[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 23 (Thursday, February 27, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H690-H693]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               EDUCATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 1997, the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Hoekstra] is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, today I continue my series on talking 
about what works and what does not work in education and why it is such 
a needed focus. But before I do that, I just have a few miscellaneous 
comments on some issues that have been in the news over the last couple 
of days that I would like my colleagues to be aware of.
  Mr. Speaker, in the last Congress I introduced a constitutional 
amendment. I introduced a constitutional amendment which would allow 
for a procedure where voters could recall their elected officials. So 
far in this Congress, I have not reintroduced that bill. But yesterday 
I decided that it was again time to perhaps make a few modifications to 
facilitate that process. But it is time to reintroduce the bill that 
allows public citizens, it allows the citizens of this country to hold 
their elected officials accountable for the promises and the 
commitments that they make during an election.
  Over the last few days, we have seen where individuals who campaigned 
and were elected during the campaign process made a series of promises 
and commitments to the voters that said, if I am elected, this is what 
I will stand for. This is what I will do. And these are the kinds of 
actions that you can expect me to take as your elected Representative.
  It appears that too often that is all they are, is campaign promises. 
They are a great way to get a vote, but when they get to Washington, 
they all of a sudden decide that maybe it is a lousy way to govern. 
Well, it is about time that voters started to recognize and have the 
opportunity to tie candidates to their performance, that when they run 
a campaign, they see a direct link between what an individual promises 
in a campaign and what they do once they get here. And that when they 
fail to see that link between a campaign and a performance, rather than 
just having to stand back and say, there is nothing that I can do about 
this, there is nothing that I can do about somebody that I voted for, 
somebody that I supported because they said they were going to do these 
things and then they go to Washington and they do something else. They 
now will be empowered with a tool that says, you said you were going to 
do that and you got to Washington and you decided that something else 
was going to happen and that your behavior was going to move in a 
different direction.
  Well, as a voter in your State, I now have the opportunity to say I 
voted for you because this is what you were going to do and, now that 
you have decided to do something else, I would like the opportunity to 
clarify and to hold you accountable for breaking the promises and 
breaking your commitment to me. It is time that the American people or 
at least the States in this country, it is time that the States had the 
opportunity to design a mechanism which will more effectively and more 
immediately allow the citizens to hold their elected officials 
accountable.
  It is unconscionable that we keep finding individuals on key issues 
who say one thing and do another. We are going to have a voter 
empowerment. In the States it is commonly known as the ability to hold 
elected officials accountable through a recall mechanism. We will have 
a recall bill. I urge my

[[Page H691]]

colleagues to take a look at it, to take a look at what is fueling 
voter cynicism and to say, yes, let us give the voters one more tool to 
hold their Representatives accountable.
  On another topic that again fuels cynicism in Washington, last year 
we had a very critical debate on partial birth abortions. It would be 
nice to believe that what we debate here on the floor and the 
information that we receive is accurate. However, we now find that an 
abortion rights doctor admitted to lying about the frequency of partial 
birth abortions. He said, I lied through my teeth. It is a form of 
killing. You are ending a life. Went on to say that this was used not 
only in rare cases, it was used more frequently, that it was not only 
used on situations where the fetus was in distress but was used on 
healthy women with healthy children. Based on that kind of testimony, 
President Clinton vetoed our legislation to prohibit this gruesome act. 
So I am hopeful and anxious that we will revisit that issue based on 
this new information.
  I also could not help but just find the irony that we as a society, 
as we focus on the right to kill unborn children, the headlines this 
week were, we are trying to find ways to clone sheep at the same time 
and on the same page, according to the headline, morning-after pill 
receives FDA approval. The FDA has also moved forward aggressively. 
Abortion bill accord clears way for sales, RU-486.
  So as we are cloning sheep, we keep trying to come up with more 
innovative ways to take the lives of the most defenseless in our 
society, the unborn. We have gone so far that environmentalist groups 
in this Nation score votes against abortion. They score votes in favor 
of protecting the unborn as a vote against the environment because they 
identify the greatest danger to birds and their habitat is more people. 
So a vote for the unborn is now a vote against the environment. It is 
interesting to see how these debates and these issues are being 
structured in our society today.
  But let us move on to education. Education is a critical issue in 
this Nation today. We have gone through a series of what we call 
lessons learned, what are we learning about education. We are going 
through a process which we call education at a crossroads. I do not 
think there is much doubt that there is a widespread belief that we 
have to take a look at what is going on in education in our country.
  We have lots of statistics about what the results are in our Nation. 
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 California, 2\1/2\ weeks ago, we had a hearing where the college 
presidents came in. They said, make sure that as you go forward and 
take a look at education funding, that you continue to fund remedial 
education. We need Federal remedial education dollars to be successful.
  You sit back and say, now, what do you mean by remedial? Remedial 
education. Somebody that has been accepted into your institution of 
higher learning, what are you teaching these kids, what do they need 
remedial education in? Are you trying to teach them more complex 
writing skills, more complex math skills, what are you teaching them? 
They said, no, when these kids are graduating from high school and, of 
course, many go on to college, they cannot read or write at an eighth 
grade level. Excuse me. They cannot read or write at an eighth grade 
level?
  They get into college and they want more remedial education dollars. 
As a college president, have you ever thought about going back to your 
high schools and trying to find out what is going on in the high 
schools that maybe we could teach them reading and writing and math and 
when they go through high school rather than trying to deal with it 
when they get to college.
  In Washington, DC, we have decided that it is necessary to take the 
elected school board and replace them by an appointed administrator. 
Why? Because these kids are getting the lowest test scores in the 
country. We are failing the kids right outside of this building. It is 
not an issue of money, $8,300 per student, and they get the lowest test 
scores and some of the lowest test scores in the country.
  In my own State of Michigan our Governor has proposed taking over a 
number of school districts because we are failing the kids. I asked the 
Governor, I said, what makes you think that as a Governor, removed from 
the local situation, you can do a better job of educating these kids 
than what the local school board can do? And the disappointing fact is, 
and he is probably right, he said, I cannot do any worse. When you have 
got 2 or 3 kids out of 250 kids who are passing a proficiency test, 
increasing that to 4 or 5 is a significant improvement but it is way 
below what is acceptable in this Nation.
  We know that, as we take a look at education, as we have gone around 
the country, as we have been in east Harlem, New York, as we have been 
in Chicago and we have been in Los Angeles and Phoenix and Napa and 
towns in my own district, we know that, No. 1, the most successful 
schools and the most successful kids in our country, the ones that are 
learning are, where parents are involved and, No. 2, in very difficult 
areas, where school administrators and principals have developed a 
dynamic program and they have reached out into their community and they 
have involved their parents, the parents of the kids, then we have the 
most likely scenario for success. And we are going around the country 
and we are taking a look at what works and what is wasted.
  Why do we have to take a look at what is working and what is wasted? 
We know there is a problem. Some people would say, well, why are you 
reviewing this at all; the Federal Government should not be involved in 
education. That may or may not be a correct argument. That is not the 
argument that we have in front of us today. The argument that we have 
in front of us today is that this town, Washington, DC, with this 
Department, the Department of Education, and 39 other agencies, has a 
tremendous impact on education at all levels in our Nation. This town, 
these bureaucrats, run 39 different agencies. This town--and these 
bureaucrats who are very good people, they are knowledgeable people, 
but they are asked to administer through 39 different agencies, we ask 
these people to administer 760 programs.
  Remember what these people do and they are matched by their 
counterparts at the State level and at the local level. It is all good 
people with good intentions trying to do the right thing, and what they 
are doing is they have all got a stack of paper. They are all 
processing paper, which means that dollars go to processing paper and 
employing people. It keeps the dollars away from the classroom because 
remember, every time we create one of these 760 programs, we have to 
let people know that these programs exist. So we have got a bureaucrat 
who designs the brochure that says, here is the program and here is who 
might qualify.
  At the other end of the communications pattern, we have got another 
bureaucrat that gets the brochure. They read the brochure and say, we 
might qualify for this program. Let us get some more information. Maybe 
let us even get an application. Let us fill out the application. It 
goes into the pile of paper. They fill out the application. They send 
it back to a bureaucrat in Washington who reads it and says, well, I 
have got a whole stack of applications. I am going to have to sort 
through who gets what and how much. Eventually they will decide. They 
send the money back.

                              {time}  1430

  The person says, ``Well, I am getting the money. Now what stack of 
paper says what can I do with it?'' Of course, they have to fill out 
papers sending back to Washington saying, ``Here is what we did with 
it.'' That gets back to Washington and somebody has to read it to 
determine whether they actually spent it the way it was intended to be 
spent.
  So we are employing lots of bureaucrats in 39 different agencies, 
administering 760 programs, spending $120 billion a year; $120 billion 
per year in 760 programs going through 39 different agencies. Probably 
a little bit of concern as to whether we are actually getting our 
dollar's worth.
  And that is why we are taking a look at what is going on in 
Washington.

[[Page H692]]

 What works and what is wasted? Spending time at the grassroots level 
and saying, we have 760 programs, we have 14 literacy programs, why can 
our kids not read when they are graduating from high school?
  And what we are saying is, before we put on another overlay of more 
programs and more spending and more dollars, it is time to take a look 
at this conglomeration of programs, and look at it from a teacher's 
level and look at it from a kid's level and say, are these dollars 
getting to our children? Are these dollars getting into the classroom, 
or are the dollars being spent shuffling paper back and forth?
  The Heritage Foundation has told us in their study that just in the 
Federal bureaucracy we lose 15 percent. And when we add in State and 
local bureaucracies, my estimate is that we lose about 35 to 40 cents 
of every education dollar to bureaucracy and bureaucrats who are doing 
what we ask them to do, but they are prohibiting the dollars from 
getting to our children and getting into the classroom.
  And even then, as we have found out as we have made these field 
visits, the dollars get into the classroom and you ask somebody, do you 
appreciate the Federal programs? Yes, we appreciate getting the money, 
but when we get the rules and regulations of how we need to spend it, 
and then we take a look at our kids and we take a look at our school 
and we take a look at our classrooms and we take a look at our teachers 
and we take a look at our community and what we would really like to do 
in our classrooms for our kids, and then we take a look at what the 
rules and the guidelines from some bureaucracy in Washington are, that 
has never been in our town, that does not know the names of our kids, 
and what they tell us to do is not what we really want to do, it is not 
our No. 1 priority. It might be somewhere on our priority list, but it 
does not help us do what we think we need to do to help our kids today.
  The lesson today is more does not always equal better. If we have a 
program, if we have 760 programs and we are spending $120 billion, 
there are those that are saying, and we are not getting results, we 
ought to be spending more. And if we had a couple more programs and a 
few more dollars, we would be able to solve the problem.
  This was in the paper this week: ``Drug Education Shows Limited 
Success, Department Reports.'' Many children still turn to drugs 
between the 5th and 8th grades despite billions of Federal dollars that 
have been spent on drug education since 1987.
  The Education Department reported that. A report commissioned by the 
Department said effects were small even in the programs that appeared 
to curb drug use.
  Now, this is the interesting thing. One would think that after the 
Education Department completes its own study that says kids are still 
turning to drugs, which is a terrible problem, the effects were small, 
one would think that they would step back and say, why are we not 
getting the results? This is a terrible problem. We all want to curb 
drug use. We have spent billions of dollars. We are not having an 
impact.
  One would think the Education Department would step back and say, let 
us rethink this. Let us come together and say this is not working, and 
let us think about bringing in parents, bringing in legislators, 
bringing in State people, bringing in teachers and saying, let us take 
another look at this problem; how are we going to solve this? We need 
to approach it in a different way.
  So what is the Department's solution? The Department wants $620 
million next year for drug education. They do not want us to rethink or 
come up with new programs or different programs to replace what they 
admit are the failed policies and a billion dollars of wasted money. 
They want $620 million next year for drug education, up from $558 
million this year and $438 million in 1996.
  This is the lesson we should be learning: More does not always equal 
better. More dollars going to Washington bureaucracies--dollars to 
bureaucracies, dollars to bureaucracies--does not necessarily mean we 
are going to be solving the problem.
  It is amazing to me that as we prepared this lesson this week, I cut 
this out of the paper this week. It is a classic case of bureaucrats 
not worrying about whether we are solving the problem but saying we 
solve the problem purely by making more dollars available; not making 
them available in an attempt to build off an analysis that says these 
programs failed, and here is why they failed and here is a new 
approach.
  They just say, here are the failed programs. Let us not rethink it. 
But if you just give me $62 million more into this same failed system, 
we will have protected a lot of bureaucrats and a lot of paperwork. We 
will not have helped any more kids, but we will be able to go back and 
say we gave $62 million more for drug education. Probably will not 
spend a lot of time talking about it does not really matter they will 
not work, but, hey, they are spending more.
  So they can say we are spending more than a 10-percent increase in 
funding, more than a 10-percent increase in funding in failed programs. 
But the disappointing thing here is there is no thinking about what we 
need to do for our kids. It means pouring more money, hard-earned money 
into a broken system, a tragic system. And in too many places it is the 
argument that we hear over and over again.

  And let me say this. We may raise an issue during the appropriations 
process about why are we going to increase spending by $62 million on 
drug education programs that, by the way, do not work, and it will be 
said, there they go again, those mean-spirited people cutting dollars 
for our kids. No, the Education Department said it. The drug education 
programs are not working. It is about time that that issue was raised.
  It is the same question that we are trying to answer in Education at 
a Crossroads; that when the President proposes spending $50 billion 
more on education, before we go out and spend $50 billion more into 
what in some cases is a failed system, we should step back and say, 760 
programs, 39 agencies, $120 billion per year: Is there maybe not a 
better way to do it?
  Is there not maybe an issue that we should be raising, before we try 
to mobilize 100,000 tutors, that we take a look and say why do our 14 
literacy programs not work today? And if tutors are better than our 
current literacy programs, if tutors are the right answer, let us go 
for tutors. Maybe we can pay for the tutors by saying the literacy 
programs we had in place were not working and so we will be able to 
fund not 100,000 tutors but 200,000 tutors because we are going to get 
rid of the failed literacy programs.
  Let us step back and see what is working and what does not work 
before we just put a patchwork of more programs on a failed system. The 
issue here is not money. There is plenty of money in the system. The 
issue is making sure that we spend the dollars on the right kinds of 
things.
  We have gone to schools in, like I said, in New York, Chicago, 
Milwaukee, L.A., Napa, Phoenix. We are going to Cincinnati, we are 
going to Delaware next week, we are going to have hearings on the D.C. 
schools, schools in Detroit. We have gone and we are going all around 
the country, and we have seen schools that spend $2,200 per child, we 
have seen schools that spend $8,300 per child.
  What does the research of our committee show? Our committee's 
research shows that more does not always equal better. Pouring more 
dollars into a bad system does not fix the system.
  If we put in place the right system, we can educate the kids. It is 
the fun thing about this project. The great thing about this project is 
going into some of what we in Washington define as some of the greatest 
areas of at-risk kids, kids who supposedly are at a disadvantage for 
learning, and seeing schools and seeing children that are getting a 
great education. It is because parents are involved, the schools are 
focusing on the basics, and the dollars go into the classroom and not 
into a bureaucracy.
  The issue is not how much money is spent but it is how we spend it. 
Are we spending it on kids? Are we spending it on the basics? Are we 
spending it on teachers? Are we spending it at places closest to the 
kids, or are we pouring it into bureaucracies and bureaucrats who are 
greatly removed from the system?
  The dollars: The District of Columbia, as I mentioned, spends over 
$8,000

[[Page H693]]

per child yet their children are not graduating, they are not reading 
and they are not succeeding. Schools in New York: Some of the schools 
that I visited, $2,200 to $2,500 per child, and they are very, very 
successful. More spending does not always equal better.
  We need to focus on how we spend it, not how much money is being 
spent. That is what Education at a Crossroads is doing: Visiting 
communities, talking to people, finding out what is working, finding 
out how effective the Federal programs are, and then going back and 
identifying what we need to do in Washington to straighten out our 
bureaucratic mess so that we can help our kids.
  The focus of this whole issue cannot be the Department of Education 
or the other 38 agencies that are trying to educate kids. It cannot be 
a bureaucratic focus. It cannot be on this town. The focus has to be on 
kids around the country.

                              {time}  1445

  The problem that we have in Washington today and the problem that we 
maybe have in our country today is if we go back and take a look at 
this graphic: Where education in this country is supposed to be, 
parental involvement and local control, independent of Washington 
interference, so that programs in classrooms, in instructional 
materials, in instructional lessons can be tailored to the needs of 
every individual child in every individual community.
  What we have found is that rather than local control, these 39 
agencies in Washington that are trying to educate our kids have made 
the street that some of you may walk down to get to work every day, 
which we fondly call Independence Avenue, when you take a look at who 
is lining the sides of that street, it is all the bureaucracies here in 
Washington, and the end result is one of these days we may have to 
rename it, not Independence Avenue but Dependence Avenue because all of 
these agencies are fostering local dependence on Washington 
bureaucracies before they can do anything. That is why parents are 
frustrated.
  This is ironic. Why are parents frustrated? Kids cannot do math so we 
are going to have 100,000 new tutors. They are going to be administered 
by an agency that cannot even keep its own books. All parents are 
frustrated because they want to give their children a chance to receive 
a quality education and we stand in the way.
  We are investing a tremendous amount of money in education. But too 
often it seems like that money is wasted. It is not getting to our kids 
and it is going to inefficient systems, so it is wasted. Think of how 
much money is spent on administrators and education bureaucrats. Think 
of how little money actually reaches the kids. Like I told you earlier, 
60 cents of every dollar gets to our children.
  I yield to my colleague from Florida.
  Mr. SCARBOROUGH. I do not want to take up too much of the gentleman's 
time, but I will just briefly say, he talked about Dependence Avenue 
and the bureaucracy, the Federal bureaucracy on Dependence Avenue, the 
Department of Education bureaucracy.
  I think one of the finest examples of how Americans' dollars, tax 
dollars, come up to Washington, DC to these huge Federal bureaucracies 
and do not get back home is the example of the Department of Education 
who 2 years ago said that they had to cut their budget by $100 billion 
to keep schools across the country safe from caving in and collapsing. 
But in that same budget where they cut $100 million from the safe 
schools part of the program, they added $20 million just to improve 
their single bureaucracy building on Independence Avenue.
  So here we have an example not of robbing Peter to pay Paul, but an 
example of the Federal bureaucratic machine robbing our children to 
feed bureaucracy instead of doing what needs to be done in education. I 
applaud the gentleman for actually having the courage to stand up and 
say enough is enough to this nonsense, and I thank the gentleman for 
yielding.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. I thank my colleague from Florida for those comments. 
That is why parents are frustrated. They want to give their kids a 
quality education, and at the end of the day they see us taking care of 
bureaucrats and bureaucrats not taking care of their kids, taking care 
of Washington but not taking care of Holland, MI. And it is kind of 
like, well, we never really wanted you to take care of Holland, MI, in 
the first place, but you took all of our money and you sent it to 
Washington and now to get it back we need to do what you want us to do 
and then think of the results.
  What is happening? How much money is spent on education? Consider the 
results. Half of American children cannot read, cannot meet the minimum 
expectations for math and reading. We spend more money per child than 
nearly every other industrial country, yet our children simply are not 
learning the way we would like them to.
  Think about this. Why are parents frustrated? Why are parents 
frustrated? They want to give their kids a quality education. Fewer 
than half of all dollars spent on public education are spent in the 
classroom. Fewer than half. Low test scores, frustrated parents, kids 
who are not learning, plenty of money, fewer than half the dollars are 
spent in the classroom. They are spent on bureaucrats, on support 
personnel, on administration buildings, but less than half are spent on 
children in the classroom.
  Parents, local control, that is most important about getting our kids 
to learn. We must restore the crucial parental role in education. 
Parents have the right to choose the school that is best for their 
child. Parents have the right to choose the best school for their 
child. Parents have the right, not bureaucrats assigning kids. Parents 
pay for it, it is their tax dollars, it is your tax dollars. Tax 
dollars should go to the schools of the taxpayers' choice.
  Remember, at the end of the day, more does not always equal better. 
Only in Washington is that accepted, that more equals better. In the 
rest of America, it is fairly common knowledge that more does not 
always equal better. It is not how much money is spent, it is how we 
spend it. When we spend a dollar and only 50 cents goes into the 
classroom, the answer may not be spending $1.20 to get 60 cents in the 
classroom. It may be taking a look at the dollar and saying 50 cents of 
overhead, that may just be too much. Maybe we can take that dollar and 
maybe we can find another dime for our kids if we take it out of the 
bureaucracy, maybe if we take it out of the paperwork shuffle between 
local school districts, State bureaucrats and Washington bureaucrats. 
Maybe if we take it out of that system, maybe if we simplify it and we 
make it 200 programs instead of 760 programs, maybe if we make it 2 
agencies instead of 39 agencies, maybe we could just find that extra 
nickel or that extra dime for our kids. It is not how much is spent, it 
is how we spend it. Today we are spending way too much on the wrong 
kinds of things. We need to get the money into the classroom.

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