[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.
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