kids not learning today? We have at least 14 
literacy programs in the Federal Government. Kids are spending 6 to 7 
hours a day in school. Why are they not learning today? Do we need to 
revamp these 14 literacy programs? Do we need to take a look at what is 
going on in the classroom?
  Those are the kinds of questions that over the next 6 to 12 months, 
the Education and Oversight Subcommittee is going to be looking at. As 
we develop answers to those kinds of questions, we will be developing, 
hopefully in collaboration with the President, the proposals that will 
put kids in front of bureaucrats, it will move dollars into the 
classroom, and it will move us in education back to focusing on the 
basics, reading, writing, and math.
  Like I said earlier, the wonderful thing about this project is I have 
seen success stories from one end of the country to the next. It is 
about common sense, it is about getting back to the basics and it is 
about doing the right things.
  As we work on getting back to that commonsense approach, we can and 
we will improve education. It is an exciting process and an exciting 
challenge on which to work.

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