[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.

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