[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 34 (Monday, March 17, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H1030-H1035]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        OUR EDUCATION CHALLENGE

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 7, 1997, the gentlewoman from Hawaii [Mrs. Mink] is recognized 
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
  Mrs. MINK of Hawaii. Mr. Speaker, the issue that I wanted to 
specifically comment on during this hour that I have is the education 
challenge which the Congress has faced in the past and must continue to 
face.
  All of the polls that we have seen over the last year, or perhaps 
even longer, indicate that the American people are absolutely driven 
with the concern and worry about the fate of our educational system. 
When simply brought into a room and asked to indicate what they think 
the most critical problem and issue this country faces in the next 
several years is, without any prompting, the vast majority of the 
persons that are questioned answer spontaneously, the education system.
  So I believe that the Congress is correct in placing a very large 
emphasis on the educational goals for this Nation, and certainly our 
President is to be commended for highlighting his commitment to 
education, to support reform, to make it possible for more families to 
send their children to higher education, to make the educational 
opportunities real for families all across this country.
  It seems to me, Mr. Speaker, with the national administration 
committed to support of education, with our local communities already 
engaged in the process of educational reform, that the Congress has a 
very great responsibility to develop a program which enhances the 
educational programs for our country.
  In that context, it therefore disturbs me greatly when I am 
confronted, as the ranking Democrat member of the Subcommittee on 
Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on Education and the 
Workforce, with an approach that is being sponsored by the majority, 
which is called Education at the Crossroads: What Works and What 
Doesn't Work, leading to the presumed conclusion that there is so much 
out there in education which is funded by the Federal Government that 
does not work that the Congress ought to pay heed and perhaps revamp 
the system of educational support.
  I think that completely misstates the issue, Mr. Speaker. I have been 
advised that at various hearings that this subcommittee has held, and I 
only came to this position a few weeks ago, so I did not participate in 
the previous hearings, I went to one a few weeks ago in Delaware, but 
it is my distinct impression from talking to staff and others that the 
people who have come to testify and to give of their views and 
impressions about Federal programs in their area, that the Federal 
programs have worked very well; and that while there are some that 
perhaps could be altered or changed, or the emphasis switched to 
something else, most of the people who have come forward have indicated 
that the Federal programs are working.
  Fundamentally, I think it is important also to understand that by and 
large, most of the Federal programs for education, at least in the 
elementary and secondary levels, are voluntary. The school systems, the 
States, the districts, come forward themselves to ask for funding, and 
they are given, by and large, a very large latitude in determining how 
these funds are to be spent.
  They find the target areas, they develop the programs, they manage 
it, and of course, they have to account for the spending. We are not in 
a position to allocate funds, even though they are voluntary, without 
examining how they are spent. That is really the responsibility of the 
oversight committee, which I joined. It is our responsibility to see 
how the moneys are spent. What works and what does not work is 
legitimate, but we are confronted by a document issued by the 
Republican majority, consisting of about 50 pages, and the repeated 
scenario both on the floor here and elsewhere, suggesting that there 
are just too many programs. We heard the Speaker here on the floor make 
mention of 760 education programs.
  I have no idea where they obtained this list. Someone said it was 
probably the Library of Congress or some other source which collected 
this data. But it has no bearing or very little bearing to the Office 
of Education and to the areas of educational responsibility assigned to 
the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, of which I am a 
member.
  As far as I can determine from discussions with the Department of 
Education, they took a look at this list of 760 programs, and any of 
the Members interested might obtain a copy of this very easily by 
calling the majority staff of the House Committee on Education and the 
Workforce and ask for this list of the so-called 760 education 
programs, and they will be surprised that the majority of the programs 
listed here are not in the Office of Education, not in the Department 
of Education at all.
  The Department tells me that there are 298 identifiable programs out 
of the 760 that is often mentioned, 298 out of 760. So why do they go 
around the country saying they are 760 education programs? It is simply 
not true.
  Out of the 298 programs that the Department says are listed in this 
document, 114 have already been eliminated, many of them eliminated in 
the list that Vice President Gore and President Clinton produced at the 
beginning of their first term. These have been defunded, eliminated, 
consolidated. They do not belong on any list. So the list for the most 
part is totally outdated and serves no particular purpose whatsoever.
  At any rate, in the 760 programs listed in this document produced by 
the majority party, there are 184 programs, according to the U.S. 
Department of Education, that are legitimately listed as functions and 
programs that are currently administered by the U.S. Department of 
Education.
  What else is in here that makes up the 760? It is important to know 
that they have listed all research programs, for instance, all training 
programs, anything having to do with a study activity. For instance, in 
agriculture, a long list of research programs are listed as well as 
other kinds of training grants in that Department, totaling 33 
programs.
  I am not a particular expert about the Department of Agriculture, so 
cannot analyze the 33 programs, but my

[[Page H1031]]

quick look at it indicates that they are probably grants that have been 
issued by the Department, but they are being listed as though they were 
programs that have to be managed by that Department.
  The National Oceanic Administration, which has to do with the study 
of pollution and management and resources of our marine environment, is 
listed with 16 so-called education programs. Most of them, perhaps, are 
the collection of data or research or items of that kind which are 
terribly important, but they do not belong on an education list.
  The Defense Department has 20 programs listed in this document, a lot 
of it having to do with research activities that the DOD conducts: 
information gathering, information disseminating, training programs 
within the Defense Department. They are not education programs, as 
such.
  The Energy Department has 22 items listed. The Health and Human 
Services has 169 programs listed in this document, and they range from 
child welfare programs, substance abuse, AIDS prevention programs, 
programs for diabetes and so forth that the Speaker was making 
reference to, all of the Centers for Disease Control programs of 
research, terribly important to this country, but not education 
programs.

                              {time}  1515

  Indian health has 10 items here, and the NIH, which the Speaker was 
commending for supporting and increasing funding because it is so vital 
to the future health of this country, has 48 items in here. Does the 
chair of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the House 
Committee on Education and the Workforce indicate by the listing of 
these 48 programs that these are excessive interventions in this area? 
I seriously doubt it. No one has taken the time to look through the 760 
items on this list. If they did, I am sure this publication would never 
have been released.
  We have the National Science Foundation, 16 items, Indian affairs has 
a score of items listed in this report, Indian health, Indian affairs 
under the Department of the Interior, many of them having to do with 
resource management, information, data collecting, health services, and 
so forth. The Transportation Department has 19 programs listed here. 
The Justice Department has 21. The Labor Department has 24, most of it 
having to do with job training services. Arts and Humanities has 33.
  So, Mr. Speaker, I urge Members to take a look at this so-called 760 
item list that has been frequently mentioned on the floor of this House 
and referenced by the Speaker as an indicator of the concerns that the 
majority has about the directions of the educational apparatus in the 
United States. For one, 760 programs are not in the Department of 
Education. At the most, 184 are. And they have to do with elementary, 
secondary education, higher education, vocational education and all the 
things that are legitimate concerns.
  So let us narrow the focus. If we wanted to truly see what is working 
and what is not working in education, let us refocus on the 184 
programs and put away this diversionary tactic of suggesting to the 
American people that 760 programs are out there and that nobody knows 
anything about them. They are being managed by other Departments, and 
it is not the business of the Department of Education to go in and 
become the czar of all of this research, information gathering and try 
to manage it as a huge bureaucracy. That is absolutely antithetical to 
what the majority party believes anyway. They do not believe in this 
large type of management facility.
  So this search for some kind of inquiry that would minimize the 
import of the Federal programs in education by suggesting that there 
are these 760 programs that are not being managed well is simply not 
true.
  What we need to focus on in education is what really happens in the 
Federal funding mechanism. We hear a lot of criticism that the scores, 
the SAT scores are coming down, that the students are not performing 
well, that by other kinds of management or measurement techniques, the 
students are not doing as they should be doing and that our competitive 
status in the world is being threatened because education is 
functioning poorly.
  Somehow in putting that criticism together about education and the 
concerns that have been expressed by parents and educators everywhere 
about the need for greater emphasis on quality education is lost in the 
debate because right now we are talking about 760 programs that really 
do not exist in our Department. So let us focus on what is really 
happening in education.
  Most of the money for public education is coming from the local and 
State communities. It is not coming from the Federal Government. The 
average Federal contribution of the local-State budgets for education 
is somewhere around 6, 7, or 8 percent. That is all; 6, 7, or 8 percent 
of the total budget of the local school district or of a State is 
federally linked. The rest of the funds are coming from local taxes, 
local support or by the State governments in making contributions to 
the health, to the education of the children of that community. So the 
bulk of responsibility is in the local communities, in the management 
of the funds that they collect from their own taxes and from their own 
constituents.
  The emphasis for the school-based management, the return of the 
management of your schools to parents and teachers and to the students 
arose from the fact that people felt that solutions and edicts and 
management suggestions coming from on top were not necessarily 
applicable to local school districts or even to individual schools. And 
so the strength of the parent movement has suggested that parents and 
teachers in a local school environment ought to be given greater 
authority to determine the kinds of educational thrusts that the school 
ought to have, how it was to spend its money, what kinds of additional 
courses needed to be added onto the program and to individualize the 
budget process on a school-by-school basis.
  Many areas have done this. My own State is one of the early pioneers 
in school-based management concepts. I believe to a large extent it has 
worked. The fundamental principle there is local school control. They 
make the decisions. So in this apparent decision to go across the 
country to determine what works and what does not work does not fit 
into this whole pattern which we have established over the last decade. 
A program may work well in one area, but that does not mean one size 
fits all and we are to take that program and try to replicate it, clone 
it so that everybody else follows that same pattern. That is precisely 
what the parent-teacher model is specifically opposed to. Every school 
situation is different. They may want to emphasize different areas of 
study or they may have different problems that they need to deal with 
in their school environment.
  So while the search of what works and what does not work is 
important, it certainly is not to find that premium program, that 
absolutely great idea that works in one area and expect to replicate it 
throughout the Nation. I think that that is absolutely contrary to this 
whole notion of local responsibility and local decisionmaking. So our 
search for what works and what does not work ought to be for our own 
information in enabling us to determine what kinds of programs we ought 
to emphasize and what programs we ought to be sponsoring under the 
Federal auspices.
  Now, in much of the discussion that I have heard on the floor 
presented by the chairman of my Committee on House Oversight, he 
frequently has a large map and he points to the bureaucracy that is 
suggested by this map in Washington and argues that the moneys that are 
being allocated to education are not being spent for the education of 
our children. In other words, it is not going to the classroom, it is 
not paying the teacher's salaries and, therefore, ``It is being wasted 
inside the beltway in this humongous bureaucracy.''
  Well, a simple search of the statistics in the Department will tell 
us immediately that the Department of Education has probably the 
smallest overhead manpower pool of any Cabinet position in any of the 
recent administrations. The Secretary tells me that roughly about 2 
percent of the moneys that pass through the U.S. Department of 
Education is spent in personnel in Washington for the management and 
administration of the funding process. That is a very small amount of 
money.

[[Page H1032]]

  So second, I want to debunk this idea that the moneys that the 
Congress has appropriated for education is somehow being wasted, on 760 
programs, because that is not true; and second, in the overly heavy 
administration or bureaucratic mechanism somehow in place here in 
Washington. It is not true and I invite Members to look at the details 
and arrive at their own judgment.
  The budget process is extremely important, and I heard the Speaker 
again make a challenge to the President that he come back with another 
budget which is balanced. That is an extraordinary request. Basically 
what I think it does is to confess failure on the part of the majority 
to have their own budget to come forward which is balanced by the year 
2002. That is their basic responsibility. The Constitution requires us 
to be the manager of the funds and revenues of this Government and to 
do allocations for the programs that we feel are necessary.
  The President of the United States, on the other hand, merely submits 
his proposal. He does not enact it. We do. He proposes. He suggests how 
he would like to see the revenues of this country spent on the various 
programs that he favors. I am pleased that he came forward with very 
large increases for education.
  I believe the President's budget will be balanced in 5 years, 2002. 
It is difficult for anyone sitting in this Chamber or anywhere else in 
the country to specifically guarantee that any budget will actually 
balance out because budgets that are based upon 5-year forecasts are 
nothing more than forecasts. They are projections. They are based upon 
assumptions of what the economy is going to be like next year and the 
year after that and the year after that, how much revenues are going to 
be forthcoming into the Treasury, how much unemployment there is going 
to be in the country that might cause a reduction in the receipts or 
the necessity to pay out unemployment compensation or perhaps other 
kinds of effects. Inflation might rear its ugly head, for instance, and 
diminish the strength of our economy and the gross national product 
might not be as vigorous as is anticipated by this administration.
  They have every right to be proud of the projections they have made 
over the past 4 years. Their projections were always criticized as 
being too rosy, too affirmative in terms of what the outlooks were 
going to be down the road 4 or 5 years. But it has turned out that the 
administration's budgetary forecasts have been very conservative and 
that the deficits which they projected were far too high. In fact, the 
actual deficits were far below what they even thought it would be.
  Consequently, to attack the President's budget document because it 
does not balance in the year 2002 is quite an incredulous performance 
and really, I think, confesses the absence of the majority party to 
have their own document forthcoming.
  Under the statute which governs the budget process, and we could 
criticize the process interminably, but the process is here and we are 
required to follow it, and that process says on April 15 the majority 
has to come forth with a budget resolution. We have yet to take it up 
in the committee.
  In addition to serving on the Committee on Education and the 
Workforce, I also serve on the Committee on the Budget, and so it is 
interesting to me that we have engaged in this banter about asking the 
President to come forward with another budget. He does not have to. He 
submitted one. He says he believes it is balanced. Even the Republican 
designated head of the Congressional Budget Office in a letter to the 
Senate said in her view the budget was basically in balance and that 
there would be a deficit of zero in the fifth year.

                              {time}  1530

  So the CBO having said that, it seems to me that the majority ought 
to accept that letter and move forward and produce their budget 
document for this House to consider, as it is required to do, at least 
by the 15th of April. We are about to go on a long recess, not due back 
until the 7th of April, so in that period, which is called the district 
work period, I hope that the leadership on the majority side will 
rethink their responsibility and work vigorously to produce a budget 
that they can defend and which is equally conservative and balances out 
in the year 2002. I think that is something they owe not only this body 
but also the American people, all that rhetoric notwithstanding.
  The budget process is very complicated and subject to a lot of 
misunderstanding. I for one very strongly support the capital budget 
idea. The Speaker made reference to the fact that people manage their 
own family budgets and have to live within the moneys that they earn 
and that just as families are required to do this, the Federal 
Government ought to do the same. That sounds like a very simple 
message, but it is far from the truth.
  Families do not live on the income that they earn, and that is the 
plain fact. Most families, if they want to own a home, go to the bank 
and borrow, if they want to enjoy a quality of life. They go to the 
bank and get a mortgage for $300,000 or $400,000 and enjoy a home that 
they will eventually pay for in perhaps 30 years. They go to the bank 
and borrow to make sure that the best quality education is afforded 
their children.
  Businesses in America do not grow and expand and become prosperous on 
a cash balance basis. Their strength as a business is measured by their 
ability to go to the bank and borrow a million dollars or $5 million to 
capitalize their business and expand and generate jobs and be 
productive. Their wealth is determined on their ability to get this 
capital funding in order to finance their ventures, and this borrowing 
extends over a fairly long period of time.
  State governments, local governments also have found it necessary to 
borrow under a capital budget idea. My own State, for instance, has a 
constitutional requirement that the operating budget must be balanced, 
but that the State may also through its legislative branch approve the 
borrowing for capital improvements, roads, highways, airport 
facilities, a huge convention center, an oceanfront development, 
university structures and athletic facilities and so forth. All of 
these are now enjoyed by the community because the State has taken upon 
itself the ability to go out and sell bonds and to build these physical 
structures.
  The Federal budget, on the other hand, is very unique. It does not 
have a separate capital budget, and yet we all know that a very large 
hunk of the Defense Department, of the space and aeronautics budget, 
the transportation budget, the airport budget, numerous other areas of 
our budgetary documents are filled with capital projects.
  Why is it that the Federal Government only has to come up with the 
cash, pay-as-you-go concept? It seems to me that that is really the 
basis of our difficulty. If we truly have a zero deficit constitutional 
amendment, balanced budget means a zero deficit, it will completely 
hamstring, straitjacket the Federal Government and its ability to go 
out into the market and borrow for necessary capital improvements.
  I hope that a day will come when the Congress and the administration 
can sit down and discuss the merits of implementing a capital budget, 
because that is the way to go. Then I believe we could adopt a statute, 
an amendment, a whatever, that would require that our operating 
programs, year after year operating and paying for the services that 
the people expect of their Government, would be in a budget which is 
balanced and shows no deficit but would allow the Government to go out 
and borrow for defense purposes, for acquisition of strategic weapons, 
go to Mars or whatever, build the facilities of infrastructure for our 
highways and airports as a necessary, without confronting the overage 
year after year on the negative side in our budget. I think that that 
is the way to go and I hope that our discourse will take us at that 
point.
  Talking about the budget, I think it is important, if I may just 
refer to this chart, for people to understand where we are in terms of 
education funding. I do not think that the vast majority of people in 
the country understand the significance of this diagram, but this is 
what we are stuck with in terms of what we can budget in our debates 
here in the Congress.
  Defense spending, although it is discretionary and comes up to about 
$266 billion, is not likely to be reduced by the Congress. It could be, 
theoretically, but it is basically a fixed allocation, and the chance 
of reducing it so that we could fund something else is very, very 
remote.

[[Page H1033]]

  The interest that we pay on our past debts, which is over $5 
trillion, is also an area over which we have no control. The interest 
must be paid, the moneys were borrowed, and that is a Federal financial 
responsibility, and that is 14 percent of the budget at $248 billion.
  Social Security as part of the budget, it is a fixed requirement. It 
costs 21 percent of the budget. $364 billion must be paid out to 
beneficiaries who are eligible in the system, and there are no ifs, 
ands or buts about it, it is a fixed obligation. We do not appropriate 
it in the budget at all. It is an entitlement.
  The same is true for Medicare and Medicaid. Both of them are strict 
requirements for funding: Medicare at $209 billion, which is 12 percent 
of the budget; Medicaid, $99 billion at 6 percent of the budget. These 
are fixed requirements and their expenditures are dependent upon the 
number of eligible people who come in to get those services.
  There are other kinds of entitlements, 14 percent, $244 billion. 
Those are the retirements, civil service retirement, military 
retirements and other items such as that which are not part of our 
budget process.
  This small little pie-shaped sector here is all that is left and all 
that we labor to appropriate in the budget process. All the rest of it 
is, in my view, fixed items of allocation. We are debating 16 percent 
of the total budget, or $288 billion, and out of this amount, out of 
this $288 billion must come all the range of services in Justice, in 
Commerce, in Interior, in Agriculture, in research, in NIH, in Health 
and Human Services, in Education and Labor. So that is where this 
struggle comes in terms of the budget process.
  Anyone that suggests that education funding is excessive and should 
be cut back really has not focused on the small amount of money that is 
allocated for education. It is an incredibly small amount of money, 
something in the range of 2 percent of the funding. I had a chart here, 
but I seem to have misplaced it. Education funding roughly is about 5 
percent of the discretionary and 2 percent of the total Federal budget. 
It is a very small part of the total expenditure. The total Federal 
budget is $1.5 trillion, and the education budgeting as of fiscal year 
1997, last year, was somewhere around $28 billion, which is not very 
much.

  In this education budget, you can see how the funding is allocated. 
Local educational agencies receive 39 percent; State educational 
agencies receive 13 percent; college students receive 16 percent of the 
total funding; institutions of higher learning, about 15.6 percent; 
other kinds of group agencies, 6 percent. The Federal share, and that 
is what the Republican Chair of the Oversight Committee is making 
reference to, the overhead in Washington, the Federal share of the 
total Department of Education outlays is a mere 1.8 percent, or roughly 
2 percent of the total budget, which is the lowest, I am told, of any 
Cabinet agency in the Government.
  There is not an excessive bureaucracy and the funding is very low. 
Anyone that suggests that too much money is going into education simply 
has not taken a look at the overall budget. Two percent of the total 
budget for education is woefully inadequate.
  All the discussion and the voices that you hear constantly is that 
education is the most important responsibility of our society, to 
translate to the future our children's ability to compete in business 
and in trade and in global interactions. If that is true, and the 
future of this country is to be in the hands of the children whom we 
have the responsibility to educate, do you not think 2 percent of the 
Federal budget is woefully inadequate, 5 percent of the discretionary 
is woefully inadequate?
  So I hope in this one area, particularly in this one area, that there 
can be a concerted effort on both sides of the aisle to come together 
with a committed program of support for education. We may differ on the 
emphasis, but let us not waste time pointing fingers at the Department 
and challenging them to reduce their bureaucracy when it is the 
smallest of any Cabinet agency, or alleging that there are 760 programs 
when in fact there are only 184. Take a serious look at those 184 and 
see how we can expand their impact if they are good, eliminate them if 
they are bad, and continue on the steady march of increasing and 
focusing and targeting the Federal support for education on the 
neediest students in our country and those programs that school 
districts have the greatest difficulty in funding because of the 
excessive cost.
  It seems to me we can join hands on that simple agenda and create a 
great deal of good for this country and make tremendous progress.
  I shall join the Republicans on their hearings across the country on 
Education at the Crossroads, because I believe that the people who will 
come forth to testify will support the Federal presence in education. 
It is so small. It is a minutia in the totality of responsibility that 
local school districts have; 6, 7, 8 percent is not a great deal of the 
funding, and most of it is voluntary. They get to use the money in 
whatever capacities they deem best, and so the essence of local control 
and flexibility is there for them to manage.
  We should listen to these school officials, because we have much to 
learn. We still do not know why, for instance, the National Assessment 
of Educational Progress report on math recently shows certain schools 
are very high on the list and other schools are very low. My own State 
scored very low, and I am distressed by seeing our State listed at the 
bottom quarter of the list.

                              {time}  1545

  Many educators and administrators will say, ``Well, those kinds of 
report cards don't mean anything. They're probably based on erroneous 
data or old data or whatever.'' That may be true, but it seems to me 
that if one is seriously interested in looking at what is happening to 
education and how the States are dealing with it, the statistics that 
are put forth are very important and that we ought to pay attention to 
it. That does not mean we have to abide by everything that is said in 
it, but it is certainly a lesson to heed.
  The recent report that was published January 22, Education Week in 
collaboration with the Pugh charitable trusts, called ``Quality Counts: 
A Report Card on the Condition of Public Education in 50 States,'' is a 
document which I urge you all to obtain and to study very carefully if 
you are interested in education as a student, as a parent, as a member 
of a board of education or in the school system as an administrator or 
a teacher, or someone who is an elected legislator or whatever. The 
materials that are contained in this educational report are very 
instructive. You could probably find nitpicking reasons for discarding 
this particular analysis or that analysis, but the tables that are 
presented in this report which rank each State in the performance based 
upon a whole range of criteria is very, very instructive.
  I found it instructive trying to see where my State placed, for 
instance, in the math scores that were recently released under NAPE'S 
and found that my State ranked in the lower fourth. It is very 
disturbing. The best part of the report said that we probably had the 
highest advances in the last 6 years in terms of the scores, so that is 
something of a positive note. But I think we should look at these 
statistics and learn from them what we are doing in our schools in 
teaching math.
  Certainly it is not the Federal Government going into the schools 
teaching math. We hardly ever even fund math per se. We might fund 
title I, which takes moneys into the economically disadvantaged school 
areas to try to help students in those communities, but math as such is 
not a Federal program as far as I can determine. So looking at math, 
NAPE'S has picked out one area of performance by the students, fourth 
grade and eighth grade. They did this 6 years ago, and they just 
released their report now. They do the same for reading. It is 
important, I think, for us to look at the reading scores and to see how 
one ranks.
  It has in the report the average per pupil expenditure; very, very 
interesting to see the States that are spending a considerable amount 
of money and what the results are in terms of academic achievements. 
One of the States that I looked at was New Jersey. Their average per 
pupil expenditure is $8,118. That is a very large per pupil 
expenditure. My own State is around $5,000, so it is significantly 
larger. The report says that 60 percent of those moneys that New Jersey 
spends for education goes directly into instruction, contrary

[[Page H1034]]

to what the Republicans on my committee have alleged. This report 
indicates overall about 60 percent of all school funding is for 
instructional services.
  Now we know to run a school requires a whole lot of other expenses. 
You have the school lunch program, you have the maintenance program, 
you have the building program, you have all these other extras. In some 
cases you might even have to have a police officer and other kinds of 
protective mechanisms added. So to find a school that is spending out 
of its $8,118 per pupil expenditure 60 percent that goes into 
instruction is very, very laudatory.
  Another statistic contained in this report, and you can do this for 
every State; in New Jersey, the percent of teachers with 25 or less 
students. That was 63 percent of their school population. This is 
another point that they need to be commended for. My State has 
somewhere around 40 percent only of teachers with 25 or less students. 
So we have a far distance to go to achieve that record.
  The average teacher's salary in New Jersey is $38,422, and it is 
probably one of the highest in the country. New York is a little 
higher. The average teacher's salary in New York is $41,157.
  So these States and communities combined are making a tremendous 
effort to put education at the top. People in a very derisive kind of 
voice say you cannot throw money at a problem and expect to solve it. 
In the instance of education I believe that funding education is 
primarily the way to improve it and to develop quality education. One 
way you do that is to hire teachers that are qualified to teach, and 
they have a chart in this report showing how many teachers in high 
school are not qualified to teach the subjects that they have been 
assigned by the system, and you can certainly predict that those 
students are not going to do well if the teacher is not a qualified 
teacher.
  So the teacher enhancement program, the average teacher salary, the 
amount of money that is going into the system are, it seems to me, key 
elements for success.
  Why I pick New Jersey is that 97 percent of their public high schools 
offer advanced placement. Advanced placement is one of the criteria 
used in this report to determine the kind of initiative and thrust in 
quality education that the school system is placing on instruction, and 
so the schools that are putting their money into advanced placement 
turn out students that excel. And so here you have New Jersey at 97 
percent AP courses. New York has an 83 percent advanced placement 
course. So they are doing well. The average per pupil expenditure in 
New York is 7,173 with a teacher average salary of $41,157.
  The No. 1 ranking State in this report in terms of--excuse me, not in 
this report, in the NAPE'S report for 1996 on mathematics, the No. 1 
scoring State, and I have to commend that State, is Minnesota. 
Minnesota placed first in the outcome of the examination on math for 
their fourth graders and for their eighth graders. So surely they must 
be doing something right in Minnesota, and we need to go there to see 
what it is so that we can inspire other school districts to do the 
same; not to use the example of Minnesota to force-feed a program for 
the rest of the Nation on a one size fits all, but to learn from the 
instructional program in Minnesota how it is they have done so well in 
the instruction of math and to excel year after year in the command 
their students have of this very, very important subject. Math and 
science together is really the path to the future if we are to be 
competitive with our foreign counterparts. The average teacher's salary 
in Minnesota is $37,570, so that is an indication also of their 
tremendous support.
  Sixty-four percent of the moneys that they collect and spend in 
education go for instruction, and their average per pupil expenditure 
is $6,983.
  So there is much that I commend to you in this Education Week. Let us 
not just look and hear the rhetoric and expect that that is the fact or 
that is the truth. Let us examine Education Week, look for your State's 
performance. There are dozens and dozens of criteria which have been 
used to make the evaluation, some of it more relevant to some 
situations and some perhaps not. But it is certainly a way to start an 
oversight investigation course which takes us across the country to 
make this examination.

  The Speaker in one of his remarks made reference to the fact that we 
might do away with bilingual education. I take strong issue against 
such a proposal. Bilingual education is to teach people how to read and 
write and think in English. You cannot abandon this program with the 
expectation that by doing so and forcing students who are not 
proficient in English coming to the class, perhaps speaking at home in 
another language, to be able to accomplish and learn what they are 
required to learn. Performance would be disastrously lowered if we did 
not have this accompanying program which allows the students to make a 
transition from the language that they are familiar with and use at 
home or a language that they use outside the classrooms. To bring that 
language in and to make it the source of instruction for mastery of 
English is really the philosophy of the bilingual education.
  So I hope that the Republicans will reexamine that issue and not come 
up for its eradication.
  The House will be debating this week the matter of flexible time for 
families. Again the Speaker made reference to their strong belief in 
families first and their desire to allow families the option to take a 
sick child to the doctor or to go to school to discuss their children's 
performance in school with the teachers and other school personnel or 
to take an aging parent somewhere. These are all laudable reasons for 
allowing people to get time from their employers to do this important 
work. It seems to me that employers throughout the country have that 
compassion and are willing to make time available. But the flex time 
bill, H.R. 1 that we will be debating this week, does not come close at 
all to this aspiration that families have for flexible time.
  It seems to me it is very simple for employers to say, ``OK, you have 
to do this for a couple of hours. You can stay late the next day.''. 
That is flexible time. There is no pay loss or anything of that kind. 
But H.R. 1, the compensatory time bill that is coming forth for debate, 
does not guarantee the employee his or her choice of the use of that 
extra time.
  I like to refer to the bill as the repeal of Saturday and Sunday. You 
know under the Fair Labor Standards Act we had the guarantee that 
people could only be worked 40 hours a week. That meant you freed up 
Saturday and Sunday to be with the family. Long ago, when the Fair 
Labor Standards Act was passed, we had the feeling about families first 
and they ought to have time to be with their families to enjoy the 
family situation. If you have an employer that is going to require 
overtime work and not have to pay wages in time and a half and have the 
option of giving time and a half time off at his, the employer's, 
choice, this is not flexibility for the worker at all. In my committee 
we tried to make it more flexible, more at the option, more at the 
choice of the employee, but each time we offered those amendments they 
were struck down.
  Consider yourself as an employee being asked by your employer to stay 
late, work Saturdays and Sundays because there is a job order that has 
to go out, the business is in great jeopardy if the schedule is not 
met. There is no way that you would turn down your employer. You would 
work the extra hours.

                              {time}  1600

  You would work the extra hours. You would have to be away from your 
family the extra hours. That is not flexible time. That is working for 
no compensation at all, because the offer is work overtime and at some 
point later you will get time and a half off at the option of the 
employer. That is not fair.
  If it is truly family first, family flexible, then the employee ought 
to be able to say, well, I want to take my time and a half next week, 
because I want to be with my children over their Easter break. There 
should not be any allowance on the part of the employer to say, no, I 
have to decide for comp time at a later point.
  Under the bill, 260 hours of compensatory time can be saved, it can 
be put aside for each worker. That is a total of 160 hours of work 
without pay, and

[[Page H1035]]

time and a half of that 80 hours would be the time and a half factor 
accumulation of 240 hours that you cannot decide when you are going to 
take, and the employer will have 12 months in which to decide when to 
give it to you. That is not flexible time. That is a diminution of 
quality time with your family, that is working without compensation for 
a promise of compensatory time off 12 months hence.
  The tragedy also is that for many workers, overtime compensation at 
time and a half is what they depend on to be able to pay for the 
expenses and make ends meet. So to have a bill that will take this away 
would be truly a hurtful kind of legislation.
  The problems with comp time also go to the whole bankruptcy issue. 
Compensatory time off is not wages, and therefore it does not go into 
the computation of Social Security benefit time earned. And if the 
company goes bankrupt because the company truly was in distress, and 
files bankruptcy, as an employee owed compensatory time, not wages, you 
will not get any priority payment whatsoever.
  This is a bill fraught with a great deal of potential harm and damage 
to working families, and does not meet, absolutely does not meet, the 
promise of flex time and family first, which the Republicans are 
touting.
  As a worker I want to have my Saturdays and Sundays off, and if I am 
required to work either an extra 2 hours or so during the week or on 
weekends, I want to have the absolute right to decide whether I want it 
in wages or whether I am willing to take it as compensatory time off, 
and the time off should be at my option.
  If the bill can be drafted to make those assurances, I am sure that 
most of us will find a happy circumstance in joining with the 
Republicans. But as I see it, the misfortune of so many workers under 
this legislation would be forced employment, no wages, and compensatory 
time off at the will of the employer after a 12-month period.
  That I think is unfair, unjustified, and I do not want to see the 
Fair Labor Standards Act protection of workers' 40-hour week, and time 
and a half compensation, which is attributable to Social Security 
credits and to bankruptcy protections and all other means for 
determining benefits, being jeopardized under a comp time concept.
  So this debate this week should be very, very lively, and I look 
forward to the minority side having an opportunity to debate it and to 
advance our objections to this proposal.

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