[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

[[Page H7267]]

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.

[[Page H7269]]

  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

[[Page H7270]]

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.

                          ____________________