[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 54 (Wednesday, April 30, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H2075-H2081]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




            BIPARTISAN COOPERATION IN THE AREA OF EDUCATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Barrett of Nebraska). Under the 
Speaker's announced policy of January 7, 1997, the gentleman from New 
York [Mr. Owens] is recognized for 60 minutes.
  Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, first I would like to applaud the fact that 
we have been discussing education now for more than 2 hours and that 
both parties have chosen to talk about education tonight. It is an 
indication of the kind of priority that we have set here in Washington 
on education, both parties.
  As I said earlier this afternoon, we are in a situation now where 
something wonderful is going to happen in the 105th Congress as a 
result of the bipartisan cooperation, which I think is very sincere and 
very real. We have a problem, however, that there are people holding on 
to the past, the recent past, the past of the 104th Congress. They 
really understand that there is a new environment for the discussion of 
education issues as a new political environment, and they discovered 
that political environment last year during the 104th Congress.
  The Contract With America made an onslaught on Federal participation 
in education. The Contract With America came forward and proposed to 
eliminate, eradicate, the Department of Education. They proposed to cut 
school lunches, they proposed to cut Head Start, they proposed to cut 
Title I.
  I do not want to dwell too much on that unfortunate, very 
uncomfortable situation of the 104th Congress, but it is important to 
set all discussion within the context of the great triumph accomplished 
by the common sense of the American people. The common sense of the 
voters triumphed over all of the proposals of the Republican majority 
for education, the proposals that would have rolled us backwards. They 
even proposed a total of cuts that would have amounted to about $4 
billion at the beginning of the 104th Congress. The Republican majority 
made those proposals and moved that way; it shut down the government. 
Let us not forget that the government was shut down because the 
President and the White House refused to go along with drastic extreme 
proposals for cuts in areas like education.

                              {time}  1845

  Let me just conclude this recapitulation of the 104th Congress by 
saying that I want to pay tribute to and give credit to those leaders 
in the Republican majority who decided to turn it all around. They did 
a 360 degree turn. They listened to the common sense being expressed by 
the American people. They listened to the voters. They listened.
  They watched the polls which showed that the American voters ranked 
education as a high priority, and they have consistently been doing so 
for some time. They listened and at the last minute, faced with the 
possibility that their negative positions on education might very much 
impact on their reelection possibilities, they did a 360 degree 
turnaround. I applaud the fact that they were not so ideologically 
entrenched, so philosophically dogmatic that they could not make the 
turn. Given the necessity of getting reelected, they decided to make 
the turn.
  I applaud the fact that the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. 
Goodling], chairman of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, 
who is a former school principal, teacher, school superintendent, been 
around a long time, been on the Committee on Education and the 
Workforce for a long time, he was there with his insight, his 
experience, his wisdom. So when the turnaround took place, the chairman 
can tell them where to intelligently make the changes.
  The turnaround, which was a 360 degree turnaround, instead of cutting 
education by $4 billion, they increased

[[Page H2076]]

education by $4 billion, and the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. 
Goodling] helped to guide them in making those increases in Head Start, 
in title I, in Pell grants. You name it, the positive increases in 
education were made, and I applaud the majority for responding to the 
common sense of the American people.
  Given the fact that the common sense of the American people has been 
discovered as a reality politically, we can expect no one in any 
leadership position in either party, certainly not in the Republican 
Party which saw the folly of their ways, to openly be against 
improvements in public education. They would not openly attack the 
effort to improve education.
  What we can expect, though, and have to be prepared for, and it may 
very much slow down the effort, confuse the effort, is guerrilla 
warfare, ambushes, Trojan horses, people who pretend that they care 
about education coming into the walls, into the compound and 
sabotaging. People who say they care about education, but they think, 
or they propose that the Federal Government not get involved. Federal 
Government involvement is minuscule even at the height of involvement, 
even if we follow the President's proposals, and the President has made 
a extensive approach here. The President does propose that we not play 
around with education.
  Mr. Speaker, this is a call for action for American education of the 
21st century. It covers education from early childhood to lifelong 
learning, right through graduate school, Pell grants, and undergraduate 
school. It is comprehensive. It talks about construction, it talks 
about standards in the classroom, telecommunications. It is a 
comprehensive approach. Certainly President Clinton has earned the 
title of education President merely for making proposals.
  It is for us, the Members of the legislature, the Members of 
Congress, the House and the Senate, to follow through on these 
proposals and not to sabotage them, not to confuse the situation with 
misinformation or disinformation such as some of which we have heard in 
the previous hour. There are people who say that we should not go 
forward with Federal involvement because the Federal Government has too 
many programs, seven hundred programs.
  Well, Mr. Speaker, I am in favor of streamlining and improving 
Federal involvement in education, but I will not take the irrational 
position that the number of programs is somehow a barometer of whether 
the programs are effective or efficient. If we did that, we would shut 
down half of the Defense Department.
  The Defense Department has far more than 700 programs or 700 weapons 
systems. If we look at the defense budget and really go through it, 
there is probably nothing in the world that in some manner is not in 
the defense budget, where they do not approach some problem of human 
concern in the defense budget. They approach reading and counseling, a 
whole lot of other things other than weapons systems. And then they 
have numerous weapons systems, which if we were into the fallacy of 
measuring effectiveness and efficiency by numbers, we would say shut 
down some of these weapons systems, because automatically to have too 
many is to have an ineffective defense.
  Mr. Speaker, that is an irrational approach. If we are going to 
streamline the way the Federal Government approaches education, let us 
not begin by making irrational proposals about the number is too great 
and therefore we should wage war on the numbers.
  What has happened with that irrational approach is that small has 
become evil and big has been too big to contain. So a lot of small 
programs that were very meaningful and very efficient and effective 
were cut out, and big programs were left, just because the size was so 
great that the people who wanted to wage war on a number of programs 
did not bother to touch them.
  Some small programs related to libraries, related to foreign 
language, literature and libraries, made a lot of sense. They had 
networks that cut across all the libraries of the country, and for a 
very tiny amount of money we were building up the inventory of books in 
foreign languages, which was significant. That was cut out, so small 
that it was deemed one of those programs, automatically, if they are 
that small and we have too many programs and numbers mean so much in 
view of education, then automatically let the small programs go. That 
is not a rational approach.
  I hope as we go forward in the spirit of bipartisan cooperation we 
will cease using these kinds of irrational barometers and measurements 
and that we be honest about, let us evaluate each program, let us 
evaluate each approach on the basis of what works. The previous 
speakers talked about what works, what really works. Let us take that 
criteria and talk about what really works.
  Mr. Speaker, we are going to have a hearing I understand next week in 
New York City, and the discussion is about what works. That committee 
will have a discussion of a program proposed by the mayor of New York 
City. Mayor Giuliani has gone out to get parochial and private schools 
to accept children from public schools as a result of the overcrowding 
in public schools that took place, that was highlighted. It has been 
there for some time, but it was highlighted last fall when we had 
91,000 children in New York City who did not have a place to sit in 
school on opening day. To what degree that exists right now, I cannot 
tell you. We have been trying to find out. And there is a wall of 
obscurity that has been deliberately promulgated which prevents us from 
really knowing, have they solved the problem of overcrowding? Did they 
move children around to empty schools or schools that have less than 
capacity? How did they solve the problem of 91,000 children in school 
on opening day not having a place to sit? How did they solve the 
problem? We still do not know.

  What we do know is the mayor took the initiative and said, I will 
find places for 1,000 children in parochial and private schools; I will 
raise the money from private sources.
  So every day in the paper we have new articles about the 1,000 
children, the fact that the corporations and the private sector have 
come forward and provided the tuition money, the fact that they have a 
lottery, the number of children that the parents have applied to put 
their children in the program, and the last count was close to 20,000. 
They have 1,000 slots. Close to 20,000 have applied, so they are going 
to have a computerized lottery system to select. All of this is very 
exciting, and I congratulate the mayor for doing something concrete 
about a problem.
  Mr. Speaker, we are going to help place 1,000 youngsters. The only 
question that we have to ask is, what happens to the other 90,000? 
There are 90,000 youngsters that we still have not placed. The 1,000, 
we hope that they will find secure places in the parochial and private 
schools. And we want to express our thanks to the private entrepreneurs 
and various people who put up the money to pay the tuition. We want to 
congratulate the parents who were lucky in the lottery; 1,000 out of 
20,000, and the number may still be drawn. I do not know when the 
cutoff point was. In that lottery, though, we will have 19,000 losers. 
But we congratulate and bless and wish the best of luck to those 1,000 
who do go forward.
  This is a good idea. Private industry, let us do more, let us place 
more children. Mr. Speaker, there are a few questions that we can ask 
to show that this is not the answer to the problem. New York City has 1 
million students; 91,000 had no place to sit as of last September. How 
do we solve the problem? Do they have the capacity in the parochial 
schools to take all 90,000? I do not think so. Are we going to be able 
to raise the tuition for all 91,000? Is the private sector that 
generous? Are we going to get the money for 91,000? I do not think so.
  I do not think that is the solution to the problem. The solution to 
the problem lies in a plan to rebuild and renovate and build new 
schools in New York City, the kind of plan that was proposed by the 
previous chancellor of the New York City school system. We do not have 
a superintendent; because we are so big, we have a chancellor. The 
chancellor presides over 32 community school districts in New York 
City.
  The chancellor of the last system proposed a plan over, I think, 5 or 
7 years to renovate, rebuild, build new schools. The present mayor ran 
him

[[Page H2077]]

out of town, ridiculed him and made all kinds of roadblocks. So, the 
man with the plan to take care of the problem was run out of town.
  The solution now becomes, instead, placing children in private and 
parochial schools, and we are way behind if all we can do is place 
1,000 of the 91,000.
  So we have to be careful. In the present atmosphere, everybody wants 
to jump on the bandwagon. The voters have spoken. Education is a 
priority issue. The voters have awakened and they want to say: Well, 
Mr. Speaker, we spent the money necessary for defense, we spent the 
money to contain the evil empire, billions and billions. We went from a 
horse and buggy Defense Department after World War I to a multibillion-
dollar Defense Department before the end of the Cold War.
  We were spending money on a scale which is impossible almost for most 
voters to comprehend. Mr. Speaker, $3.5 billion for an aircraft is 
beyond the comprehension of most people; $2 billion for a submarine, 
beyond the comprehension. We take the cost of one submarine, and we can 
solve the problem of New York City for the next 20 years of buildings.
  We can do a great deal with $2 billion in terms of construction, 
renovation, taking care of asbestos problems in some schools, lead 
poisoning problems in some other schools, boilers that still burn coal. 
We have one-third of the city schools almost that still burn coal, 
polluting the environment and contributing to the high asthma rate in 
New York City. A large number of young people have asthma, larger than 
most big cities.
  So be careful, beware. The Trojan horses are within the walls. They 
say that they are in favor of improving education; they say that they 
want to support the effort to revitalize and guarantee that every young 
person in America has a decent school, but the old attitudes that 
existed in the 104th Congress are still underneath the surface. There 
is an underground movement. There are guerrilla actions, there are 
ambushes that are going to take place, and we have to beware.
  Let me just pause for a moment to talk about what it means to have a 
Nation committed to go forward in every way possible to improve our 
education system from the cradle to the grave.

                              {time}  1900

  We are creating a learning society. Before these were kind of loose 
terms thrown around, but we are really creating a learning society. 
President Clinton talks about a learning society, a lifelong learning 
society, where you learn from the time you are a baby all the way to 
the time you die.
  This comprehensive approach dealing with adult literacy and adult 
education, the Call for Action for American Education, understands that 
that is the kind of society we want to create. As we go into the 21st 
century we ought to be able to spend less for defense and less for 
weapons systems, and spend more to guarantee that there is a maximum 
opportunity for every person in America to be all that they can be. 
That is a sentimental, hokey slogan, you say, from the Armed Forces' 
public relations campaign, but it is pretty good. I will accept it.
  Mr. Speaker, let us try to guarantee that the opportunity for every 
American will be there to be all that they can be, to strive for 
excellence in every way, starting with the kid who was in preschool, 
preschool age, through kindergarten, Head Start, right up to high 
school, college. Let us dedicate ourselves to the proposition that in 
this great country of ours, we are going to give every person an 
opportunity to be all they can be.
  One part of this process ought to be to let us glamourize education 
and excellence more. Let us give more credits and more incentives to 
our students to be champions in the arena of education, in the arena of 
academics. We have a few national contests, the Westinghouse Science 
Contest and a few other well-known contests that reach out and embrace 
a small group of youngsters. We need more. We need to have academics 
elevated to the level of sports, so young people fulfill themselves and 
attain some kind of recognition among their peers and among adults by 
participating in activities which improve their minds.
  A healthy body, of course, is a premium. We want to encourage healthy 
bodies. We still have a problem in America with people who do not 
exercise enough. We have a problem of obesity. Exhibition No. 1 is 
standing here. We do not want to denigrate sports, we do not want to 
denigrate physical activity, but we do want to exalt academic activity, 
intellectual activity.
  I am here to pay tribute to a project, one of these 700-some projects 
in Federal education that was talked about before. I want to pay 
tribute to that for exalting the academic achievements of students. It 
is called ``We the People * * * The Citizen and the Constitution.'' 
``We the People * * * The Citizen and the Constitution'' is a national 
competition that is organized to encourage young people to learn more 
about our Constitution and our Government and how it works.
  This was initiated, by the way, during the celebration of the 
centennial; not the centennial, the 20th anniversary of the 
bicentennial--the 200th anniversary of the Constitution. It was one of 
the activities initiated. Now it is continued by the Center for Civic 
Education.
  The Center for Civic Education is part of the operation of one of our 
education centers funded by the Federal Government. I want to applaud 
them and congratulate them for this. They were not always involved. 
This started out as an ad hoc sort of thing just for the celebration of 
the Bicentennial. Now it has been institutionalized. I want to 
congratulate the Center for Civic Education for carrying it forward.
  They have now been doing this for quite a long time. I do not 
remember whether it is 10 years or more. Each year in each State, or 
first in each locality--I will use New York City as an example, New 
York City has a competition among the schools. Other areas of the State 
have competitions. The winners of those competitions go to some central 
place in the State and they compete for the State championship. This 
happens all over the country, in all 50 States. The State champions 
then are invited to Washington in the spring, and they compete among 
themselves for the national championship.
  The competition is all about who knows the Constitution, the 
Government, and its operations the best. What they do here, let me just 
read some background. The top high schools or the winners in the 
country come here and they participate in national finals on the 
Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and more than 1,250 outstanding 
high school students from 50 States came this spring. There were 50 
States and the District of Columbia to participate.
  This has been going on for some time now. I think we have had the 
participation of something like 24 million students totally, at the 
local level as well as at the national level; in every locality, every 
State, they get a lot of participation.
  This year, of course, they came on April 25 and 26, and after 2 days 
of intense examination of their knowledge of the Constitution the field 
was reduced from 51 teams to 10 teams, the top 10 teams. The first two 
rounds of competitive hearings were held April 26 and 27, at the J.W. 
Marriott Hotel here in Washington, and the combined scores of each team 
determined the 10 teams to compete Monday in the championship round on 
Capitol Hill. They were right here a few days ago, Monday, in this 
Capitol, in the Rayburn Building, competing for the final championship, 
10 different teams.
  In the competitions, students demonstrate their knowledge of the 
Constitution and Bill of Rights before simulated congressional 
committees composed of constitutional scholars, lawyers, journalists, 
and government leaders. Students compete as classes after completing a 
comprehensive course of study on the Constitution to qualify for the 
competition. The national finalists had won congressional district and 
State competitions in order to advance to this point. Then after the 
day's competition here on Capitol Hill they announced the winners last 
Monday night.
  I want to pay tribute to the winners of the contest. First I will pay 
tribute to the top 10 schools. This is the kind of activity that you 
will not get on television. The championship games are broadcast for 
college and at the local levels you have championship games broadcast 
for high schools and sports.

[[Page H2078]]

 Students who are good in sports always get attention. They get 
trophies, and there is a trophy case in every high school. We would 
like to replicate that and have academic and intellectual activities 
given the same status.
  So I take my hat off, and I want to congratulate the top 10 schools 
in America. Lincoln High School in Portland, OR was one of those top 
10; East Kent High School from Kentwood, MI; Clara Barton High School 
from Brooklyn, NY, in my own district; East High School, from Denver, 
CO; Castle High School from Newburgh, IN; Maine South High School from 
Park Ridge, IL; East Brunswick High School from East Brunswick, NJ; 
Tahoma High School from Kent, WA; Arcadia High School from Arcadia, CA; 
and Our Lady of Lourdes Academy from Miami, FL. These are the top 10 
schools in the competition on ``We the People * * * The Citizen and the 
Constitution,'' a competition designed to test the students' knowledge 
of both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

  So I salute all of the top 10, and I would like to pay additional 
tribute to the top four. The top winner was Our Lady of Lourdes 
Academy, Miami, FL. They came in first this year, first place. The 
second winner was Arcadia High School from Arcadia, CA. 
Congratulations, Arcadia. Congratulations, Our Lady of Lourdes.
  Then No. 3 was Tahoma High School of Kent, WA. Congratulations to 
Tahoma High School. No. 4 was Clara Barton High School of Brooklyn, NY, 
from the 11th Congressional District. I want to congratulate the 
members of the team from Clara Barton High School in my district in 
Brooklyn. My hat goes off to them. This is the second time they came in 
fourth in the contest. This is, I think, the sixth time that they have 
made it to the national finals as State champions, so something great 
is going on at Clara Barton High School.
  I want to congratulate the students who participated. This was one of 
the largest classes. The rules require that the participants in this 
contest be a whole class, and that the class be under the instructor, 
the coach, for the whole year. So it is a class in social studies or 
history or some related matter that comes as a class.
  What happened at Clara Barton High School this year is that because 
of their past reputation, because they had come and won fourth place 
before, because they had consistently won the State championships, the 
teacher, the coach who heads the class, was inundated with requests to 
get into his class. So we are talking about 40 students, one of the 
largest classes. It was the largest class to come to the contest, all 
40 students.
  New York City has an overcrowded situation, but high school teachers 
do not have to take 40 students. Mr. Casey, Leo Casey, was the teacher, 
Dr. Leo Casey. He agreed to take 40 students because of the 
overwhelming demand to get into his class.
  These students have not been celebrated as sports heroes. They are 
not entertainment celebrities. But the tradition that has been 
established at Clara Barton High School is such that the winning 
tradition in the intellectual academic arena has led to students 
clamoring to get in. So Dr. Casey accepted 40 students, and those 40 
students, that was the largest team here in Washington.
  I want to read the names of the students. I am going to take the time 
to do it because I think this is part of the process of creating an 
environment in America where education is exalted, where academic and 
intellectual activities are raised to a new level, our students are 
inspired and given incentives to strive for excellence. These are 
students who strive for excellence in the area of understanding the 
Bill of Rights and the Constitution.
  They are: Nicole Aljoe, Munira Basir, Letricia Bennett, Michelle 
Bennett, Katherine Bernard, Slahudin Bholai, Dafina Westbrook-Broady, 
Keusha Carrington, Shakira Chang, Calvin Coleman, Dean Douglas, Nirva 
Dube, Iesha Etheridge, Jonathan Ewars, Migdalia Feliberty, Sean Forde, 
Sharkara Godet, Oslen Grant, Moshesh Harris, Rochelin Herold, 
Christopher Hubbard, Sonia Hurble, Tiffany Jefferson, Generva John, 
Anthony Marin, Anisah Miley, Travis Moorer, Calistia Nanton, 
Franchelica Nunez, Damian O'Connor, Ayo Ogun, Emmanuel Onasile, Tamara 
Osbourne, Charlene Palmerm, Carolina Perez, Natalie Pierre, Raquel 
Rivera, Tanisha Simpson, Camille Sinclair, Vysaisha Singh, Vijay 
Sookedo, Sharon St. Hill, Karrien Stone, Naquida Taylor, and Andrea 
Telford.
  These are all students, and I think the Members might have surmised 
from reading the names that they come from very diverse backgrounds. It 
was the most diverse team to appear at the national contest.
  I might point out that in the 11th Congressional District, my 
congressional district, when the census was taken in 1990, 150,000 
people listed themselves as being noncitizens, 150,000 out of a total 
582,000. So I have one of the highest noncitizen populations of all the 
congressional districts. The 150,000 came forward and indicated they 
were not citizens, so they were legal immigrants. I assure the Members, 
the illegal immigrants did not come forward. So we have 150,000 of the 
1990 legal immigrants.
  The diversity of my district is reflected in the names of these 
children. My district has Cambodians, there are Chinese, there are 
Pakistani, there are a whole array of people from all of the islands of 
the Caribbean; we have Haitians. It is a wonderful mixture, a rainbow 
mixture of America in my district.
  Generally, Mr. Speaker, there is an income level that is lower than 
average. Not all of these children are poor, but the great majority 
come from low-income homes who go to Clara Barton High School. I want 
to congratulate them on their magnificent achievement.
  I want to congratulate Mrs. Florence Smith, a former high school 
teacher, who served as the volunteer coordinator for my office. The 
11th Congressional District coordinator is Florence Smith. By the way, 
she resigned, retired from school one year, and the next year she 
became the coordinator for my 11th Congressional District, and she has 
been there since then; about 8 years with Florence Smith, who does not 
receive a penny for her services.
  If Members want to talk about volunteer services in harmony with the 
great conference that was held in Philadelphia this past weekend, here 
is an example of the kind of volunteers that we have in America. People 
who retire and who, in some cases, spend more time in activities after 
retirement than they did when they were working.
  Congratulations to all the people who made it happen. In my 
congressional district, the Clara Barton High School team is sponsored 
not only by my office but by the Central Brooklyn Martin Luther King 
Commission. In fact, the money that was raised to first send this team 
to the capital at Albany was gathered by the Central Brooklyn Martin 
Luther King Commission. Money that has been raised in the past years 
before the funding level went up nationally to get them to Washington, 
the great sponsor and mentors of the Clara Barton High School team have 
been the members of the Central Brooklyn Martin Luther King commission.

                              {time}  1915

  We have some other organizations that have also become sponsors. 
Children's Times is a publication on education. Thomas Jones and his 
wife, Mr. and Mrs. Jones, have been very instrumental in encouraging 
the young people at Clara Barton High School and in raising money to 
make certain that they were able to go to Albany and come to 
Washington.
  So it is a kind of growing group activity. They still have 
difficulties raising funds to get to Washington. I want to call on the 
bar associations of Brooklyn, the bar associations of Manhattan and New 
York, and all the lawyers who know what the Constitution is all about, 
judges' organizations, I would like to call on you.
  Some judges come to practice with the youngsters. They come to my 
office on a Saturday morning about twice a year just before the contest 
and judges come and sit with them, go through the process and coach 
them in terms of how they handle tricky questions in the legal system 
related to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. So it is a group 
enterprise of great magnitude. I congratulate the winners, the 
champions from Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn.
  It is one of those activities that we should see more of. The old-
fashioned

[[Page H2079]]

spelling bees and the science fairs and a number of incentives to have 
children participate more in academic activities which develop their 
minds is an absolute necessity and must go forward.
  Again, this is one of those 700-some Federal programs that have been 
ridiculed by the previous discussion. The Center for Civic Education 
does a great job. And I would not want it to arbitrarily be denied 
funding because it happens to be one of many programs. That is an 
irrational approach. That is an approach taken by people who really 
have not quite come around 100 percent to the understanding of the need 
for education to become America's No. 1 priority.
  Our national security is all tied up with what we do with education. 
Our national security, certainly defense and our defense posture and 
our military services still have a great deal to do with national 
security. I am not denigrating that, but in a world which is more and 
more an economically competitive world, in a world where there is great 
competition for ideas, our No. 1 resource are our people and the 
education of those people must be our No. 1 agenda.
  I congratulate the American voters. The American people understand 
that. They understood it long before the Members of Congress were 
willing to admit it, but now the Members of Congress have been forced 
by the insistence of the electorate to admit that education must be our 
No. 1 priority.
  Political necessity has dictated it. What we have to worry about now 
is a people who are not sincere who, because of political necessity, 
they give lip service to their support for education. We have to worry 
about the Potemkin village effect. Does anybody know what a Potemkin 
village is?
  There was a general named Potemkin in Russia who took Catherine the 
Great, who was his empress, on a tour to show her how magnificent a 
village that he was in charge of was; and in that village they had 
fronts. The houses were beautiful, but they had nothing behind them. 
They were all linked together. So Catherine the Great could not see 
behind them. And Potemkin's village was a beautiful village, but it was 
nothing but facades.
  The danger is that there are some people that would want us to go to 
the American people with a Potemkin village in terms of educational 
improvement. They are satisfied to just get the headlines, make it 
appear that we have gone forward, but really not do the job.
  It is a big job that we face. It is a big undertaking. And unless you 
are willing to follow the leadership of the President and take a 
comprehensive approach, comprehensive, a call for action for American 
education, this is a comprehensive approach. It starts with preschool 
education. It goes to Head Start.
  Preschool education and Head Start have been given a great 
intellectual and philosophical boost by the recent conference that was 
held at the White House on early childhood education and learning. 
Several magazines have run some articles on the brain of young 
children, how the brain develops.
  It seems now that there are no detractors. And nobody opposes, nobody 
questions the theory now that the brain of a young child is the most 
valuable thing on Earth. It has potential that has seldom been tapped. 
They can learn so much more than we teach them. They can be developed 
in so many more constructive ways than we know. We should focus maximum 
attention on what happens to young children.
  The brain is affected by how often they are squeezed, by how often 
they are cuddled. The brain is affected. The brain is affected by 
whether they are yelled at or whispered to. The brain is affected by 
the number of times their cries do not get a response. The brain is 
affected by the way you hold their hands and encourage them to grip the 
hand. It is affected by the way you move to help their eyesight 
develop. These are things that all the scientists agree on that great 
things happen to the brain just by the proper nurturing.
  Recently we had scientists that affirm that this is happening 
positively. Recently we had several studies that show what happens if 
it is negative, if you do not take care of children when they are very 
young, what the results are.
  The Romanian children that came from the Romanian orphanages have 
been cited several times in several studies from some of the Soviet and 
other Middle Eastern orphans. People saw these beautiful little 
children who had no mothers and fathers. They were being kept in pens 
and being thrown into big rooms where the adults only came around to 
feed them. And they were physically beautiful children and needing some 
help and attention in the hearts of many American parents who did not 
have children, and some who had children, who wanted to help so they 
added some of these children. They have gone and adopted children.
  We had a heart-breaking example on television, I think, last night a 
news story about a family that adopted two Russian youngsters, 
fraternal twins, and what that family went through as a result of the 
damage that those young people had already suffered. You could not 
reverse it. Their brains had been affected in ways that could not be 
changed. So they are very anti-social. They have been ignored so long 
until they can form no attachments to human beings. They really are 
very suspicious, very hostile. They have things that they do that are 
incomprehensible.
  The mother and the father tried for a long time. The father then died 
from pancreatic cancer, and now the mother just is overwhelmed. She 
cannot get help anywhere. She tried to place them in a residential 
school and found that the school saw them as being too difficult, they 
could not keep them.
  It is not that she is not trying as hard as possible. It is an almost 
impossible task to raise such children in a normal situation, because 
the scientists have confirmed that your brain actually atrophies, it 
gets smaller, it dries up as a result of in childhood not being treated 
a certain way.

  They have a study where they took some of these children from 
Romania, mainly Romanian, there is a thorough study done on the 
Romanian children, they took them through CAT scans and these various 
devices that can actually look at the brain and they showed the 
diagrams on television where the brain had shrunk and where it was 
irreversible. Certain parts of the brain shrinks, they cannot respond 
normally. They are damaged children.
  On the other hand, there is a percentage that, no matter what 
happened to them, they survive, a small percentage. You might say the 
old argument that people often make, well, I went through poverty, I 
went through despair, but I came out all right. A certain percentage of 
the human race can be classified as almost super people; and no matter 
what group you are looking at, a certain percentage is going to 
overcome whatever conditions you put in front of them, a small 
percentage.
  The overwhelming number of people respond to stimuli, and the brain 
is affected. So that nation which understands the importance of 
handling its young people with the maximum amount of nurturing and 
care; that is, the nation which first commits the most resources to 
young people, will certainly be in a position to not only save a lot of 
money later on in terms of the social dislocations that people who are 
damaged perpetuate, but in terms of the benefits of alive minds capable 
of learning, alive minds that have been expanded and they can absorb 
new information and new changes in technology very rapidly.
  If you treat the minds of the young people a certain way, they have 
those kinds of minds and they have the mental and emotional attitudes, 
which are also constructive. Because people have always responded to 
them in a positive way, they respond to other people in a positive way. 
Their ability to work on teams, their ability to work and relate to 
their peers, all of this is affected.
  We have concrete, scientific evidence which documents this. More 
important than genetic, the old debate of inheritance versus 
conditioning, environment versus the inheritance, that old debate can 
be put to rest. The inheritance does count. The genes you get do set up 
possibilities.
  The greatest problem is in the way those genes are handled in the 
early years of life. You can take some weak genes and improve on them, 
actually, if children are nurtured a certain way and treated in a 
certain way. You can take some beautiful genes, strongest genes, and 
you can destroy them. They will atrophy, they will shrink, dry up

[[Page H2080]]

in terms of the brain, and you will have a set of behaviors that has 
nothing to do with the genetics that they inherit, the condition is 
there.
  So what we put into Head Start, the dollars we spent for Head Start 
are the dollars we could get the greatest benefit from. If Head Start 
programs are going to degenerate and if we are going to put them on 
tight funding and say, yes, we subscribe to the principle that early 
childhood education ought to be supported, but we will not appropriate 
money so you can really have teachers who know, child-care specialists 
who know how to handle children and you just put them out there and you 
get welfare recipients, as has been proposed in some cities, you take 
people who are on welfare and you force them to go to work in child-
care centers. Nothing could be worse than to have a person taking care 
of children who does not want to take care of them. Nothing could be 
worse than to have a person taking care of children who will be hostile 
to them because they feel they are being forced to do something they do 
not want to do.
  So do not put people who are on welfare to work in child-care centers 
unless they want to go and receive training as to how to raise 
children, unless they are mothers already that have gone through the 
process already and understand how to nurture the children. And do not 
do it in a happenstance way so that maybe they know it, maybe they do 
not.
  It pays to screen the people who are taking care of children in day-
care offices and Head Start, anywhere else. Let us not try to solve our 
welfare jobs problem by using children as unfortunate guinea pigs. That 
is one lesson we ought to learn. Education funding for early childhood, 
education for Head Start should be adequate funding.
  What is adequate funding? You can determine whether or not the 
ingredients are there by looking at the situation and setting up a set 
of rules that either the place is safe or it is not safe. The day-care 
center or the Head Start center, either the place is conducive to 
learning, with enough light, enough air, or it is not. There are 
standards that can determine what is adequate.
  When it comes to personnel, you can determine whether the person has 
experience, training and they are able to deal with the job that they 
are assigned to do with respect to children. The dietician in the 
kitchen, they can determine whether they really know what they are 
doing, are they going to put too much salt in the food. All these 
things are doable. We can do them, but we have to have adequate funding 
to guarantee that they get done.
  What I am saying is that the Potemkin village approach to say we are 
for education, we are for early childhood education, but say what is 
too much money, Head Start should not spend too much money, what is so 
much money? Let us determine what is adequate.
  Which brings me to my final discussion for today. If you have 
bipartisan cooperation here in the House and they really want to go 
forward to improve education in America, then there is a set of 
standards which must be reexamined. I invite the voters, the citizens 
who are listening, to apply their common sense.
  I spoke to a group in Cleveland called PS-21, a group of people who 
are dedicated to the proposition they want to have the most improved 
schools in University Heights, Cleveland Heights, they want to have the 
best possible schools. One of the ways that they are trying to 
accomplish this is to make sure that local citizens, leaders, teachers, 
people concerned about education and parents have a maximum discussion 
of what it takes to make good schools.

                              {time}  1930

  A series of forums that they have had last year and this year, they 
are going to go all the way to the year 2000 because they are getting 
ready, they are remolding their schools to be the best possible schools 
as they go into the 21 century. So that is why they call it PS 21.
  We had a good discussion, and I talked to them about the micro level, 
at the citizens level, out there in the schools, the PTA's, people on 
the firing line, teachers. We have to have this kind of dialoguing to 
make certain we get the maximum benefits from what is happening at the 
macro level. The macro level is what President Clinton is proposing. 
The macro level are Federal programs. Macro level is what Congress will 
do when it acts on President Clinton's proposal.
  The macro level involves such things as the vote that is going to be 
taken next week on the discount to schools for telecommunications 
services. The Federal Communications Commission acting on a mandate 
given to them by Congress will vote on a proposal to provide 
telecommunications services to schools and libraries across the country 
at a discount rate of between 20 percent and 90 percent. The poorest 
schools will get up to 90 percent discount on telecommunications 
services, and any school in the merit system will get at least a 20 
percent discount on telecommunications services.
  And by telecommunication services, I mean a whole range of things, 
including telephones. Most of our schools in New York do not have but a 
few telephones because they are charged the business rate for 
telephones. If telephones are put into this universal fund for 
telecommunications that is now going to be voted on by the FCC, then we 
will at least have more telephones in schools. But online services for 
computers, computer hardware, the wiring of the school, all of these 
things can be paid for at this discount rate that the 
telecommunications industries will have to pay for.
  They have a fund called a universal fund that the money goes into, 
and at this point it is a $2.5 billion fund per year, $2.5 billion per 
year indefinitely. It is not a short-term proposition. So this is a 
macro activity we ought to all understand, to relate to this macro 
activity. At the local level you have to have schools that can be 
wired.
  If a school has an asbestos problem in New York, you cannot even get 
to the first step and take advantage of the universal fund that is 
going to be established by the Federal Communications Commission. We 
had Net Day across the country, various States, localities. We have Net 
Day. We had another Net Day episode in New York last week, and on Net 
Day volunteers go to help wire schools. For Net Day, the standard is 
that you should wire five classrooms and the school library, and you 
have completed a Net Day responsibility.
  Well, Net Day in New York has been a gross failure. You have 1,000 
schools and only a handful have been wired because the asbestos problem 
is there. You cannot bore holes and confront the fact that there is 
asbestos that must be taken care of. So at the micro level, unless we 
find a way to solve the problem of asbestos, we will not be able to 
take advantage of the macro programs. We will not be able to get part 
of that universal fund.
  The President has proposed and we have in effect the literacy 
challenge fund. We have the technology learning grant program. These 
are already under way. We cannot take advantage of those in the schools 
that do not have the iniative to deal with the local problems that 
allow them to link up with these problems. That is why it becomes so 
important to deal with construction before you deal with anything else.
  They cannot go into the 21st century and take advantage of the 
educational technology that is being developed. Computerized learning, 
videos, all kinds of things are being developed to supplement the 
teacher in the classroom. There is no substitute for the teacher in the 
classroom, by the way. Recent studies have shown that no matter what 
you do, the quality of the teacher in the classroom determines whether 
or not children will get an adequate education or superior education.
  So the quality of the teacher we have to take as one of the 
constants. But around that they can have their performance enhanced. 
Teachers can do so much better no matter what kind of teacher they are 
if they have enhancement and can use the Internet, the videos, the 
educational television, computerized learning. All that is available 
and we should make a maximum opportunity to use it.
  Mr. Speaker, we need what we call opportunity-to-learn standards in 
our great discussion of how to improve education in America. We need to 
focus on opportunity-to-learn standards. We know about the standards 
for curriculums. The President has pushed that and I agree with 
curriculum standards.

[[Page H2081]]

 We know about testing standards where we are going to have tests that 
are similar enough from one State to another to be able to compare the 
performance of States, schools within States and performance of States 
with each other, and have some idea of what is happening in America 
overall with respect to adequate and excellent education. What the set 
of standards that we have not agreed on, we did agree on, and it was 
reversed. And the great horror story of the 104th Congress, they turned 
around everything except one, in one area they went backwards at a 
rapid rate.
  We had opportunity-to-learn standards written into the legislation. 
The Goals 2000 Educate America Act had three sets of standards. They 
are the curriculum standards. They had the testing standards. And 
through a long debate, we members of the Education Committee had gotten 
the opportunity-to-learn standards.
  Opportunity-to-learn standards are exactly what they say. If you are 
going to have a curriculum that is a great curriculum, if you are going 
to have testing, you are testing the children to see if they measure up 
and can learn that curriculum, one thing else has to happen. You have 
to have a guarantee that the students have an opportunity to learn by 
seeing to it that they have the right books so that they can measure up 
to the standards, pass tests, guarantee that they have a safe place to 
study, a safe place to learn.
  That is part of the opportunity to learn. Guarantee that they have 
qualified teachers, people who know what they are doing. At one point 
we had a survey in New York City and found that two-thirds of the 
teachers who were teaching math and science in public schools in New 
York City had not majored in math and science in college. In junior 
high school, if you have teachers teaching math and science who did not 
major in science in college, you have a problem. Opportunity-to-learn 
standards would say that the standard is that no State, no locality 
should permit a situation where children do not have an opportunity to 
learn because the teachers are not qualified.
  Opportunity to learn means that, if you are going to teach science, 
the school ought to have a science laboratory. It means that the 
science laboratory ought to have adequate supplies. Opportunity to 
learn means that you have books in the library which enhance the 
textbooks which are not 30 years old.

  We have a problem with history books, social studies books being 30 
years old in some of the libraries in New York City. So opportunity to 
learn and the agreement to accept opportunity-to-learn standards is one 
of those barometers by which we can measure whether people are sincere 
about improving education in America. One of those barometers to flesh 
out the Trojan horses and the underground operatives and the people 
trying to ambush the effort is to ask them, how do you feel about 
opportunity to learn?
  One of the first tests of opportunity-to-learn standards is, will you 
support the President's construction initiatives because at least every 
child should be in a building that is safe, in a building that is warm. 
In a building that does not burn coal and put pollutants in the air for 
children to breathe to get contaminated with all kinds of harmful 
substances. A building that is safe, a building that has decent 
lighting, a building that has decent ventilation, a building that is 
adequate so that you do not have what is happening in New York City. 
Again, schools will tell you because the board of education and the 
bureaucrats have told them that they do not have an overcrowding 
problem. We had a little test, the Central Brooklyn Martin Luther King 
Commission, which is my advisory committee on education, they sent 
people to school to see if they have solved their overcrowding problem.
  Principals said, we have no problem, slightly over capacity. They 
were lying. The next question I told them to ask was, how many lunch 
periods do you have? How many lunch periods do you have? That is a 
telltale sign of an overcrowded school. We have numerous schools that 
have three lunch periods. Children start eating at 10:30. They do not 
stop until 2:30.
  We have discovered one school that has five lunch periods. I said, if 
you have five lunch periods, when does the first group eat lunch? At 
9:45. Is it not child abuse to make a child eat lunch at 9:45? Is there 
not something wrong nutritionally, physiologically with making a child 
eat lunch at 9:45 in the morning?
  The principal who told me this has been living with it so long she 
was not embarrassed. She said, we let them have a snack later on if 
they get hungry. The last group that eats, we let them have a snack in 
the morning because they get hungry before we finally get to them. Five 
lunch periods, from 9:45 up to nearly 2, they are eating in relay 
teams. It is overcrowded. The capacity has been exceeded.
  You should not do that to children. No matter what they do to lie 
about the statistics and tell us, once we asked the question, how many 
lunch periods do you have, we have a telltale sign it is overcrowded.
  We can go around and see with our own eyes that children have classes 
in storerooms, sometimes in the hallway, two or three classes are in 
the auditorium. We can see that the overcrowding is there, even when 
the bureaucrats do not admit it.
  We still have the problem, 91,000 children did not have a seat in New 
York City when school started last fall, and large numbers still do not 
have seats and nobody is willing to admit it. So opportunity to learn 
means that the construction initiative of President Clinton should go 
forward because at schools like the schools in New York and the schools 
in numerous other cities that are overcrowded, that do have unsafe 
environments, lead poisoning, asbestos, all kinds of problems which 
affect the health of children. Those schools are transformed into the 
best schools that America can make.
  The President is only proposing a small program that will set off the 
process, stimulate the State to put in money, stimulate the localities 
to spend money. And we must understand that. The great emergency for 
opportunity to learn is the construction of school buildings in our 
inner cities.
  The $5 billion fund that the President is proposing should be given. 
The first proportion that they are proposing, up to 50 percent, I 
understand there were a lot of objections from Members of Congress. 
Members of Congress, I plead to them to open their eyes and look at the 
evidence.
  The greatest problem is now in the inner-city communities. Children 
do not have an opportunity to learn because they are denied the basics 
of a decent place to sit, a safe place to sit, and a place free of 
toxic substances and a place which is ventilated properly and lighted 
properly. It is that basic.
  Opportunity to learn means much more. But let us at least start with 
the President's construction initiative. We will follow through. The 
President is proposing training for teachers, suppliers. The President 
is proposing a number of items that become very important.
  The incentive of having young people in elementary, secondary schools 
know that they can go to college, if they apply themselves to their 
studies in elementary and secondary school, that is also important. It 
is a continuum from early childhood, from the cradle and how you handle 
a baby when you pick them up and nuture them all the way to lifelong 
learning of retired people who can still contribute to the society by 
volunteering, by helping to mentor, by trying to improve our society in 
a number of ways.
  In the process, we should also make certain that we build into our 
popular culture, build into our popular culture incentives that 
glamorize academic activities, that glamorize intellectual activities.
  I will close by saluting the Clara Barton High School championship 
team from my district for their performance in the contest to show 
their knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I 
congratulate all the schools and all the youngsters across America who 
are champions in the area of intellectual and academic activities.

                          ____________________