Congressional Record, Volume 143 Issue 144 (Thursday, October 23, 1997)

[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 144 (Thursday, October 23, 1997)]
[House]
[Pages H9491-H9498]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

REPUBLICAN VISION FOR AMERICAN EDUCATION

The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of
January 7, 1997, the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Hoekstra] is
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I would be more than willing to engage the
gentleman from California [Mr. Cunningham], but only on one condition.
The gentleman has got to get the name right. It is not ``HOCK-STRA'' it
is ``Hoekstra.'' If the gentleman wants to start tonight and talk a
little bit about education, that would be fine with me if he would like
to go first.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Mr. Speaker, I would like to, first of all, thank the
gentleman, who is the chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight. I
think it is fair to take a look at the education programs to see if
they are good or they are not. A good example is the President wanted a
$3 billion new literacy program. We failed, were last of the industrial
nations in literacy here in the United States of America. The President
wanted a $3 billion literacy program. It sounds good. But there are 14
literacy programs within the Federal Government. Title I is one of
those. I would think it would be fair to look and say which of the 14
are good? Can we take one or two, get rid of all the bureaucracies, all
the pay for all of those staffs and all of those buildings and focus
and say, that is wasted money? Let us put the money in the one or two
programs that really work.
Mr. Speaker, if it is title I, fund it. But do it fully instead of
just halfway doing it. And the gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Hoekstra],
and the gentleman from California [Mr. Riggs] and the gentleman from
Pennsylvania [Mr. Goodling] are doing that. They are going through the
over 760 programs, now, and identifying which are correct

[[Page H9492]]

and which ones that we should absolutely support.
But my colleagues on the other side of the aisle would demagogue to
say well, the Republicans are cutting education if they eliminate those
programs, even though we are getting more money down to the classroom
and to the Zip Code.
Mr. Speaker, I would say this, that this last weekend I attended
public school teachers' outstanding teachers in San Diego County. I saw
parents lauding those public teachers. I saw children lauding their
teachers like we would want. I was a teacher myself in high school, and
a coach. I was a college teacher and a coach and a dean of a college.
My children went through public schools. I still have a daughter in a
public school, a sophomore. I truly believe that one of the keys for
this great country is a solid public education program and the
investment in that.
But is it not fair, Mr. Speaker, to ask what programs that we can put
into those school systems and fully fund and the Jaime Escalantes of
this country to encourage teachers and pay teachers finally what they
are worth, instead of paying some bureaucrat in Washington, D.C. that
is wasting the money?
The average is less than 48 cents per dollar that gets down to the
classroom. Is it not fair to say we want at least 90 percent, which
this body is going to have a chance to vote on? We want 90 percent of
the money from the Federal Government to go to the classroom.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Certainly I will yield to the gentleman.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I think this is really an important point,
that what the gentleman is saying here, and this is one of the numbers
we are trying to get a handle on and I thought it was closer to 60,
either one of which is not very good. But what the gentleman is saying
is the GAO study, our work on the committee says maybe it is 60 cents
but for every dollar that comes out of our hometown that comes to
Washington and then leaves here in the form of an education dollar,
that of the dollar that comes here somewhere between 52 cents, 40 to 52
cents never leaves here.
So a dollar that comes here; only between 48 cents and 60 cents
actually gets back to what we have found is the most effective place
for education, which is in the classroom with the teacher under
parental and local control. That is the leverage point, that somewhere
we lose almost half of every education dollar here in Washington.
Next week, the gentleman from California is absolutely right, we are
going to have that debate here on the floor where a resolution that
says our vision for the future is that at most for every dollar that
comes to Washington, only 10 cents stays here and 90 cents--well,
actually only 10 cents is lost between Washington and the classroom,
which means the State bureaucracies and that. We want to get 90 cents
to the teacher who knows my child's name, and into the classroom where
my child sits in the school that is run by the school board that we
elect. That is where we want to get the money to.
Mr. SHADEGG. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, I compliment
the gentleman for his work in this area. He came to Phoenix, Arizona,
to my hometown and held a hearing, ``Education at the Crossroads: What
works and what doesn't?'' And I also thank my colleague from California
for joining us in this effort.
Mr. Speaker, I have to tell my colleagues that I feel an immense
sense of urgency tonight on the topic that we are talking about; that
is, education and the whole question of getting money into the
classroom, because right now there is a grave threat posed to education
in America. It is a feel-good, sound-good idea called national testing.
It is this idea that we ought to adopt in America a single reading
test for every fourth grader in America, and a single reading test for
every eighth grader in America. It is a proposal that the President
made on the floor of this House in his State of the Union speech last
January which, as the gentleman I know already knows, the President has
already implemented. That is, he created a test panel and has written
that test.
Now, a lot of my colleagues in Arizona say, and my friends at home
say, ``Well, Congressman, what is wrong with national testing? Why are
you so impassioned in your opposition to national testing and why am I
concerned about it here tonight?'' Let me explain that. There is a
simple concept: What is tested is what will be taught.
Mr. Speaker, I have an 11-year-old son in Arizona, Stephen, and a 15-
year-old daughter, about to turn 16 and to start driving, and what they
are tested on throughout their education careers has been what they
were taught; that is, their teachers, because they want them to perform
well, have gone out and ahead of time learned what is on the tests that
they will take each year and made sure that they are taught what will
be on those tests.
What that means is that if we let this idea of a single national test
written in Washington, D.C., thousands of miles from the teacher in
Phoenix, Arizona, who knows my son Stephen's name or my daughter
Courtney's name, if we let that test be written in Washington, D.C.,
hundreds of layers of bureaucrats from the administrators in my
children's school or the parents in my neighborhood or the parents in
the gentleman's neighborhood in Michigan or the gentleman's
neighborhood in California, if we let them write that test in
Washington, D.C., we will have ceded control over much of the content
of education to Washington, D.C.

Mr. Speaker, that I believe is a severe disaster and the Senate is on
the verge of doing it. I hope people will watch tonight and call the
Senate and do something about it and urge them not to allow it to
happen.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, I think the
gentleman brings up a very important point. Whether we are talking
about dollars, which is what my colleague from California and I started
talking about, whether we are talking about testing, whether we are
talking about curriculum, we are talking about where is the focal point
and where is the decision-making for education? Are we going to move it
to bureaucrats here in Washington?
That is exactly what has happened with this testing. We know that we
lose somewhere between 40 and 50 cents of every dollar to bureaucrats
here in Washington. Was that test written with the Governor of
Colorado?
Mr. SHADEGG. No.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. California?
Mr. SHADEGG. No.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Arizona?
Mr. SHADEGG. No.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Michigan?
Mr. SHADEGG. No.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Were they involved?
Mr. SHADEGG. How about the parents?
Mr. HOEKSTRA. No, parents were not involved.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. How about the teachers? Were the teachers involved?
Mr. HOEKSTRA. No, I do not think so. What we have is we have a group
of people here in Washington, and you have some other interesting
statistics on tests, but the people here in Washington who developed
the test that they expect to work in Holland, Michigan, that they
expect to work in San Diego, that they expect to work in Fort Collins,
is that where my colleague from Colorado is from? Close?
Mr. BOB SCHAFFER of Colorado. Absolutely, Fort Collins.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Phoenix? It is a very different approach. The Clinton
administration has said: We know best and we want to take over
education.
Mr. Speaker, here is where Republicans have been. Here is where we
have been on our Crossroads project. We have been to Milwaukee, New
York, actually twice, Chicago twice, we have been to Napa, California.
We have been to San Fernando, California; Phoenix; Wilmington,
Delaware; Milledgeville, Georgia; the Bronx, Cincinnati; Louisville;
Little Rock; Cleveland; Muskegon Heights, Michigan. We are going to
Iowa. We are going to Texas.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Mr. Riggs has been in San Diego.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Riggs has been in San Diego. We are going to go to
Colorado. Number one, we are going to parents and teachers. We have had
over 25 educational institutions and hearings that we have visited; 174
grassroots witnesses. They are testifying about their schools, their
teachers, and their kids in their hometowns. So we are hearing and we
are finding that we

[[Page H9493]]

feed parental control, we need a focus on basic academics, and we need
to get dollars in the classroom.
Mr. Speaker, I will yield to the gentleman from California because I
miss him on the committee. I do not know if he went on to bigger and
better things, but he was a great colleague on the committee.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Well, I am on the Committee on Appropriations and the
Committee on National Security, and my two passions are national
security and education, and I am trying to get on that committee in
Appropriations so I can support the authorizors.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, we would love to have the gentleman back.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Mr. Speaker, if we take this dollar and we only have
half of it--and I carried this dollar for 40 years because of a lesson
that my father taught me, I am not going to get into that today. But if
we take half of this dollar and leave it here in Washington, then we
are cutting education. That is what has been happening. The liberals
that claim that they support education are actually cutting education
every single day.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, and what are
we trying to do with that dollar?
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Mr. Speaker, we are trying to get 90 percent of this
dollar down to the Zip Code to where parents, teachers, local
administrators, and the community, and I would say family as well,
because there are grandparents that want to invest in their children.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I ask the gentleman, how do some of our
colleagues describe trying to consolidate programs, get rid of red
tape, empower parents and local school boards, and get the money back
to the local school?
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Mr. Speaker, they demagogue and say it is a cut. A
classic example: Last year the President's direct lending program cost
$3 billion to administer, another $4 billion to collect. GAO study.
That was when it was capped at 10 percent.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. But good news on the direct loan program. Right? We had
to shut it down this year because they cannot consolidate the loans. I
did not bring it with me, oh, I do have it with me. A letter from 75
college students who want to consolidate their loans. What does this
mean? It means they are going to take all of their loans that they have
gotten for education and put it in one payment. A novel idea?
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Mr. Speaker, if I could just finish one thought on it
on how we are wasting money for education. That was at 10 percent. When
the government shut down the President said he wanted 100 percent of
student loans to come out of the government. He wanted government
control, bigger bureaucracy. I wanted zero. The leadership decided to
let it go to 40 percent so the government could go back. I disagreed.
What they did not see is that we put about six little words in there
that saved the money going to the bureaucracy. Did we cut $10 billion?
What did we do with the money? We increased Pell grant the highest
level ever. Special education, it is called the IDEA program. We passed
that bill. The President signed it and we got more money there.
We increased student loans by 50 percent. But when the gentleman says
what do they do, they demagogue and say we are cutting. What we are
doing is cutting, whether it is the 13 programs in literacy to focus
all the money on the one that works or whether it is on direct lending
or whether it is on AmeriCorps or whatever it is. We are trying to get
the money to the education process.

{time} 2030

I thank the gentleman.
Mr. SHADEGG. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will continue to yield, I
want to make a quick point about the issue of money in the classroom
and the point you make rather eloquently, about only half of that
dollar getting back home to the classroom.
I hope people understand that when some of us rail against the
concept of national testing, they understand that the President did not
come forward with a bill proposing national testing in which he
suggested that the Congress study the issue and implement legislation.
He did not seek dollars being appropriated for national testing. He is
doing this all on his own.
He will, if we do not stop him in a vote next week, he will pull
money out of everywhere else in the Federal Department of Education
budget, monies allocated for other purposes, part of that 50 cents that
stays here in Washington, he is going to pull off and give to implement
national testing.
I believe our children are tested and tested and tested. And I would
like to see, as you both would, that 90 cents out of every dollar get
back to the classroom. But it is not going to get back to the classroom
if the President is able next week to go forward with his national
testing program where he will take another 5, 10 or 15 or 20 cents out
of each of those dollars and allocate it to a national test written in
Washington, D.C. that you and I do not get to control and that the
parents and the teachers and students and the administrators in our
school districts do not get to control.
He is going to nationalize testing and use those scarce dollars.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Which we will have to increase taxes to pay for.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. You bring up a couple of good points. The President has
not involved parents, teachers, administrators, governors, as a matter
of fact, the President has not even involved Congress. We are going to
embark on national testing and it is going to be one branch of
government, a few elitist bureaucrats who have developed a test for all
of our kids. And we are not even a part of that process.
Mr. SHADEGG. That test will drive the education agenda in America.
The handful of textbook publishers in this country who write our
students textbooks will write that national test. Can you imagine the
amalgamation of power in this small little committee that the President
appointed to write this one test and he did an end run around the
Congress?
Mr. HOEKSTRA. When you are bringing that out, the testing or whatever
it is and the 90 cents of the dollar, I think my colleague from
California will agree, we want that 90 cents to go to a local school
district, but we want to give them a lot of flexibility as to what they
do with it. We do not want to give them 90 cents and then give them a
three-ring binder and say, here is how you spend it. We want the
parents and local school administrators and local teachers to say, we
have got great facilities. We need more computers or we need to invest
in books or educational training or whatever.
I yield to the gentleman from Colorado, Mr. Bob Schaffer, who has a
great passion for this issue, is on the committee with us, and has
really been helpful in us getting some work done in this area.
Mr. BOB SCHAFFER of Colorado. Mr. Speaker, I am grateful that the
gentleman is raising this issue of national testing and the Clinton
administration's effort to try to centralize testing here in
Washington, D.C. and in fact erode the ability of States and local
communities to determine quality on their own terms and their own
standards.
I hope people will think of this national testing debate in those
terms, because we are not opposed to establishing a national quality
standard for measurement of education. We are very much in favor of
that. The question on national testing, as the Clinton administration
proposes, is one of independence, which we do enjoy today. Independent
national testing is a good thing, private organizations, private
associations, private panels, private boards that are independent of
the government measuring quality throughout the country. That gives us
a better idea of how schools in Michigan compare to schools in Colorado
that compare to schools in California and so on.
But what the Clinton administration is talking about is something
entirely different. And what they are suggesting is that independent
measures of quality should be pushed aside, that we should forget about
independent measures of quality and instead go to the Clinton model of
government defining quality of education for the American people.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. I thank my colleague and, just for a moment, yield
again to the gentleman from Arizona [Mr. Shadegg] who has a great
definition because, remember, if it is national testing from the
Federal Government, you really will not have an

[[Page H9494]]

option as to whether to take it or not. If there are independent
testing organizations out there, which there are, schools can pick
which one is the best for their schools, which they think is the most
appropriate that actually tests knowledge.
My colleague from Arizona has a wonderful example, I believe that is
what you are holding up, is how the Federal Government in their new
testing program or at least one of the people involved in this defines
quality in the types of things we should test. I believe it is in math.
Is that what you have there?
Mr. SHADEGG. I do have it here. That is exactly the point. I want to
raise a couple of comments.
First of all, my colleague from Colorado is exactly right. It is not
that we oppose the ability of people in Arizona or Colorado to compare
how our schools are doing with other schools in Michigan or California.
And there are tests to do that right now. Two of the best that we all
have heard of are the Iowa test of basic skills, which I know I took
and my children take, and the Stanford test. Those are independent,
privately written national tests which enable us to compare how schools
in our neighborhoods are doing or our States are doing with schools
halfway across the country.
There are tests to do that and there should be. We support that.
But as my colleague has pointed out, the Clinton proposal is not that
we just have the ability to compare. It is that we have the one
Federal, correct, written-in-Washington, D.C., written-inside-the-
Department-of-Education test and that is where it gets quite scary.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Tell us about the math test. This is the kind of math
test that I think, actually this is the kind of math test that
bureaucrats would give to bureaucrats, is that not correct?
Mr. SHADEGG. There is no doubt about it. It is a wonderful, feel good
math test. My colleague on the other side [Senator Ashcroft] who is
fighting this fight against national testing, points out that it is
really the rain forest test, because they ask children more questions
about rain forests than they do about their ability to do math.
This, in fact, is the national test in both reading and math as
proposed by the national test panel proposed and established by
President Clinton. The test is already written and, by the way, my
colleague said being talked about by the Clinton administration, the
sad truth is, it is not just being talked about, it is about to be
implemented. They are ready to go.
But the wonderful thing about this test is that you discover, when
you examine it, that in the eighth grade test for math, there is not, I
want to say this carefully and slowly so people follow it, there is not
one single question which requires eighth graders to do a math
computation with a pen and pencil. At no point in the eighth grade math
test already written is there a single question where they are to do a
multiplication problem with a pen and pencil or a division problem with
a pen and pencil. There is not one single question. Why is that?
It appears that one of the people on this committee, a Mr. Steven
Leinwand, a consultant to the Connecticut Education Department, has
written a paper and his school of thought has been adopted by the
National Association of Mathematics Teachers. And his school of thought
is as follows. It is, he writes, downright dangerous to teach children
that 6 times 7 is 42. It is dangerous, he says, to teach them basic
computational math skills.
Why, you say, does he consider it dangerous? He says it is dangerous,
and I quote, because it will annoint the few to master these subjects
and, quote, cast out the many who fail to do so.
First of all, the pessimism in that statement is monumental. I think
American children can learn math calculations and do learn them every
day. But what he is fundamentally saying is that because some children
may not master the multiplication tables, the division tables, may not
be able to do a complicated division problem or a complicated
multiplication problem, they will feel bad. And we do not want them to
feel bad so we should not give them a test that requires them to master
those skills.
That is in the national math test which the Clinton administration
has written and which will be imposed on America if the Congress does
not stop it. It needs to do that next week, and we need, really, the
help of our friends in the U.S. Senate; 295 of our colleagues in the
House here voted to block national testing as proposed by Bill Clinton.
Unfortunately, the House wants to compromise on this issue and let a
committee be appointed to write a single national test.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. I am not sure the House wants to compromise. I think
the Senate maybe wants to compromise. I think my friend from California
has something to say on this issue.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Not specifically on this issue. You can see on
education, when we had the hearings in the 104th, we had eight of them,
and the main concern from industry, small business, unions and major
business was that children coming out of our school systems could not
qualify for an entry level job because they could not read, they could
not write, they did not have the math skills. They did not have the
high technology or they could not speak the English language.
We are last, of the 15 industrialized nations, on all core courses.
That is a legacy we have been left from a liberal education system. Not
only cutting it, but the money that we get there, the teachers are not
paid properly. My wife has a doctorate degree in education. She has a
master's in education. She has a master's in business. She is bilingual
in Spanish. Her sister is in public education, special education
program. So I know there are good programs and good teachers out there.
But what do we want to do? Because, A, there is less than 12 percent
of the classrooms have even a single phone jack to upgrade them for the
21st century. They are operating in the 1950s. And even the good
skilled schools do not have the computer facilities to help the kids to
learn, to get ready for jobs. What I would say, and I would like to go
through just a few of these, it will take me one minute, no more.
Number one, we have mentioned, to review the 760 programs. Number
two, drive 90 percent of the money down to the classroom. A State
bureaucracy is just as bad as a Federal bureaucracy. We want to give
flexibility. I do not think we ought to tax work. We ought to tax
savings, but tax consumption, different issue. But at least we ought to
be able to give someone that wants to save for education not to have to
pay tax on that for their children. That is an investment. We do think
that.
Welfare reform, I think that is going to help. Every child should be
able to read the English language by the third grade. There is no such
thing as bilingual education. There are over 360 different languages
out there. But every child by the third grade should be able to read in
the English language and to be able to speak it.
I would say that we ought to incentivize. Of all the good schools
that we do have out there, I would ask the gentleman, would you send
your children to the worst? No. You would not. And we would say that
the people that are trapped in that system want the same right that you
do, that I do, that the President has. If their children are in a
crime-ridden, drug-infested school or the teachers cannot even read
their own readers, in some cases that has happened, it exists today,
then that parent should be able to choose, with parental choice, where
that child goes to school.
These are just a few of the initiatives that we think that we are
being prohibited because of the unions. When the gentleman made a
statement the other day about the unions, I happened to agree with you.
If you look at Karl Marx' Communist manifesto and take a look at where
the folks that want all the power to reside in the government, whether
it is health care, whether it is education or whatever it is, in that
manifesto it talks about the establishment of unions that will support
the government because government will have the power.
If you look at the union bosses, and I say that because 30 percent of
the unions are Republicans, 10 percent are independents, but yet the
union bosses, like the Communist manifesto, want all the power in
Washington so that they will have power. That is what is inhibiting us
from going. I happen to agree with the gentleman's statement.

[[Page H9495]]

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I want to reinforce a
couple things. The gentleman has brought up the term 760. Where does
760 come from? What we did, as part of the crossroads hearings, we went
around the country, and we also asked the question in Washington, as to
how many education programs are there. We went to OMB. We went to a
couple of different places in the executive branch, and they came back
and said, there are roughly 760 programs.

{time} 2045

We said, that is interesting, that sounds like a lot. We asked for
these programs typically to move the money from Washington back to the
State, what kind of process does it have to go through. 487 steps. No
wonder we lose 40 to 50 cents. No wonder 40 to 50 cents of every
education dollar that comes from Colorado, for every dollar that comes,
only 50 cents makes it back to Fort Collins. I do not think that is
good enough for Colorado. I think the people in Colorado at the local
level, those parents and those teachers know how to improve their
schools better than somebody from Washington who has never been in
Colorado.
Mr. BOB SCHAFFER of Colorado. The gentleman is absolutely correct. I
try to characterize my education goals and those of the Republican
Congress in the following ways. First, we focus on treating parents
like real customers. Secondly, we focus on treating teachers like real
professionals. The third thing we talk about is the liberty to learn.
And then fourth, the freedom to teach. Let me talk about the one we are
addressing at the moment.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman will yield for just a second, some
people might call that radical, is that correct?
Mr. BOB SCHAFFER of Colorado. I have been accused of that on
occasion. I refer to that as the empire striking back.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Think of that. Empowering parents and teachers and all
of that, some people in this Washington establishment down the road
believe that that is a radical idea.
Mr. SHADEGG. Taking this one step further, they accuse us, those who
support nationalized testing and support really federalizing this whole
issue say that we are anti-education because we support empowering
teachers. They say we are anti-education because we support empowering
parents. They say we are anti-education because we support empowering
local school boards and local schools to do what they know how to do
best. That makes us anti-education? It is mind-boggling.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. He has got some great ideas on what to do on education,
yielding back to our friend from Colorado.
Mr. BOB SCHAFFER of Colorado. The gentleman is precisely right when
he stated before that in Colorado, as in any State, that it is the
local teachers, the local principals, the local school board members
and state legislators and parents, I do not want to leave out parents
certainly, but those are the individuals that have the best ideas on
what kind of reform needs to take place in order to improve the quality
of education for their children.
National testing really places a damper on education improvement. I
will tell my colleagues why. It goes back to the comment I made earlier
about allowing the government to take over the role of defining
quality. When we talk about liberty to learn as a Republican majority
in Congress and our approach to reforming schools, what we are really
speaking about is creating an education marketplace where intellectual
ideas are free to be used and picked up or left behind by those who
have different ideas about which educational setting is in the best
interests of their children. When we talk about the exchange of ideas,
when we talk about the creation of economic opportunity through
learning, in an education marketplace it means that you or I as parents
have the opportunity to pick the school that best meets the needs of
our child.
That really is at the heart of every initiative that we have
discussed on this floor over the course of the last 3 weeks when it
comes to improving the quality of schools. Liberating parents,
liberating teachers, liberating States to pursue education excellence
on their terms. What happens when we give the government the authority
to define quality is you really do constrain the ability of the
customers to define quality. If we look to any other industry in
America, all of the great industries that we have that are the best in
the world, they are so because of competitiveness. They are so because
of a marketplace that they compete in. They compete to do the best, to
offer the greatest quality, the greatest amount of convenience and the
lowest cost.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. For those companies, who defines excellence?
Mr. BOB SCHAFFER of Colorado. It is the customer. It is the customer.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Who do we want to have in education define excellence?
Mr. BOB SCHAFFER of Colorado. We want the parents, the customers, to
define the quality. There are national tests, we mentioned before. The
Clinton administration wants the government to establish a national
test that will define quality. But I would submit that there are
indicators upon indicators that tell you whether your local school
district is succeeding or failing. If you look at things like the
graduation rate, the dropout rate, if you look at things like the
placement rate of students who graduate and go on to become gainfully
employed or pursue higher education or serve in our armed services,
whatever the case is, you have a whole battery of independent national
tests. You have State tests that compare district to district and so
on. All of those independent indicators are the kinds of places that
parents look to define quality. I want to give one specific example in
my district. I raise this example because those who oppose parental
choice in education, treating parents like customers, frequently say
that if you really let parents choose which school to send their
children to, that the public schools will somehow fail to meet the test
and stay in the arena.
I refute that idea and offer the following example. A very good
friend of mine, Anita Greeb in Fort Collins, Colorado recently wrote a
letter to the editor in the local Fort Collins newspaper. What she
discussed was her choice to move her child to 3 different education
settings in my school district in my community. She was dissatisfied
with school A, the first school. She moved her child to a charter
school, a charter school that I helped create. She decided she was not
satisfied with the quality of education in the classroom that her child
was a part of and she moved her child to a third school, school C, a
traditional public school setting with the teacher devoted to meeting
the demands of that particular parent. My point again being this:
School choice does a couple of things. It allows a parent to play a
meaningful role in picking the right place for their child. That parent
who cares about her child in this case, more than anybody else. She
chose a traditional K-12 public school setting, the very kind of
setting that many people believe will go away if we allow school
choice. The second thing, though, that it does is it resulted in a
lengthy letter to the local newspaper where she named names, she named
the specific schools, she gave the specific reasons why she was
dissatisfied with the first two options and the specific reasons why
she gravitated toward the third.
When we have parents in communities being vocal about defining
quality in their neighborhoods, we have won the battle. That is the
goal of public school choice, parental choice, allowing parents to
define the terms of quality on their terms in a persuasive, meaningful
way rather than turning that authority over here to Bill Clinton and
the U.S. Department of Education. That is the core element of this
debate on national testing, whether we allow Anita Greeb out in Fort
Collins, Colorado to define quality for her and her child or whether we
take that authority from her, confiscate that authority from her and
give it to the Clinton White House and to the U.S. Department of
Education so far removed from the home and the child and the school
district that Anita cares so much about out in our community.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. That is really what we have found as we have gone
around the country, is that when you empower parents, you have parents
defining quality. The other thing that happens, it is kind of
interesting, it happens in the private sector as well. When customers
are defining quality, the people

[[Page H9496]]

that are manufacturing or producing the product pay more attention to
the customer and involve the customer in the process. What we find is
that when you empower parents, you empower them in a number of ways, to
choose, but also what you find out is that it fosters an environment
that empowers parents and teachers and administrators to come together
and to get a more common vision for their school and identify the
school's role, the teacher's role and the parent's role. You actually
get a consensus of where you want to go. The empowerment of parents, I
think we saw that in Phoenix when we were there, we have seen the same
development in California with charter schools. We are seeing it in
Michigan with more public school choice. The atmosphere I think raises
all of the schools up, traditional public schools. I have got a great
example of a public school that is performing, I have got a lot of them
in my district but one is kind of personal to me. They did very well in
the State Science Olympiad. Some of you may remember at one time I had
more hair on my face than I did on my head but they did very well in
the State Science Olympiad. It is a traditional public school. I met
with them, we kind of celebrated their success at the State Science
Olympiad and I told them that you are going to go to the National
Science Olympiad, they were smarter than I was because they are
competing against 6,000 schools on a nationwide basis, that if you win
the National Science Olympiad, you can shave off my beard.
Obviously, they won the National Science Olympiad and so we can have
excellence in all different formats of schools. We are not saying
charters. A lot of the stuff that we are seeing a lot of States
experimenting, vouchers, charters, tax credits. There is not a silver
bullet, one answer. There are lots of things that we can do and that is
empowering parents, dollars in the classroom, basic academics. The more
we move in that direction, the better off we are going to be.
Mr. SHADEGG. I think the gentleman is right. There is clearly not a
single bullet but we have ascertained some basic facts. One of those is
that the more parental involvement you have, the better the school. The
more you empower parents, the more you empower the teachers and the
administrators at that school to control that school and to seize its
direction, the better an education we produce.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. We saw that in Arizona when we went to, I do not
remember the name of the school but we went to one of the gentleman's
charter schools, we have seen it in the public schools as we have gone
around, in all the different kinds of schools, the schools that are
doing well, you go into the school and you go into the classroom and
you can feel an energy. Parents are there. They are at our hearings,
they are asking questions, they are contributing, the teachers are
there, the kids are pumped, the administrators, but the thing that they
all have in common, they feel ownership of that school. They are proud
of it.
Mr. SHADEGG. That is why I think that America would be in open
revolt. There would be an outcry across this country if people
understood that that kind of parental control of their local school was
about to be stolen away by a one-size-fits-all Washington, D.C. written
national test. I want to make a couple of quick points. I pointed out
that this education consultant was a part of a group called the
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and that he wrote it is
downright dangerous to teach kids math calculations. There are a couple
of quotes that I want to read from him to show how radical the people
who will influence this test are.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Explain this. This is the guy that was part of the
group that developed what may or may not be a national test, correct?
Mr. SHADEGG. He is listed in this book as one of the experts who
helped write the test which the Clinton administration will begin to
implement next year in America if it can or the year after that if the
Congress does not block them.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Has the gentleman from Colorado, Mr. Bob Schaffer, had
more involvement in that test than the gentleman from Arizona, Mr.
Shadegg, is talking about?
Mr. BOB SCHAFFER of Colorado. I have far less.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Has the gentleman from California Mr. Cunningham?
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Let me give another classic example of where the
Federal Government can run amok in writing standards or tests. The
ranking minority member, he was my chairman when the Democrats were in
the majority and then he became my ranking member when I was chairman
of the committee when we took over in 1994 the majority. But he was
outraged as a history teacher for the Federal Government producing
history standards that spoke more on Madonna than they did the Magna
Carta. They demonized veterans and liberalized hippies and liberals in
different fields. They demonized in another area the Enola Gay which is
right up here in a museum, they demonized American veterans and our
military and wanted to apologize to Japan which caused many, many
deaths. The gentleman from Texas, Mr. Sam Johnson, got that particular
individual fired. But when the government takes over, they want their
liberal agenda to fit into these exams. That is the whole difference.
We want to empower the parents, the teachers, the local communities and
the families to empower them to establish what is important to them,
not some liberal bureaucrat here in Washington, D.C.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. The real difference here is when you empower local
communities and parents, the standards reflect community standards.
When you empower bureaucrats here in Washington, you get an agenda from
Washington that they are trying to impose on communities around the
country. It is bottom up versus top down. We are in favor of bottom up.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. If I could just finish this one thought, that
recently, this month, they did an exam, international exam. The United
States was 28th in math skills, internationally, that we score 15 of 15
industrialized nations in almost all core courses. So is there an
emergency? Yes. We want more than 50 cents on a dollar down to the
classroom. We want local parents and teachers to take care and support,
we want the dollars to upgrade the classroom instead of bureaucracies
back here. So that everything we are talking about, the other side
demonizes as radical. It is not radical to empower people. What is
radical under a socialist communist government is to take that power
away from the people and put it in the hands of the government alone.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. We do not want to lose one child. We want to give every
child the opportunity to develop their full skills.
Mr. SHADEGG. The gentleman makes an excellent point. That is, that
just a few years ago, we witnessed an attempt by the Federal Government
to impose national standards for education. Only we discovered that
their standards taught that our veterans were evil, their history
standards taught that great leaders like Abraham Lincoln and George
Washington were in fact evil. So the President in this latest effort to
nationalize education has said, well, we will not do subjective topics
like history or social studies, we will do objective, that is, those
subjects we can all agree, objective subjects like mathematics.

{time} 2100

Except that we discover that it is not objective, because, and there
are really two points I want to make here, one is it is not objective
because you and I and all Americans, I think, would agree that we ought
to teach children that 6 times 7 is 42, but this test has been taken
over by people that believe it is, and I quoted earlier, downright
dangerous to teach children that 6 times 7 is 42. So they are
radicalizing even an objective subject like math.
I want to read you one or more of these quotes in a few minutes here.
One quick quote from Mr. Leinwand, this education expert. ``But none of
these larger social issues,'' he writes, ``is as compelling as what we
know about the sense of failure and pain unnecessarily imposed on
hundreds of thousands of students in the name of mastering these
obsolete procedures.''
The obsolete procedures he is talking about are computational math
skills. He goes on and writes, ``A few short years ago, we had no
alternative to pencil and paper computation. A few

[[Page H9497]]

short years ago we could even justify the pain and frustration we
witnessed in our classrooms as necessary parts of learning what were
then important skills. Today there are alternatives. There is no honest
way to justify, he writes, no honest way to justify the psychic toll it
takes to teach children to do calculations that involve simple math,
that is, multiplication and division.'' ``That,'' he says, ``imposes a
psychic toll and we shouldn't do it.''
I suggest in Japan and Germany, and elsewhere around the world, with
whom our children in the next generation will have to compete, they are
drilling their children on those same basic computational skills.
The other point is we are going to move away from them if we adopt a
national test, if we do not block it next week and get the help of the
United States Senate in blocking the President next week.
But I want to make one other point. You asked my colleague from
Colorado what input he had had on the test, and he said none. I have
had no input on the test, and you have had no input on the test. But,
more importantly, the parents and the teachers and the administrators
and even the students in the schools in my neighborhood or your
neighborhood or their neighborhoods across America have not had any
input.
I want to talk about one gentleman that had some input. I mentioned
the test was written as Mathematics Committee Recommendations to the
National Test Panel. There is a national test panel.
One gentleman on that panel, Alan Wurtzel, wrote a letter of
objection. He said wait. This test is a mistake. This test does not
test basic math skills. He dissented, and he wrote, quoting from his
letter of September 25th, ``The test assumes that by the 8th grade,
children can do basic arithmetic, including addition, subtraction,
multiplication and division of whole numbers, decimals, and common
fractions by hand.''
This is the guy they got to write the test. He had input. He goes on
to say, ``The problem is that this assumption is all too often
unjustified.'' Then he goes on and writes about a personal experience
where he was talking to the others on the panel that wrote the test.
``As I told the panel, we used to test cashiers at Circuit City to
determine if they could calculate the change due on a sale. So many
were unable to do so, that we gave up.''
He goes on and writes, ``We have got to include in this test basic
math skills.'' He is pleading as one of the panel members to include in
the test basic math skills, and his ideas have been rejected.
A single test written in Washington will not include the views of the
parents and teachers in our schools, and, for that reason, it will
nationalize the curriculum and leave America's education behind the
rest of the world.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman will yield, one of the places we have
had hearings this past year is we had hearings in the State of
Delaware. Delaware is the size of one Congressional district. We have
16 in Michigan, 54 in California, or whatever it is, or 52.
But in Delaware, the State of Delaware, they wanted to develop a
statewide test, and they used the right process. They started with
parents, teachers, local administrators, and it took them three years.
They are now to the point where they believe they have a test that is
testing the kind of skills that they believe need to be tested.
They have got parental input. What happens when you take a test? They
get a score. Who finds out about the score? The kids and parents. What
happens if the test is not validated with the parents? They say this
test is all wrong, and you end up wasting it.
These guys here in the administration developed a national test with
no involvement. They sat in an ivory tower somewhere and developed it
in what, six or seven months, and they think they are going to apply it
to Arizona, California, Michigan, New York, and what do you think the
people in Colorado are going to say?
Mr. SCHAEFER. They will reject it, certainly, because it stands in
the way of the local efforts that we have made to establish quality on
local terms.
If I can, let me jump for a moment to the bureaucrats who write these
tests that we are talking about, the national tests. What they
understand is that conflict and controversy within their ranks does not
compel public cash. It does not secure the taxpayers' cash for their
efforts.
If they can come to the White House, to the President, with a package
they have all agreed on in their closed rooms and secret little
settings, and come to the White House and say, you know, all of us
bureaucrats agree on this particular test, they get the Clinton
Administration and the U.S. Department of Education to back them and to
move boldly ahead in trying to secure the public money necessary to
move these ideas forward.
That is what you see here. That is why a singular idea with this
goofy notion on math, for example, that you should not challenge
children to do simple computations, that is how a goofy idea like that
is able to move forward in the Clinton Administration, because
bureaucrats understand if you challenge another bureaucrat, if you
embarrass a bureaucratic colleague, that the money goes away, that the
American taxpayers lose confidence, they will not spend their cash on
those kind of experiments with our children.
So they hide and they mask and they disguise the shortcomings of a
Federal Government-owned test in the way that the gentleman from
Arizona just described.
Again, it is precisely the reason when we talk about free markets in
education, talk about treating parents like real customers, the empire
is threatened, and the empire does strike back and begins to
characterize us as somehow anti-child and anti-education and so on.
The reality is the greatest hope for improving the quality of
education and academic performance for our children is not to give the
bureaucrats that the gentleman from Arizona described authority. It is
not to make the notion of, what was that, the psychic toll, this notion
that you present a psychic toll to children when you ask them to add
and subtract, we should not give those kinds of folks more authority
and more taxpayer dollars.

Mr. SHADEGG. If the gentleman will yield briefly, my concern here is
that we are literally within days, as early as Tuesday of next week,
this issue will be decided, and right now we have a fight going on
between the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate where the U.S. House has
said, no, do not steal local control of education away from our
neighborhoods and give it to bureaucrats in Washington, and the Senate
is caving in.
I am impassioned in my belief we have to fight this fight and win
this fight. Senator Ashcroft over on the other side is battling his
colleagues. We are in grave danger of having a national test imposed by
the Clinton Administration, written by these people, and I don't care
how good the test is, one test will not work. We need to let parents in
America write tests in their neighborhoods.
Mr. BOB SCHAFFER of Colorado. Any caring parent who understands what
the Clinton Administration is trying to accomplish with these tests
ought to be suffering a psychic toll of their own.
Mr. SHADEGG. I hope they will plead with their U.S. Senator to get
into this fight.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. I think it is very interesting. I have learned a new
term tonight. Instead of talking about stress or anxiety or whatever,
psychic toll, only somebody who would be developing a national test
could come up with psychic toll. I think it is about time we create
some psychic toll on the other body before we end up really creating,
we are going to have a test that does not work, and it will create a
lot of stress and anxiety and a lot of wasted effort at the local
level, because one more time, it is going to move more power away from
that classroom to bureaucrats in Washington.
The leverage point is the classroom, with the teacher that knows my
kid's name. That is where the money needs to go, where the decision
making needs to go, and we have got to get it there and move it away
from Washington, and we need to move to my colleague from California.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Who has been patiently standing by. I don't know of
my colleagues, how many of you, it is difficult to pass a school bond
even on a local district. In California it takes like two-thirds to
pass a proposition. It has been very difficult. And if we get

[[Page H9498]]

less than 50 cents on a dollar down to the classroom, where are we
going to get the money to upgrade those schools?
First of all, when you ask the public, more than a majority of the
public feels that the education system, even though we have good
schools, the majority feels that our public education system does not
even rate a C grade. If that is the case, I would ask most of the
majority to expect our schools to have nothing less than an A grade in
what it teaches our children.
Remember a gentleman named Jaime Escalante, I mentioned his name once
before? They thought he was radical when he thought he could teach
children mathematics; it was calculus. And the teachers thought he was
crazy. This was in a minority district, gang-infested, where the kids
were low achievers, high risk.
I would say that the parents thought he was crazy; the teachers
thought he was crazy. He got no support from the administration, and he
said I am going to teach those kids. And he set out to do that as an
individual. What a difference he made. Ninety-seven percent of the kids
went on to college in mathematics. Then he got the support of the
teachers. He got the support of the students. He got the support of the
administrators, and made a difference.
I think when we turn this around that we get the support of people to
say, listen, if we invest our dollars into education and there is a
tangible result from that, that is going to make my child's life
better, I am willing to give more. Part of that is giving them the tax
dollars back to their pocket instead of the Federal Government. But I
would say one of the ways we found out besides just the Federal dollar,
the State dollar, is the 21st Century bill that my colleagues
supported, goes in and lets private enterprise invest into high-tech
systems into the classroom. They get to write off, say a computer that
is less than 2 years old.
We have a nonprofit organization called the Detweiler Foundation that
when you take that computer, the school cannot use it, they upgrade
that computer with software and hardware. Guess what? They use prison
labor and they use military brig labor. It gives them a skill so maybe
they are not going to end up back there.
Then they turn around and give that computer, ready to use, to the
school. We are putting California schools on an 18-month cycle so that
we can upgrade and keep those schools up to speed. There is much more
that needs to be done.
Libraries, I think, should be, because we are asking people to come
off welfare, they have to have a place to access modern technology so
that they can upgrade their skills.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. You would love the story that our colleague from
Arizona and I can share with you about the student at the charter
school who was, I think, in his previous school had been labeled as a
difficult student or whatever.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. I got one of those, and he is doing great in charter
school.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. This kid was put into this environment where he was
provided an opportunity to flourish. You know what his strength was? He
developed a whole bunch of strengths. Do you know one of the things he
is really contributing to the school is--
Mr. SHADEGG. Rebuilding computers.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Rebuilding computers. They do not need a corporation to
rebuild the computer and give it to the school. This kid, they give
him, people drop stuff off and they give it to him and he fixes the
stuff and he is a great student now.
Mr. SHADEGG. He was flunking out and he is borderline genius in
repairing and putting computers back together.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. I think he is a great student now and he is
contributing in a very different way to this school. So everything is
kind of coming together because we have that student in the right
environment.

{time} 2115

It does not mean that the other school was a bad school, but we match
the student with the environment.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Would the gentleman agree, though, that nationally we
have a system where computers are given to the schools, and they are
ending up in a corner because they do not have the technology to
upgrade? This is fantastic.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Absolutely. I am just trying to reinforce the point
that we need to get the computers and technology in there. When it
happens, the gentleman and I need somebody to fix our computers for us,
and those kinds of things. These kids out there that are growing up
with it, they can do wonderful things, the more technology we give
them.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Think what we can do if we get 90 percent of the
Federal dollars there, eliminate bureaucracy, and get private
investment into our schools. That is a vision for the future of
education.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Remember what this means. If we get 90 percent of the
dollars to the local school district, instead of 50, that is about a 40
percent operating increase in local budget for every school district,
without any new millage. It just says, you know, we have cut this money
out and you are getting it, with no red tape.
So I thank my colleagues for joining me in this special order. We
have had a wonderful discussion and dialogue on education. The
important thing, as my colleague, the gentleman from Arizona [Mr.
Shadegg] keeps coming back to, we are going to be making a decision on
this testing issue, which is a much bigger issue than testing. It is
about who is controlling education, who is controlling curriculum, and
who is controlling dollars and direction for our local schools.
The House is firmly on record saying it has got to be parents,
teachers, and local school boards. The other body is moving in the
direction of Washington maybe knows best. That is the wrong direction
to go.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. I think the gentleman's crossroads program is one of
the most important programs we are working on in Congress.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. I thank my colleagues for joining me.

____________________