[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 122 (Monday, September 15, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H7266-H7273]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH NEEDED IN EDUCATION REFORM
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 7, 1997, the gentleman from New York [Mr. Owens] is recognized
for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
(Mr. OWENS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his
remarks.)
Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we are already in the process of debating the
Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education appropriation. We have
spent most of last week on that debate, and that debate will continue
tomorrow. I think it is very interesting some of the kinds of
amendments that have been introduced with respect to using funds from
other places to assist various programs in education.
While I am all in favor of increased funding for education, I did not
support amendments that sought to take funds from Health and Human
Services or to take funds from labor programs, programs related to
working people. I think we should take this opportunity that has been
presented to us. Education is now clearly on the minds of a lot of
people, including the decision-makers in the 105th Congress.
We have listened to the common sense of the American people. They
have clearly made education a high priority over a long period of time.
Education as a priority has not gone away. Prior to the last election,
there was a clear, highly visible concern about education which both
parties responded to. We had a sudden increase of $4 billion in funding
for education just before the last elections in 1996, last year. That
was an indication that both parties had gotten the message. They funded
time honored programs, like Head Start got an increase and title I got
an increase, and we had several other increases which were very much
needed.
We are still in a situation where the public is demanding more, and
rightly so, from elected officials at every level for education. They
are demanding more of people at the local level and State level and
here. We have an unprecedented window of opportunity to do something of
great and lasting significance about educational reform in this
country.
We can start our schools on the road to improvement, a road to
improvement which will have a continuum. It will not be a stop-and-
start sort of situation, but it can be a road of steady improvement.
But we cannot do that unless we understand that the window of
opportunity that we have now requires a comprehensive approach to
reform. It requires that we not vulcanize our attempts to improve
education.
We understand that it is good to have so much concern at every level;
all Members of Congress concerned, parents concerned, people in general
concerned about education. That is wonderful.
It is also a fact of life that everybody in America who is an adult
considers himself to be an expert in education. Everybody has their own
set of pet theories about how education can be improved and what should
be done. Everybody has their own theory and approach to instructions on
how to raise kids and how to handle young people in the school system.
Lots and lots of people are involved in the process, and that is
good. We should not try to turn that off. It is good that millions and
millions of people care about education and they care about school
reform.
{time} 1215
I would like to, however, caution those of us who are in power to
understand that although it is good to have everybody involved in the
process, there is a danger that any one person who thinks he has the
truth can do a great deal of harm if he also has a lot of power. Those
who are concerned, who have a lot of power, who want to put their pet
theories into practice can wreck the process, or certainly throw it off
track for a long time.
Let me just use the story that we have heard repeated often about the
blind men who were describing the elephant. Each blind man who felt a
part of the elephant, the tail, the trunk, the leg, the body, each
blind man who felt a part of the elephant proceeded to describe the
elephant, and they felt they had the true situation, the true
perception of the elephant. They described the elephant in terms of the
parts they felt. They were blind, however. We cannot blame them. They
were not lying. They were sincere. They really believed that, according
to what they felt, they had a good description of the truth of what an
elephant is.
We have millions of blind men and women, I am one, blind in different
degrees, who are involved in trying to reform education and improve
education. We should stop and think of ourselves as blind people
groping to try to come to some kind of ongoing, continual improvement
of education in America and have a little more humility. The blind men
should understand that you cannot hand down the truth here, that
education and reform, improving our schools, is as complicated as
nuclear physics. It is more complicated than building an atom bomb or
building a hydrogen bomb. It is more complicated
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than putting a shuttle in orbit. It is more complicated than building a
space station, putting a rover on the surface of the moon or Mars.
These things are very difficult, we know, but they are all in the realm
of the physical sciences, and in physical science, properties, things
do not move and change and vary in the ways that they do when we are
dealing with human beings.
Education is a human enterprise. It has many different sciences
involved. Education should be respected for being complicated. There
are no simple solutions to the improvement of schools in America. There
is no one solution. There is a need to approach the problem of school
reform on a comprehensive basis and try across the board to deal with
the various problems.
There are problems that will not go away in the area of physical
facilities. We need schools that are able to provide conducive settings
for children to learn. We cannot back away and ignore the fact that the
General Accounting Office says we need about $112 billion to really
revamp the infrastructure of elementary and secondary schools across
America. That includes in some cases we have just got to build new
schools.
There are areas where the large population growth of young people
necessitates the building of new schools. There are areas where the old
schools are just not sufficient, and they have to be replaced. We have
to build new schools there. There are other schools that have to be
drastically renovated. There are other schools that need various
repairs in various degrees.
So $112 billion just to do it with physical facilities. We cannot
ignore that, no matter what we try to do in terms of improvement of
instruction, training of teachers, new forms of governance and
management.
Charter schools are very popular. Charter schools represent a new
form of governance and management of public schools that has a lot of
agreement. Both parties, a lot of people on various sides of the issue
think that charter schools are not a bad idea. But even before you try
to deal with charter schools, the problem of physical facilities is a
major problem. One of the reasons we have so few charter schools
starting up is that they cannot find a place to start. The physical
facility problem stops them, also. So physical facilities cannot be
ignored.
Testing is on the other end of the priorities scale, and I think
testing is important. I think assessment in various forms, testing
standards are very important. Testing is important, and that cannot be
ignored. But you cannot stampede the situation. You cannot insist that
you have to have testing, and testing is the most important thing, and
generate a debate, a long, prolonged logjam or debate, on testing while
you ignore the fact that physical facilities are important.
Training of teachers is important. New materials and technology are
important. We want to wire our schools. We want them to have the best
capability to make use of the Internet, video, computers, et cetera.
All of these things are important, but there are some that in sequence
are more important than others.
You cannot have a computer without a mouse. The mouse is a very
important piece of the computer. Most people have forgotten that it did
not exist 10 years ago. It is a recent addition. Computers existed for
some time before we had the mouse. A mouse is very important. But to
talk about focusing on the mouse and forget about the fact that the
chips, the basis for the computer, the chips had to be perfected first,
if there were no chips there to form the basis of the whole computer
technology, the mouse would be insignificant. To leap to testing, to
emphasize testing over everything else is that kind of absurdity.
We are going to come back to that, but I want to not move into a
detailed discussion of the testing debate without first making the case
for an approach for school reform. We have a window of opportunity.
Stop and think about the fact that the American people can focus on
education more now because there is no more cold war. There is no hot
war going on. There are really no global crises of a magnitude to take
a lot of the time and attention of the leading thinkers of America, to
the leading decisionmakers in Government. We can take time to really
take a long, hard look at education from a lot of different points of
view. That is what the lack of global crises allows us to do.
We have few national emergencies. There is a fire out of control in
California, but I do not know whether it is going to become a national
emergency or not. No earthquakes, no floods, nothing right now is of a
magnitude to require a lot of time and attention. So if we have this
kind of time and attention as a sort of a surplus at this point, then
let us focus on education in a deliberative manner. Let us focus on the
totality of trying to improve education in a deliberative manner. Let
us not bully the process from the bully pulpit of the White House or
from the bully pulpit of the Appropriations Committee.
If the blind men that I described before have power, any one of those
blind men have power, they can force an interpretation of what the
elephant looks like, and we have to buy it for a while. But, of course,
if they do not have the truth, it will only distort things and make a
fool of everybody, because the blind man who had the tail had power,
and he insisted that the elephant looks like a tail of the elephant. He
describes it as a long, stringy thing. We go off for the next few years
trying to deal with elephants as a long, stringy thing, and that is not
the truth.
Education suffers in the same way. If powerful people on the
Committee on Appropriations have their own pet theory and they push it
forward, then they are going to mess up things for a long time to come.
If the President and the White House have their own pet theory and they
push it forward, ignoring how it fits into the totality of the
comprehensive strategy, then we are going to have a mess. We are going
to have some real problems.
I hate to compare education reform and trying to improve our schools
to war, but it is a good analogy in this sense. We do not go off to
fight wars and let each powerful person in Congress or in a State
legislature have his own little pet theory to guide how the war is
fought. We won World War II and we won other wars because we have taken
a comprehensive approach. It is understood that if you are at war, it
takes a total effort. You have to look at manpower recruitment as well
as the materials manufacturing, the tanks and the guns and the bombs.
You have to look at the psychology of the country. You have to raise
the bonds to finance the whole enterprise. You have to have a spy
apparatus as well as the Army, the Navy, the Marines. We understand
that it is a complex operation, and we prepare for it in an across-the-
board, comprehensive way.
Education deserves the same treatment. Let us look at it across the
board. We do not have quite the urgency of war. People are not dying.
There is no threat to our liberties directly. But it is important
enough to take a comprehensive approach, and because of the fact that
the urgency is not a matter of guns and bullets and dying, we can take
a little more time to be more deliberative.
The history of this body, of the House of Representatives and the
Senate, has been that education has been dealt with in the past in a
very deliberative manner. The Committee on Education and the Workforce,
once called the Education and Labor Committee and now called the
Committee on Education and the Workforce, the Education Committee has
been the place where we have had the deliberations on education, and
the bills have developed out of there and been brought to the floor
after they have gone through the committee process.
That has worked very well, in my opinion. I may be prejudiced because
I am a member of the Committee on Education and the Workforce. I have
been on the Committee on Education and the Workforce now for 15 years.
I have seen it change names quite a bit. I have seen it change its form
of operation, also, which is unfortunate. There is less
deliberativeness now. There is more secrecy even on the committee. The
majority does not share with the minority exactly what it is doing. We
get last-minute bills put in front of us, proposals.
That is most unfortunate that the deliberative process is treated
with contempt even at the committee level. Is it any wonder that when
you reach the
[[Page H7268]]
House floor, you have a process which treats the whole Committee on
Education and the Workforce with contempt? You have more important
legislation being proposed through the Committee on Appropriations,
more important decisions being made through the Committee on
Appropriations than we have through the Committee on Education and the
Workforce. That is treating the people on the Committee on Education
and the Workforce and the whole process and the function of the
Committee on Education and the Workforce with great contempt. That is
unfortunate. It started in the last Congress. Now it has reached
proportions where it may generate a major disaster.
I know we are not supposed to talk about the other body, but news is
news. I will read from the Washington Post editorial so that we are not
in a position of breaking the rules and criticizing the other body, but
the Washington Post has an editorial which talks about a wrong move on
education. It really is focusing on the fact that by a 51 to 49
rollcall vote in the other body, it was voted to take all the education
programs and put them into a set of block grants. The Committee on
Appropriations made this proposal; not the Committee on Education and
the Workforce, the Committee on Appropriations. The Senate voted almost
casually.
I am reading a quote from the Washington Post, Monday, September 15,
today's Washington Post. It is called ``Wrong Move on Education.''
The Senate voted almost casually last week in effect to
abolish most of the current forms of Federal aid to
elementary and secondary schools for the year ahead by
merging them into two block grants to school districts. The
51-49 roll call after only perfunctory debate seemed mainly
meant to score a political point--that Republicans, all but
four of whom supported the amendment, favor local control of
the schools, while Democrats, all of whom opposed it, would
have the Federal Government dictate school policy. But the
issue is phony. Democrats no more than Republicans favor
anything like Federal control of the schools, of which there
is scant danger--and the schools deserve better from the
Senate than to be used as political stage props.
The Federal Government pays only a small share of the cost
of elementary and secondary education, about 6 percent.
This is their figure. I think it is not exactly correct. It may be
even less than that. The total Federal involvement in education may be
about 8 percent, and that includes higher education, which has a far
larger percentage of the Federal fund part than the elementary and
secondary education. But let us use the Washington Post figure. Only
about 6 percent.
The rest is State and local. The Federal role thus never
has been to sustain the schools, but to fill gaps and push
mildly in what have seemed to be neglected directions. About
half the Federal money--some $6 billion a year--has been
aimed since the 1960's at providing so-called compensatory
education for lower-income children.
The block grant amendment, by Senator Slade Gorton, would
have the effect of converting this into general aid. The
requirement that the money be spent on poorer students would
be dropped in favor of letting school districts spend it as
they deem appropriate. That's more than just a shift to local
control; it's a shift away from a longstanding sensible
effort to concentrate the limited Federal funds on those in
greatest need. Does Congress really want to reverse that
policy?
Most other Department of Education programs--though not
such popular ones as aid to the disabled--would be bunched in
the second block grant. As in most departments, a pretty good
indication can be made for such bunching. Some programs are
always floating around for which the original rationale was
weak or has faded and that are too small to warrant separate
administration. But that is true of only some, not all, of
those Mr. Gorton would dispatch. Example: The Senate voted
Thursday in favor of a compromise version of the national
testing program the President supports, but in voting for the
block grant, as Education Secretary Riley observed, it then
voted to eliminate the funding for this purpose.
Other special purpose programs in aid of particular groups
or in support of reform likewise would disappear, the
secretary said, including several the President has touted as
evidence of his commitment to education. The President and
Democrats generally have made effective political use of the
education issue in the past few years. Block-granting would
leave them less of a stage from which to do so.
The Gorton amendment would be only for a year, at which
point the appropriations bill to which it was attached would
lapse, and the issue would have to be fought all over again.
That's another reason why, even if mainly for show, it was
the wrong way to do business. Mr. Riley was authorized to say
it was ``unacceptable'' to the administration, meaning
presumably that the President would veto the bill if the
amendment were to survive in conference. He'd be right to do
so.
{time} 1230
That is the end of quote from the Washington Post editorial.
Mr. Speaker, I will submit the entire Washington Post editorial for
the Record.
While we fiddle about national testing, there is a basic crisis being
created by a proposal that we block grant all of the education
programs. The Washington Post has amnesia in one area, and that is they
do not point out the fact that the great debate on Federal involvement
in elementary and secondary education that took place over a number of
years reached the conclusion by deciding that the Federal Government
should enter elementary and secondary education only to come to the aid
of special situations, like impact. If military bases have an impact on
the area, there should be Federal aid. The other place was aid to
disadvantaged students.
The poor, aid to the poor, was a primary thrust of the Federal
intervention, Federal involvement, and the Federal initiatives with
respect to education. The Johnson administration, which led the way for
title I, they made a case on the basis of poverty. The Office of
Education, Research and Improvement, in the charter which establishes
it, talks about improving education, first in the area of disadvantaged
children and children in poverty.
The whole thrust of the Federal Government's involvement in
education, which is primarily a State function and nobody debates that,
the whole thrust has been to help the poorest districts, to help where
it felt it could come to the aid of States and local governments in
trying to deal with a problem that was clearly seen.
We saw it in World War I and World War II when they started
recruiting youngsters for the draft. They saw gross inequities. We saw
it at the time of Sputnik, when the Russians jumped ahead of us in
space technology, and they did it because they had a superior apparatus
in materials of education, which produced not only the general uses at
the top, but the technicians and all the people up and down which are
necessary for a complex society to produce the kind of technology we
have in this space age. We understood that.
So we have had a history of the Federal Government's rather limited
involvement, very limited. People blame the Federal Government for what
is not right with education, but they forget that the Federal
Government's involvement in terms of dollars in all education is no
more than 8 percent. When you include higher education, the heavy
involvement of the Federal Government in college aid now, it is 8 to 10
percent. It has never gone above 10 percent.
If even all of that 10 percent were in local elementary and secondary
education, let us hypothetically say you have the whole 10 percent in
elementary and secondary education, if the whole amount went to local
education, it is still only 10 percent. The other 90 percent comes from
the States and local governments.
The control, if control is followed by dollars, they say if you have
Federal Government involvement, if they are paying part of the money,
if they are paying for it, they are going to call the tune. Their
influence would be, at the greatest, 10 percent. Ninety percent of the
influence and decisionmaking, 90 percent of the power to run our
schools, still rests with the State and local governments.
Let us be reasonable. You cannot control the situation with 10
percent of the funding. We talk about title I and all these other
things that have failed. Well, they were only the icing on the cake,
maybe the raisins in the bread; very, very tiny, but important
elements. We think they are important because they are considered like
the yeast in the bread. They have a vital role. They can be stimulants,
like the catalysts and enzymes in our bodies, that do nothing except
speed up certain operations or make them work properly. Like the oil
which lubricates the machinery, there are a lot of things that can be
done by a small quantity of something which is placed in the right way
and serves the right function. That is the way the Federal Government's
involvement in education has been.
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Maybe too little of it. I am not one of those who fears that there is
too much Federal intervention. I really think personally we should move
toward a 25 percent involvement of funding, that the Federal funding in
local education should go as high as 25 percent in order for us to get
out of the present rut we are in with respect to infrastructure,
materials and teacher training, the new technology.
It is unfortunate that we have these myths that get caught on. They
hold on to these notions that somebody else is to blame, that local
governments have done a bad job, that local school boards have done a
bad job in terms of measuring up to the world standards.
Before Sputnik and the Federal Government got involved in promoting
science and math education, we were way behind. We are in many ways
failing to meet the challenges of the final years of the 20th
century and the 21st century in terms of education, which provides
young people can step out of high school and take the jobs that are
available in the areas of media, computer, and a number of areas where
we have jobs that are going begging because there is nobody qualified
to handle those jobs. That failure is not a Federal Government failure,
it is a local and State failure.
I am not here to lay blame, I am here to call for unity. I would like
to see some unity, Federal, State, local governments, in terms of a
comprehensive, deliberative approach to educational improvement.
Instead of going off on headline grabbing, highly visible ventures
like national testing or uniforms or block grants, which will hand to
the schools a pot of money, and say we do not care how you spend it,
forget about the disadvantaged youngsters that we originally intended
this money for, those kinds of things will wreck the system, instead of
facilitating the construction of a school improvement effort that will
go forward and serve future generations.
I am sure every parent and grandparent is concerned about their child
being able to have first rate schools now, and not to wait.
There is a bright light in terms of when I was the chairman of the
Subcommittee on Select Education with the Office of Education, Research
and Improvement under the jurisdiction of that committee. We did push
for the formation and reorganization of the Office of Education
Research and Improvement, and developed a National Education Research
Policies and Priorities Board. That does exist. I hope they take into
consideration that priorities part. They are not only supposed to set
the research agenda and project that 5 or 10 years ahead of time, but
also supposed to help set priorities. With all due respect to what is
going on now with the National Educational Research Policy and
Priorities Board, I want to appeal to them to understand that the
priority setting is getting out of hand. Other people are setting the
priorities. We need to hear from the National Education Research Policy
and Priorities Board.
This document they produced, the first report called ``Building
Knowledge for a Nation of Learners: A Framework for Educational
Research, 1997,'' talks about what the parameters are and what the
elements are for a good, long dialog and discussion with all facets of
the American Nation of people concerned with education. Everybody is
concerned. Teachers, policy-makers, government people, they want to
have a dialog. They talk about this dialog, and that is good. They put
a great deal of emphasis on teacher training and putting teachers at
the center of the process. That is good and generally agreed upon.
There is no debate between Republicans and Democrats about the role of
teachers in the process or the need for greater teacher training.
The problem with the document is the sense of urgency is not there
and the next deliberation, the next document, the next outreach, the
next initiative by the National Educational Research Policy and
Priorities Board has to take into consideration the fact that we are
moving very rapidly. There is a lot of concern, and we need from them a
greater sense of urgency to help pull in all of these various proposals
that are being made.
All these blind men out here groping for the truth, sincerely, the
blind Republican Party, the blind Democratic Party, the blind members
of the Committee on Appropriations, the Committee on Education and the
Workforce, we all need to take those parts that we can see and feel and
are strongly advocating and put them into a framework for an ongoing
comprehensive reform policy.
Now, that is not an easy order. Education is as complicated as
nuclear physics, as I said. Reform in education is as complicated as
building a nuclear submarine or hydrogen bomb. It is a complicated
process and we should not belittle the difficulties. But there is
agreement, and I want to emphasize, we have a window of opportunity not
only because the American people have made it a high priority, but
because there is a great amount of agreement among the people who are
most concerned about education, about certain very important items.
There is a great deal of agreement between Republicans and Democrats on
certain important items.
The first elements of our accelerated reform effort, a reform effort
which moves with a sense of emergency, a reform effort which acts more
like you are fighting a war, and it is across the board and you have to
deal with it. You have to deal with governance of schools or boards of
education, you have to deal with management, the quality of
administration and direction we are getting. You have to deal with the
teaching apparatus. You have to deal with the physical facilities,
construction, repair, renovation. You have to deal with the new
technologies. You have to deal with the need for materials. We have
library books in New York City libraries which deal with geography and
history, and they are 30 years old. That is distortion of education.
That is miseducation. You should throw them away even if you have empty
shelves. But what do you replace them with? You have to deal with that.
Opportunities to learn. We have to focus on opportunities to learn
and what that means and the Federal role in opportunities to learn.
Opportunities to learn is a very simple concept, and I want to repeat,
we have agreement in 1994 when we passed the Elementary and Secondary
Schools Assistance Act, which also contained Goals 2000 as a part of
it, we had agreement, a working compromise. Some people did not like
the idea of national testing, the Federal Government being involved in
developing testing standards, liked the idea of a national curriculum,
and the others liked the idea of national testing that did not like the
idea of national curriculum. There were some of us that did not think
either idea was that good unless you combined it with something else,
and that was called a national set of opportunity to learn standards.
We had a compromise. In the legislation passed in 1994, the
reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Schools Assistance Act,
there was a three-pronged attack in terms of the Federal Government
pushing national standards: National standards for curriculum, national
standards for testing, and national standards for opportunity to learn.
Now, where there is disagreement, and the unfortunate thing that
happened was in 1996, the all-powerful Committee on Appropriations took
out, they repealed, the opportunities to learn prong of the three
initiatives. Opportunities to learn was taken away, leaving just
testing, national standards for testing and national standards for
curriculum. I say national standards for testing. It was not a national
test. They are moving beyond that when they called for national test.
We will get to national testing in a few minutes.
But opportunity to learn, I regret, does not have the kind of
agreement we need. So let us put it on a back burner for a while and
look at the places where we do have agreement. We have agreement there
is a great need for teacher training and more involvement in the
Federal Government in trying to facilitate teacher training that should
take place. We have agreement that we need more technology in our
schools and we should harness the advantages of the Internet and
computerization and prepare our children, students, for the jobs that
are to come in the future and for the transformation of society with
the computer and the technology
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of the Internet and telecommunications playing a major role.
This Congress passed the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which had in
it a mandate that the FCC had to develop certain procedures and a
program to provide aid to schools and libraries. They have done so. The
FCC has passed a set of regulations which will provide $2.2 billion a
year, $2.2 billion a year, for telecommunications services to schools
and libraries. That is going forward.
Coupled with that is the Technology Literacy Act that is also getting
an increase in funding. There is agreement, Republicans and Democrats
across the board, local level, State level, and Federal level, on
technology. So that is a second place where there is great agreement.
Teacher training, technology, the uses of technology for education, a
new initiative, improved initiative for technology in schooling is
going forward.
The third is charter schools. The charter schools, there is still
some controversy lingering with respect to charter schools and not
everybody is on board, but there is great agreement between Democrats
and Republicans that they are a good idea. There is a great agreement.
Even the National Education Association and the American Federation of
Teachers, they have approved the concept and are willing to go forward
to experiment.
Charter schools are no cure-all or miracle for anything. Charter
schools can be added as one component of the whole reform effort.
Across the board you have these various attempts to improve schooling.
The whole school reform, the whole school approach to reform that was
advocated by a member of the Committee on Appropriations, that is
important. It ought to be in there in terms of the overall running of
schools. I think that is a very good idea. I have always advocated
that.
There are a number of other approaches in terms of reading, there are
approaches in terms of the way you use technology. All those things
should be in there across the board, in that across-the-board strategy.
One important component would be charter schools. Charter schools are
very important because they deal with governance and management.
At the heart of some of our problems is the failure of governance.
While we praise local school boards and some Senators and Congressmen
want to push more money down to the local level, some of the worst and
most corrupt decisionmaking processes in the whole area of schooling
has taken place at the local school boards. Patronage problems,
corruption, all kinds of things have happened in the area of local
school boards, and it is just a fantasy, a romantic ideal without any
basis to talk about local control being the Godsend that can handle
everything. Local control often is very poor, very backward, and even
when it is honest, as in the case of 90 percent of our school districts
or more, most of them are honest, hard-working people, they are slow to
pick up on national trends. They are slow to pick up on international
trends. They are slow to pick up on innovations. They need some help in
terms of understanding what the possibilities are.
So governance and management, new ways to approach that, is found in
the area of charter schools. When you have a charter school, which is a
public school, the funding for the charter school is public, the whole
idea is that the amount of money spent per child in the traditional
public schools or localities, that same amount of money would be spent
per child in the charter school. The charter school would have a
different governance. They would be bound by certain State rules and
maybe certain local rules, but they would be able to get out from under
the local apparatus, the bureaucracy that runs the local traditional
schools in the area. They would be able to experiment and do some
things without having to have a level of improvement within the
bureaucracy or without being bound by tradition. They could have
innovations without seeking approval, and they would be held
accountable, the same accountability mechanism, the same tests that you
apply to local schools. The same whatever judgments you are going to
make or criteria you will use to evaluate what the traditional local
schools are doing, you would use that on the charter school.
{time} 1245
You would have the flexibility. They could breathe. Teachers who
complain all the time about being stultified by the bureaucracy, the
rules, all the other things they have to do other than teaching, all
the kinds of problems that teachers present, some could be ameliorated
because they would have a way to get command of those rules and those
processes and those procedures in a charter school setting.
Charter schools do not have to be a little red schoolhouse. It should
not be limited to 100 kids or 300 kids. Charter schools can take many
forms. I hope we have some charter schools which deal with disruptive
junior high school and high school students, and take on the challenge.
That is a major problem in the cities, complaining all the time about
disruptive students and what they do to other students. They imply that
they cannot be handled in the classroom, that the regular traditional
apparatus cannot deal with them. If that is the case, let us have some
charter schools which seek to deal with disruptive youngsters, and lay
out a plan of people who are dedicated and went to do that.
They are in charge in terms of they are the board of directors, they
make the policies, they determine who the managers are going to be, the
principals, the rules for the faculty, the structure; if they went to a
different structure from the traditional structure of one teacher in a
class of 25 or 30 kids; maybe they want to infuse more technology, more
kinds of approaches to squad learning, and techniques used by the Army
to teach. There are other things that they would be free to do without
having to get approval from the whole system.
I have no quarrel, and I am not criticizing local education agencies
as being inevitably stupid or inevitably hidebound. Local education
will for a long time be all we have. Even with charter schools, it is
the local education agency that is going to have to get things done.
But a local education agency has to stop and think about what it is
doing in terms of many different entities before it can make a move.
They are inevitably forced to be more cautious and move slower. So let
us welcome on the fringes, and I do not want to use the word
``fringes,'' but let us welcome a component which can move with greater
freedom and flexibility within the strictures, really, of the local
education system.
Charter schools are not a threat to the public schools, I assure the
Members. Charter schools at this point, according to the Office of
Educational Research and Improvement review, it said there are about
600 charter schools in the country now, 600.
Charter schools, as I said, are public schools. There are 86,000
total public schools, 86,000. That is 16,000 local school boards; but
actual schools, 86,000 schools. Six hundred charter schools are no
threat to 86,000. In fact, by the end of this year they expect maybe we
will have 800. Eight hundred are no threat to 86,000. It is far too
small. We need enough charter schools to be able to measure what is
going on.
If we do not do something to improve the environment that charter
schools exist in, they are going to drop off the radar screen. They do
not want to lose them as part of this experiment, or I do not want to
see them not become a part of the experiment. We ought to have enough
charter schools to measure how they perform against the public schools.
A lot of people insist that the competition is needed. As Members
know, the Republican platform for some years has insisted that we need
competition with traditional schools through vouchers, that vouchers
provide competition. It allows parents to make choices and take their
kids to some better school, and the competition with the school that
receives the vouchers, between the school that receives the vouchers
and the school that has a traditional education, that competition is
going to help improve education overall. That is the argument made.
We differ on vouchers, but on the competition I agree. Competition in
the schooling process, competition within the whole environment of
school reform, will be very good. We
[[Page H7271]]
need competition. We can get the competition through charter schools.
Publicly funded charter schools can give us the kind of competitive
situation which would allow us to compare what the traditional schools
do with what a group of people who are free to innovate and freer to do
things in many ways.
Let us understand that Republicans agree that charter schools are
good, Democrats agree that charter schools are good, the National
Education Association agrees that they are willing to try charter
schools as part of the experiment. The American Federation of Teachers
and numerous other organizations that care about education and are
involved deeply in education have approved the concept.
If the concept is approved, this is one of those areas of agreement
where we can move forward in this comprehensive approach. We do not
have all the pieces there, but we have teacher training, technology,
and charter schools. Let us not lose this window of opportunity
quarreling about block grants, which would wipe out the focus of the
Federal Government on special needy targets, or quarreling about
testing, or quarreling about uniforms. Let us understand what the
priorities are. Those things may be important.
There is one thing that we do not agree on, and that is construction.
The President's construction initiative would propose $5 million over a
5-year period for school renovation and repair. We need that, because
these other parts will not work, the charter schools and the technology
will not work, if we do not have some relief in the area of physical
facilities. The teacher training will have limited impact.
Teachers are laughing at us when we talk about education reform and
we have children who are in crowded schools, so crowded that some of
them have to go to school or have to study in the bathroom. That is not
a fiction. There is a great controversy in New York now about an ad
that was used in the mayoral campaign by candidate Ruth Messenger when
she told the truth. She had a picture of the kids in the bathroom.
Twenty-five percent of the schools at one time or another have had to
use their bathrooms for the overflow. Many of them regularly use
hallways. A large percentage, probably the majority, are using their
cafeterias and their gyms as classrooms.
There are schools in New York where children must go to lunch at 10
o'clock in the morning, and one at 9:45, because there is so much
overcrowding that they cannot go to the cafeteria except in relays. So
the first children are forced to eat at 10 o'clock, the last children
eat at 2 o'clock.
In my opinion, and I have made it quite clear that I intend to do
more about this in pursuing it, this is child abuse. To make a child
eat his lunch at 10 o'clock, that is child abuse. I do not know why the
health department would tolerate this, and we are going to push on
this. But it is done in a large number of schools because of
overcrowding. There is a major problem.
So the teacher will be very cynical when you say you are interested
in reform and you want to bring in new technology, computers, the
Internet, while you are not relieving the problem of overcrowding. The
teacher will be very cynical if you talk about charter schools being a
good idea but there is no money to buy a building for a charter school
or renovate an old building in order to have a charter school take
place. Charter schools have indicated, or people who are concerned
about charter schools have indicated that their No. 1 problem is
facilities. They cannot find the facilities, so construction is
important in our across-the-board comprehensive approach.
There are many pieces that I have not talked about, and there are
some that I do not even know about. But let us recognize with humility
that we are all blind men. There is one piece, though, that we ought to
have in there in order to make the three pieces work that we agree on,
the three components that Republicans and Democrats agree on: teacher
training, charter schools, and technology. Those three will be made
more operable and meaningful if we have the initiative for
construction. The construction initiative is a very cautious one,
limited one, conservative one: $5 billion over 5 years. That is all we
are talking about.
New York State has already, I think, been inspired by the President's
direction. The President did announce in his State of the Union Address
that he was going to push for the $5 billion. The President did put it
in his list of items in the nonpartisan budget negotiation, so I think
that the very fact that in the budget the President took the initiative
and made a trial has inspired some other States and localities. So New
York State has a bond issue on the ballot on November 4 to provide $2.2
billion for school construction.
{time} 1300
It is very much needed. I hope that we go back, before this first
year of the 105th Congress is over, so that we can do something about
that construction initiative that was knocked off track for the whole
country.
It was only a stimulus; $1 billion a year over a 5-year period, would
only stimulate the local and State governments, but the stimulus is
very important. It helps to promote an idea for a population that is
generally suspicious of any new initiative to spend money.
We expect in New York State that this bond issue will pass. The
voters in all parts of the State feel the pressure of aging physical
facilities. There are some communities where they are concerned about
the infrastructure. They have fairly decent schools, but they are 30,
40 years old, and they see problems arising in terms of new wiring for
the computers, new kinds of things happening, plus the aging factor is
there. And the question is, Is it more important to repair very old
buildings or try to build new ones? Or if we are going to repair the
old ones, that will cost a great deal, too.
So we have, I think, a universal need. Probably in every school
district in America there is some need for renovation, repair or
construction. So we ought to get back to it. This window of opportunity
where the people of America have clearly shown their concern about
education, the window of opportunity should not be lost. They deserve
more from their elected officials at every level. Certainly they
deserve more from the Members of Congress.
Members of Congress should try to respond to the demand of the
people, of the voters, in a more responsible way. Let us not just throw
them gimmicks, let us deal with items of agreement, teacher training,
charter schools, and technology, and understand that those three cannot
work unless we have a Federal initiative in construction.
The Congressional Black Caucus has some other initiatives that they
have proposed in terms of computer training which should be extended
beyond the schools, and in order to have youngsters who are
disadvantaged and do not have computers at home to have places to
practice outside the schools. So we are proposing storefront training
centers, computer centers, and a few innovations of that kind.
But let us agree on the basics. At least get the technology into the
local schools and get charter schools in a position, if it is a good
idea, where they can have the money they need for the facilities and be
able to go forward.
Where does testing come into all this? We will have a debate on the
floor on the President's proposal for national testing. I am on the
side which opposes national testing at this time. I was a member of the
Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities when we passed the
Elementary and Secondary School Assistance Act in 1994. We had this
great debate. We went through a deliberative process on the committee.
We debated for months. And after we passed it out of the House of
Representatives we debated with the Senate, because they did not have
the same thing we had. In the conference process we worked back and
forth with the Senate for another 3 months.
The deliberative process was in place and a compromise was reached
where we had a three-pronged approach: National standards for
curriculum, national standards for assessment and testing, and national
standards for opportunities to learn. I am against the testing at this
point because in 1996 they pulled out the national standards for
opportunities to learn.
If we do not have the Federal Government using its influence, its
clout, its bully pulpit, we cannot make the States do anything. And all
this is voluntary. But when the Government
[[Page H7272]]
speaks up and the President speaks up, people listen and the local
elected officials at the State and local level must respond.
When the President talks about opportunities to learn in terms of
construction that will provide new facilities; when the President talks
about opportunities to learn in terms of science laboratories where
kids can really studies science, with appropriate science equipment;
when the President talks about opportunities to learn in terms of
teacher training, we do not have a situation like the one we had in New
York a few years ago.
A survey was done by the Community Service Society and they found
that two-thirds of our schools, where the African-American and Latino
youngsters go to school, in those junior high schools, two-thirds of
our junior high schools in the city, and we have 1,100 schools, and I
do not know how many junior high, but within the context of 1,100, that
many schools, that two-thirds of the junior high schools did not have
any teacher who had majored in math and science teaching math and
science.
Math and science was being taught by teachers who had certification
in other areas. That was 3 or 4 years ago. It is worse now because,
since then, we have had campaigns by the city to encourage older
teachers to retire. In order to save money, older teaches are
encouraged to leave the system. The science and math teachers were some
of the first to go because they had jobs waiting for them outside in
private industry or in other school systems in the suburb.
We have a steady drain on the brain, the best teachers and the most
experienced teachers. Even without encouragement from our Government,
they are steadily moving out from New York City to the various suburban
areas which pay higher salaries. That is always a drain. So the
likelihood that the situation with physics, chemistry, general science
teachers, biology teachers is going to improve is zero.
Any reasonable analysis of the situation will show us that it is not
going to get any better under the present conditions. Math teachers. We
are not going to have the teachers. We have to have some new form of
teaching to deal with that. Opportunities to learn must be provided
somehow. We have to come up with something.
I emphasize technology, new technology, which will have videotapes
and commuter instruction and Internet instruction to help back up the
few math teachers we do have and have some kind of way to approach it
by getting the best of help through distance learning and these various
techniques where we can bring high quality teachers into any classroom
in America and provide a lesson or demonstration on a video which can
illustrate a principle in physics or some part of biology in ways in
which we could never do it without the new technology.
So the new technology is not a luxury, it may be the only answer to
solving the problem of decent math and science teachers in inner city
schools where we have lost them and we are not going to get them back
any time soon. So opportunities to learn means we address that kind of
problem.
When they pulled out the opportunity to learn standards during a
Committee on Appropriations conference, and I questioned the legality
of that because appropriations committees are not supposed to
legislate, but in this case, in 1996, the Committee on Appropriations
repealed a part of the Elementary and Secondary School Assistance Act.
When they pulled it out, they left us with just the two prongs,
national curriculum standards, which I am still in favor of, but
national testing standards, which I do not want to see go forward
without the opportunity to learn. They must balance off each other.
If we do not have the opportunity to learn, I know what the tests
will tell us. We know who will fail. We know who fails now. They will
fail on the national test if they do not have the opportunity to learn.
Testing without the opportunity to learn is abuse of students. We are
abusing the students by saying the burden of school reform, the burden
of school improvement is on their backs. We are not going to give the
students a decent place to sit, a safe place to learn; we are not going
to give them decent laboratories or decent library books, we will not
give them the kind of science equipment and materials they need, but we
are still going to test them and put a score there where they will be
stuck with that score for a long time to come.
A national test is being proposed. That was not in the legislation.
The National Government was not supposed to be involved in testing
standards, setting standards so that States and localities would have a
similar set of standards and be able to make comparisons. Now we
propose a national test which, one of these days, might not be a bad
idea. I have no problem with a national test if it is done in
conjunction with the opportunities to learn.
Our problem is that presently the national test represents an easy
way to fool the American people that are clamoring for improvements in
education and make them believe that they have accomplished something
significant when they have accomplished nothing. The national testing
is a decoy, a diversion. A diversion. It really should not come at this
time. It diverts us.
There are other people that have other reasons for opposing national
testing. I support not the generally stated conservative reason of we
do not want any more Federal intervention. I do not agree with that.
William Bennett does not agree with that, Chester Finn does not agree
with that. They want a national test. They are Republicans. I think
national testing is not a bad idea eventually, but the national testing
at this time, under these conditions, we are being stampeded into doing
a national test, and that is wrong.
It should go back to Congress, as an amendment on the floor tomorrow
would propose, that Congress should have the opportunity to deliberate.
Back to the deliberative process, where the blind men have a chance to
confer with each other and come up with something where all the very
important is taken into consideration.
I use the analogy of the elephant and the blind men, because I think
it is very important that we make the point that very powerful blind
men can do a great deal of harm. A blind man who happens to be in the
White House, a blind man who happens to be on the Committee on
Appropriations can do a great deal of harm, because they insist that
they have the truth without consulting with the others of us who are
groping the same elephant, and we can do some things that will set us
back in the process of education reform.
The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights is opposed to testing, and
they give a set of good reasons, which all relate to the fact that we
are moving too fast, being stampeded. They said the administration
proposal allows school authorities to exclude or refuse to accommodate
students who have limited English proficiency or who have disabilities.
They say also that the administration's proposal fails to provide
safeguards against the invalid and inappropriate use of test results.
They fail to hold school authorities accountable by requiring public
reporting of results so that parents and others can take informed
action. The administration's proposal does not take even modest steps
to identify details of critical educational resources that have a
significant impact on test results.
That is the primary point of my concern. Critical educational
resources, opportunities to learn, have an impact on test results. And
we can say ahead of time who will fail and who will score high by
looking at the kind of resources that are available to our students.
The administration must take the necessary steps to assure that the
laws and policies according to the rights of equal educational
opportunity will be effectively enforced.
That is the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. NAACP Legal
Defense Fund had some of the same kinds of concerns. Tests will be used
for high stakes decisions about students' futures and under the present
conditions it is not fair to do that, and on and on it goes.
I hate to conclude on the note of tests because my plea, my major
concern is that we operate together on the points where we are in
unison. We do agree that teacher training, charter schools and
technology are important. Democrats and Republicans should join hands
and respond to the public demand for improvements in education in
[[Page H7273]]
a positive way by moving on these areas of agreement in a comprehensive
reform approach.
Mr. Speaker, I include the Washington Post article for the Record.
[From the Washington Post, Sept. 15, 1997]
Wrong Move on Education
The Senate voted almost casually last week in effect to
abolish most of the current forms of federal aid to
elementary and secondary schools for the year ahead by
merging them into two block grants to school districts. The
51-49 roll call after only perfunctory debate seemed mainly
meant to score a political point--that Republicans, all but
four of whom supported the amendment, favor local control of
schools, while Democrats, all of whom opposed it, would have
the federal government dictate school policy. But the issue
is phony. Democrats no more than Republicans favor anything
like federal control of the schools, of which there is scant
danger--and the schools deserve better from the Senate than
to be used as political stage props.
The federal government pays only a small share of the cost
of elementary and secondary education--about 6 percent. The
rest is state and local. The federal role thus never has been
to sustain the schools, but fill gaps and push mildly in what
have seemed to be neglected directions. About half the
federal money--some $6 billion a year--has been aimed since
the 1960s at providing so-called compensatory education for
lower-income children. The block grant amendment, by Sen.
Slade Gordon, would have the effect of converting this into
general aid. The requirement that the money be spent on
poorer students would be dropped in favor of letting school
districts spend it as they ``deem appropriate.'' That's more
than just a shift to local control; it's a shift away from a
long-standing sensible effort to concentrate the limited
federal funds on those in greatest need. Does Congress really
want to reverse that policy?
Most other Department of Education programs--though not
such popular ones as aid to the disabled--would be bunched in
the second block grant. As in most departments, a pretty good
case can be made for some such bunching. Some programs are
always floating around for which the original rationale was
weak or has faded and that are too small to warrant separate
administration. But that's true of only some, not all, of
those Mr. Gorton would dispatch. Example: the Senate voted
Thursday in favor of a compromise version of the national
testing program the president supports--but in voting for the
block grant, as Education Secretary Richard Riley observed,
``It then voted to eliminate the funding for this purpose.''
Other special-purpose programs in aid of particular groups
or in support of reform likewise would disappear, the
secretary said, including several the president has touted as
evidence of his commitment to education. The president and
Democrats generally have made effective political use of the
education issue in the past few years. Block-granting would
leave them less of a stage from which to do so.
The Gorton amendment would be only for a year, at which
point the appropriations bill to which it was attached would
lapse, and the issue would have to be fought all over again.
That's another reason why, even if mainly for show, it was
the wrong way to do business. Mr. Riley was authorized to say
it was ``unacceptable'' to the administration, meaning
presumably that the president would veto the bill if the
amendment were to survive in conference. He'd be right to do
so.
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