[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 17 (Tuesday, February 11, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H414-H417]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
ANSWER TO EDUCATION PROBLEMS NOT IN WASHINGTON
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 7, 1997, the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Hoekstra] will be
recognized for 40 minutes and the gentleman from Florida [Mr. McCollum]
will be recognized for 20 minutes as the designees of the majority
leader.
The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Michigan, [Mr. Hoekstra].
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, today we continue a discussion that began
in 1996. It deals with this city. This is a picture of Washington, DC.
And it deals with what we really can expect Washington to do and the
kind of balance that we need to strive for in this country between what
we expect from Washington, what we expect from the private sector, what
we expect from individuals, and perhaps what we can expect from faith-
based and religious and volunteer organizations in America.
In many cases, I believe we have moved too much power to this town.
We have asked Washington to do all kinds of things that perhaps it is
not best equipped to do. We saw some of this last week when we heard
the President articulate a vision for education, a vision that I
believe moves power, authority, and control from the local level, from
the parental level back to this community, back to this town, and it
says the way we improve education in America is we empower Washington
and we empower the bureaucrats in Washington to make decisions.
We used this chart for the first time or this picture for the first
time in 1996 when we talked about the crisis that this Nation was
facing in welfare. Because what we had done in welfare is we had moved
decisionmaking away from the local level, where we were best equipped
to help those in need, and we moved it to Washington.
We moved it to buildings here in Washington, so that when the State
of Michigan or when the State of Wisconsin wanted to design a program
that they felt best met the needs of their citizens, they had to come
to a building over here and a bureaucrat in Washington, who had maybe
never been in Wisconsin, maybe never been in California, maybe never
been in Michigan, and say ``Can I do this in my State?'' And the
bureaucrats in Washington were empowered to make the decisions.
Yesterday I had the opportunity to meet with a new program in the
State of Michigan, where in my home county they are working on what
they call Project Zero, which is to move everybody off of welfare. It
is a partnership. It is a partnership between local agencies, it is a
partnership with the State, and it is a partnership in a volunteer way
with faith-based institutions to reach out and embrace those families
that need help and to lift them up in a permanent and in a meaningful
way off of welfare.
Those are the kinds of programs that I expect we will see over the
next 12, 18, 24 months that will have a dramatic improvement in the
welfare situation in this country.
Now, after we have made that change in welfare, which moves power
back from Washington, back to the States and, more important, back to
the local communities where we can have these creative mergers of
people coming together to help others in the community, we find that
the President does not really believe that the era of big government is
over. He now believes that the era of big government has moved from a
failure in welfare, and it is kind of like we did not learn our lesson:
We are going to take that bureaucracy now and create and expand the
Department of Education.
Over the last 9 months we have had hearings around the country, and
we know that that model does not work. We know that the model of moving
power to Washington and moving power to bureaucrats in Washington is
not the answer. These bureaucrats are knowledgeable, talented people,
but they cannot address the problems at the local level.
In hearings that we have had in New York City, that we have had in
Chicago, that we have had in Cleveland, that we had a couple of weeks
ago in Los Angeles and Phoenix, the answer is very clear. The way that
we improve education is we empower parents, we move decisionmaking back
to the local level, we focus on basic academics, and we drive dollars
back into the classroom and not into a bureaucracy and
[[Page H415]]
into bureaucrats, as well-meaning as they may be.
The system today is fairly clear and what the President proposes is
fairly clear. It is the myth. It is the myth of the magical President
who believes that by having good intentions in Washington and outlining
wonderful-sounding programs, and moving dollars to Washington and
moving responsibility to Washington, we can actually solve the problems
that we have in education.
There is no doubt that in certain parts of our country education is
in crisis, if we take a look at some of the statistics. This is not a
debate about whether we need to improve education or whether we need to
put a focus on education. The statistics are clear: One-half of all
adult Americans are functionally illiterate.
Two weeks ago we had a hearing in California. Think about it: Twenty-
five percent of the students that enter higher education in the State
of California need remedial education. This is kids in 8th grade, this
is kids in 10th grade, these are kids going into higher education.
Twenty-five percent of them, when they enter the institution of higher
education, need remedial education.
What does that mean? That means that they are entering into college
and they cannot read or write at an 8th grade level. Sixty-four percent
of 12th graders do not read at a proficient level. In international
comparisons U.S. students scored worse in math than any other country
except for Jordan.
If we take a look outside of this building in Washington, DC, it is
also not an issue of money. We spend about $8,300 per child in the city
of Washington, DC, and we have some of the lowest test scores in the
country. In the State of Michigan we spend about $5,400 per student. So
it is not let us pour more money into these programs or into these
cities, it is let us focus on the basics.
When we have gone around the country, the exciting thing that we have
noticed is that we can go into many areas that we would identify as
having at-risk kids, the kids that maybe when we take a look at their
environment and a whole series of factors we might be saying they are
at risk, and they are at risk because maybe they are in an environment
where it is most difficult for them to learn. The exciting thing about
this is, as we go into these areas we see schools, we see teachers and
we see parents and, most importantly, we see some of the greatest kids
in this country, and they are learning and they are learning
successfully.
But it is because of the schools, and it does not make a difference
whether it is a public school or a private school or whether it is a
charter school. We have seen examples of all of these, but when the
schools make a commitment to involve the parents, where they have been
freed from the rules and regulations from Washington and from the State
so that the teachers and the administration can focus on the kids
rather than the rules and regulations, it works. When the dollars go
into the classroom rather than into paperwork, it works, and when the
schools are focusing on basic academics, it works.
{time} 1430
Here is the system today, and here is why I am leery about sending
more money to Washington and why I believe it is a myth and why I
believe that in the area of education, at least in Washington, more
does not mean better.
Remember what we have in Washington today when we say education.
Washington has been trying to help in the area of education for the
last 20 years. Twenty years of work, 760 different programs running
through 39 different agencies, spending about $120 billion per year.
Washington has been going after this problem, but we have not been
doing it very successfully.
Why? What is the process? Well, we start with parents, which is where
we should start. We should have focus on parents and kids. But when we
move the education system and the focus of education to Washington, we
end up getting a whole bunch of layers in between parents, kids and
teachers and local school boards.
In Washington, in this model that some want to expand, we have
parents paying into Washington about $120 billion, into Washington
programs, into Washington bureaucracies, 760 different programs. We are
worried about reading and writing? Washington, a couple of years ago,
had 32 different literacy programs. We still have more than 14 literacy
programs. $120 billion into 760 programs, 39 different agencies.
Then the Washington bureaucracy, all the arrows point one way in
terms of putting rules and regulations and dollars back on State and
local school boards, but what happens when we create a program? If you
create a program, somebody has to find out about it, so we spend
dollars communicating to a school board or to a State saying, ``We've
got these dollars available for these kinds of programs.''
So we invest dollars in a communications effort. School boards find
out about it; they do not automatically get it. They have to now say,
``I wonder if we qualify for this? What do we need to do to qualify for
this? How do we apply?''
They then fill out applications, and it goes back to the bureaucracy.
The bureaucrats in Washington say, ``Well, you know, we've got x amount
of dollars, we've got so many school districts applying. We're going to
have to go through a sorting process to decide who gets this money and
who does not.''
So they go through a decisionmaking process in the awarding of
grants. The Vice President's National Performance Review outlined that
in one of these grant applications in the Department of Education the
process went through 487 different steps to move dollars from
Washington actually back to a school board, back actually to the kids.
Washington then sends money to a school board or to a local school
district. Of course, we cannot trust the people at the local level to
do what we ask them to do, so of course we have rules and regulations
and we have reporting structures back into Washington that says, ``Yes,
we received your money,'' and ``Yes, here is proof that we spent it
exactly the way you wanted us to.'' We in Washington, of course, cannot
believe those, so we have to put in place an auditing program that
says, ``Make sure you keep your records, because we may want to come
back and audit that you actually spent the money the way we intended
you to spend it.''
The bottom line is when parents send $120 billion to Washington and
they funnel it through the 760 programs that we lose at least,
conservatively we lose at least 15 cents of the Federal dollar. If you
take a look at how much we lose at the State and the local level as
they go through the process of applying and meeting the rules and
regulations in the local cost, we probably lose somewhere in the
neighborhood of 35 to 40 cents of each and every education dollar that
goes to Washington to funnel it back.
We are not getting the money into the classroom. Most of this money
or a good portion of it, probably 35 to 40 percent of the dollars that
we think we are investing in education, gets sucked up into the
bureaucracy and into the paperwork, and what happens is rather than
school boards focusing on and working with parents as to what they need
to do in their local district, what we have created is a model that
says, kids are important, but I need to meet the rules, the
requirements and the regulations from Washington. So their focus goes
to a bureaucracy in Washington and not to parents and not on kids.
We have got to break the cycle. We have to focus on what is
important, the basics, local and parental control and getting dollars
into the classroom. We need to focus and we need a model where the
people who are involved in education and setting the direction for
education for our kids are parents, kids, and local leaders in the
community.
I can say that with conviction because of the success we have seen
around the country. We visited the Vaughn Charter School in L.A. 2
weeks ago, south central Los Angeles, one of the lowest performing
schools when it was part of the Unified Los Angeles School District. It
is now a charter school. It is still a public school. It is still
accountable to the taxpayers. But what they did when they became a
charter school, they cut the strings of bureaucracy. Dr. Chan, who is
heading that school, saved the school district,
[[Page H416]]
and the number is a little bit disputed, but somewhere in the
neighborhood of $1.5 million. But more importantly, talking to the
parents, talking to the kids, going into the classrooms, sitting around
a table and talking about what makes this school different today, the
parents, Dr. Chan, and the students are all saying it is because this
is the model.
The model is one where the school, the principal, and the teachers
have a partnership with the parents, and they are focused on the kids.
Parents talk about we got our school back. As a matter of fact, it is
now a neighborhood school. The kids in this neighborhood were being
bused all over. The kids now have the choice of where they want to go
to school. They are now going back to this school. They not only
took control of the school back for the parents, but it is now a
neighborhood school and in a very rough part of Los Angeles. It is kind
of like a bright beacon in that community about what a local community
can do when it cuts the strings from a bureaucracy and is empowered to
take over a small part of its own community, and it is empowered to
take over a very important part of its community, which is the schools.
There are a couple of other interesting statistics when we talk about
what happens when dollars go into Washington.
We know we lose at least 15 cents here in Washington and we know that
we lose at least another 20 cents when you go to the costs incurred by
the local schools and the State, but it is kind of interesting how
these dollars get distributed. Dollars do not follow kids. Dollars go
all over the place.
If you are in Alaska, sending dollars to Washington and increasing
the Washington bureaucracy is a good deal, because even though you
maybe lose 40 cents of every dollar you send to Washington, with
Alaska, when you send $1 in, you get $3.12 back. So the dollars coming
in, the share back to you is very positive. It is a disproportionate
share back to Alaska.
If you are in Connecticut, it does not really pay. Connecticut gets
all of 39 cents back to that State. If you are in Mississippi, you get
$2.41, if you are in New Mexico, you get $2.34. If you are close to New
Mexico, in Nevada, too bad, you only get 39 cents back.
So it is a huge shell game in Washington that is not focused on kids.
It is not focused on improving education. It is focused on bureaucrats
and politicians trying to do something that really parents and local
school districts can do a whole lot better.
As we take a look at this, this system does not work, when we take a
look at what is going on and some of the proposals that the President
has to improve learning, to improve education. It is interesting, one
of the proposals he has, and I have oversight over this area, is the
President proposes $809 million for the Corporation for National and
Community Service. National and community service. It sounds great. Our
volunteers through the Corporation for National Service cost us as
taxpayers about $27,000 apiece, or as high as $27,000. They are going
to go out and they are going to get tutors. I think that is a laudable
objective. Schools are doing this today. Community groups are involved,
and I am not sure what the Federal Government can do to help and assist
in that process.
We fund and send money through the Corporation for National Service,
and it would be one thing if we knew where now another roughly $1
billion going into this model, we know we are going to lose some of
that in the structure and in the hierarchy and in the bureaucracy. We
also know that, at least for the Corporation for National Service and
for many of these other agencies, we are not actually going to know
where the money goes.
The Corporation for National Service, this is an agency that spends
about $600 to $700 million per year. The books still are not auditable.
Think about it. Sending taxpayer dollars to an agency that was set up
and was going to be the model for a government agency and how
government should run but cannot have an independent accounting firm
come in and audit its books.
That is one example. The Heritage Foundation cites a number of other
examples that says these 760 programs do not have the kind of oversight
necessary to determine whether they work and where the dollars are
going and whether they are efficient or not. Is it not interesting that
we know we have a problem in reading, we know that our kids are not
reading at competitive standards, that in certain States a high
percentage of them need remedial education, and rather than focusing on
the real problem as to why kids are not learning in the classroom, the
response in Washington is to create another program.
We have known that this has been an issue. We have got 14 literacy
programs. And now what we are doing is we are funding an overlay of
perhaps volunteers reading 2 hours per day or 2 hours per week with
students, but we are not asking the fundamental questions as to why are
kids not learning to read in the classroom.
Is there something going on in the classroom that is prohibiting kids
from learning? Why do we not take a look at what is going on in the
classroom before we do anything else, and maybe moving dollars into the
classroom is a more effective way of addressing this problem than
putting another Band-Aid on an open wound. Maybe we ought to go back
and take a look at the 14 literacy programs that are already spending
over $8 billion per year from a Washington level and saying, why are
those 14 literacy programs not driving the kinds of results that we
would like to have?
{time} 1445
If they are good programs and they are working, why are we not
putting more money into those programs? If those programs are not
working and we do not feel we should be putting more money into them,
but we should be going in this new route or in a different route, why
do we not take a look at eliminating those programs and getting true
effectiveness into the system? But no, the proposal that we have in
front of us is more bureaucracy in Washington, not critically
evaluating the programs that we have in place.
Well, that is not going to work in this Congress.
We do have in place a program which we call Crossroads in Education.
The Crossroads in Education project that is coming out of the Committee
on Education and the Workforce is going to do, and is in the process of
doing, a critical analysis of these 760 programs. We want to find out
where the dollars go; are they getting results or are they not getting
results; how can we make them more effective; and what is working and
what is wasted in education today?
So what does that mean? It means that the first step is last year we
asked the question: How many programs are there? Nobody had ever asked
that question before. We did some work, we did some research; some
other outside organizations, some parts of the executive branch helped
us. They said 760 programs, 39 agencies--actually the 760 is a little
old. Since that point in time they have identified about a hundred more
programs that we have. So it is somewhere in the neighborhood of 850 to
900 programs that we really have in Washington.
But we are now going through and we are asking what is the process;
how is this money distributed; what are the actual links back and forth
between a bureaucracy and the State and a local school board; how are
people awarded and granted dollars; what is the largest grant request
you get or that you gave out; what is the smallest?
We found a grant request for safe and drug-free schools. The school
district went through all of the work, a very thick application, and I
will tell you they got their money's worth. They got a grant for $13.
The Government cannot even write a check for $13, but that is what the
school district got. Maybe that went out and would have paid for lunch
for the person who spent considerable time putting this grant request
together: $13 for a school district to develop their safe and drug-free
school program.
Think of the costs that went in. We are doing that. What is the
largest and the smallest grant request you got? What do these grant
requests look like? Are they 2 pages, are they 50 pages? In some cases
we found that they may be a thousand pages. How much time and energy?
What happens to the grant requests when they come to Washington? How
are they sorted
[[Page H417]]
through? Who reads them? You then go back and you take a look at when
the grants go out, how much paperwork?
The statistics I believe that we had in our hearing in Arizona 2
weeks ago was that of the 6 percent--let me find the exact quote--this
was from Lisa Graham Keegan who is Arizona's superintendent of
education--said, I will say that the 8 percent Arizona receives from
the Federal Government easily accounts for more than 50 percent of the
work in my department and school districts.
The paperwork. They receive 8 percent of their money--remember this
$120 billion is only about 5 or 6 percent of what any school district
gets, but on a national average some get more, some get less. Here in
Arizona it is about 8 percent of their total dollars come from
Washington and about 50 percent of their paperwork. Is that a good
investment? What do bureaucrats in Washington really know about what
needs to be done in Arizona?
So what is the paperwork that goes back and forth? We have had
meetings, and we asked superintendents to tell us about their
paperwork, and one of the things that they keep coming back with is, we
appreciate the money we get from Washington. In some cases it does some
good and we can work in those areas. But the real problem is when we
take a look at our local school district and we take a look at the
needs that we have. If we had more flexibility to use that money in
different ways, we would spend it in different ways than what you are
mandating that we spend it on.
So we know that this process is not an ideal process. Fifty billion
dollars of more spending in Washington is not the way to improve
education. Spending $50 on education may be a worthwhile effort. It is
probably a good exercise. Spending it at the State and the local level,
where you have more control and direction about what you need in your
community, and actually getting the dollars into the classroom probably
makes a lot more sense.
Recognize that when we spend and say we are going to spend $50
billion in Washington, maybe only 25 to 30 billion will actually make
it back into the classroom. Twenty billion is going to get lost
somewhere else in the process.
A couple of other proposals that the President is talking about that
I think need serious consideration: talking about school construction.
As soon as we put in Federal dollars, any amount of Federal dollars,
into a local school construction, Washington will come in and mandate
what contractors need to be paid on an hourly basis for the work that
they perform in your school district. It is called Davis-Bacon,
mandated from Washington what you will pay. We have an elaborate system
in the Department of Labor that is not very good but that tries to
track wages in thousands of different communities around this Nation,
in a number of different construction categories, and that is what you
have to pay. In other projects where you do not have Davis-Bacon, we go
through this kind of complex way of determining how much a project will
cost. It is called competitive bidding. School districts cannot
competitively bid. They have to pay Davis-Bacon wages.
So in effect, when you go on a construction project with Federal
dollars or partially funded with Federal dollars, you lose again about
15 percent of your purchasing power by being required to pay the wages
established here in Washington versus what you may be able to get in a
competitive bid.
I enjoy the discussion about the HOPE scholarships. Making education
available to more students on a longer basis I think is a worthwhile
goal, saying that Washington is now going to provide scholarships for
those that maintain a B average.
The IRS today cannot track our income tax system, our Income Tax
Code. Just think of what wonderful work they are now going to have also
trying to match tax deductions with information from schools indicating
that, yes, these people did maintain a B average and that B averages
across the country are consistent, so that the same B that you get in
Michigan is equivalent to a B that you get in Arizona.
It is going to create a lot more work for bureaucrats, and it is
going to move a lot less money into the classroom.
The evidence is clear. We need to focus on education, but more
compelling is the case that rather than increasing and building and
expanding this city in Washington, the keys to improving education is
moving dollars and power away from this city and moving it back to
parents, moving it back to local school boards and empowering teachers.
It is not only school boards. It is teachers that want control of
their classroom. It is the parents that want their schools back. They
do not want to come to Washington to take a look or to fight for what
they want to do in their classroom. They want control of their schools.
They know specifically what they need for their kids and their
community.
The needs of this country are so diverse. We need to be able to have
the flexibility to tailor the programs for our kids from one city and
one community to the next, and we need to empower parents.
That is not a concept or a theory. We know that it works. Take a look
at the schools that are working, take a look at the schools that are
excelling, and that is the bright spot in the picture in education.
Yes, there is some bad news, there is some information that says we
ought to be worried about this and that in some parts of the Nation
education may be in a state of crisis. But the good news is that we can
look at models of success and we can learn from those models of
success, we can learn what the characteristics are, and we can then
tailor Federal policies and rules and regulations, or whatever, to
empower that kind of change and reform to happen at the local level.
And what we learn is very simple: Parents, basics and getting dollars
into the classroom, empowering parents instead of empowering
bureaucrats, dollars to kids, not to bureaucracy, fundamental basic
education, not the latest education fads; it is a key issue, it is an
important issue. It is going to be a vigorous debate. I think in the
end kids and parents will win, and politicians and bureaucrats in
Washington will lose. That is the system that works, that is the model
that we will build on, and that is the direction that we need to go.
____________________