[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 6 (Wednesday, February 4, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H317-H323]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    EDUCATION IMPROVEMENT IN AMERICA

  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, I also would like to compliment the gentleman 
from Michigan (Mr. Hoekstra), who spoke before me, a fellow member of 
the Committee on Education and the Workforce. I found his presentation 
fascinating.
  I would certainly like to be a part of discussion on the items that 
he outlined there and hope that the committee itself officially can 
take up some of that discussion also. We will all benefit greatly from 
the kind of macrovision that he brings. And I salute the gentleman.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, will the gentleman yield?
  Mr. OWENS. I yield to the gentleman from Michigan.
  Mr. HOEKSTRA. I would very much look forward to working with my 
colleague. I realize that it is a complex issue, and I really think 
that where we are beginning with a macropicture really allows us to go 
through a learning process in very much a bipartisan way. So thank you 
very much, and I look forward to working with you.
  Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I salute the gentleman; 
and I congratulate him on his vision. I hope he understands also that a 
part of what he is talking about cannot be separated from education, 
what happens in our schools. He did mention the kind of training the 
workers will have to have, and that is what I want to talk about again 
tonight.
  Education for the next 3 or 4 months is certainly on my agenda; and I 
hope to put it on the agenda of most of my colleagues, especially those 
who are on the Committee on Education and the Workforce. I hope that 
all the Members of Congress will not let the present discussion that 
has been launched by the President in his State of the Union address, a 
list of items that he gave there related to education, I hope that that 
wonderful list will not get lost. I hope that we will not have a 
fragmentation of the discussions about education to the point where we 
have all these tiny, separate discussions going on and there is no 
focus, no unity and no sense of priorities.
  I want to hold on to a sense of priorities within that education list 
that the President offered. Some things are more important than others. 
One thing is key to everything else. Unless we understand that, I think 
we are going to lose out in our efforts to improve the schools, those 
schools that need improvement; and the great majority of American 
schools do need improvement, some more than others.
  In the inner city communities, like the ones in my district and in 
many other big cities, inner city schools are on the verge of collapse. 
They have lost their education mission already. There is a ceremony 
going on where the kids come to school. But, for a number of reasons, 
education of the kind needed to prepare youngsters for the complex 
society that we live in is not taking place.
  So I really want to focus finally on that. I think that some of the 
other things I have to say are very much related; but, most of all, I 
want to keep the drumbeat going for the improvement of education. It 
must be kept on center stage.
  There is a dangerous education emergency in the inner city 
communities of America where most African-American students attend 
school, and I want to send that message to my constituents and to other 
representatives of African-American districts and to the people who 
live in these districts. We have an emergency which is far greater than 
anything else that exists in American education.
  Other schools are in trouble. There is a need for improvement 
everywhere. Rural schools and schools where poor children attend are 
probably in similar difficulties to the schools of the inner city where 
most African-Americans attend school. But all schools can stand some 
improvement.

                              {time}  2130

  The emergency must be recognized, however, in the African American 
community, with leaders of the African American community. Members of 
the Congressional Black Caucus, everybody in a position which has any 
influence must be made to understand that our schools are falling 
behind at a more rapid rate every day.
  The indicator of the African American education emergency, which has 
the highest visibility and the most obvious exposure of neglect, is the 
dangerous and counterproductive condition of school buildings.
  I focused on construction, education and infrastructure, because that 
is most visible. If we cannot deal with that which is most visible and 
most obvious, then I have no hope that we are going to deal with the 
more complex in a meaningful and productive way.
  There are a lot of people who want to micro-manage the schools and 
have an answer for every problem that exists in the schools. Most of 
the people who have all the answers never took a single course in 
education at any college anywhere or never read a book on education, 
but every adult in America has ideas on how to improve education.
  But it is important that all of us, leaders and laymen, experts in 
education, et cetera, admit that there is something obvious that has to 
be corrected before we go forward on any other level. We cannot improve 
our schools with respect to the ratio of teachers to pupils in the 
early grades. That is one of the items on President Clinton's list, and 
I welcome that item, and we all should. It just makes a whole lot of 
sense. It is supported by a whole lot of research.
  It is not the solution to the problem. Automatically children do not 
learn by being placed in a situation where there are fewer children 
with one teacher, but it does improve things a great deal.
  However, you cannot have a better ratio of students to pupils unless 
you have more classrooms. You have got to construct more classrooms. 
You cannot have a situation where the teacher with the lower ratio of 
pupils to teacher can do anything, if the classroom that she has to 
teach in is unsafe, if it is poorly lighted. It is counterproductive 
with respect to education, and you are going to have no result from the 
initiative to produce more teachers and smaller classes.
  There are many other problems which result in a denial of the 
opportunity to learn to inner-city, rural and poor children all over 
America. There are other problems, other than construction, other than 
the physical infrastructure problem. But the physical condition of the 
schoolhouse itself tells the story of inadequacy with a loud and clear 
example.
  We do not have to go into abstract reasoning. We do not have to go 
into syllogisms, deductive or any other kind of reasoning. We do not 
have to use boolean algebra. It is quite obvious when a school is 100 
years old; it is quite obvious when a boiler in a school has a coal 
burning boiler and it is 70 years old. It is quite obvious there is a 
problem. It is quite obvious if you have coal burning furnaces in 
schools, you are contributing to a pollution problem that you are 
teaching children every day in the classroom should be eliminated. Some 
things are obvious, and, because they are obvious, it is a good place 
to start.
  So I want to start to continue the drum beat today on this theme. But 
before I do that, I want to talk about two other items that still 
relate back to the central theme of we have an educational emergency, 
and the place to begin to deal with that emergency is to deal with 
school construction and improvement of the infrastructure, to be real 
about it, to follow through on the President's proposal that we have $5 
billion for 5 years, which is totally inadequate, but it is a 
beginning, to use his initiative; to call upon the President to use the 
bully pulpit of the White House; to call upon the governors and the 
mayors in cities and states where they have a surplus now, a budget 
surplus, to let them take the initiative at the local and state level

[[Page H318]]

and deal with this problem of construction and physical infrastructure.
  But before I add my new evidence to my argument, the evidence beyond 
what I stated last week, I do want to take time out to do two things.
  One is I want to pay tribute to Ronald Dellums. I am very frustrated 
as one of the admirers of Ronald Dellums, my colleague from California, 
who is resigning from the Congress. I am frustrated because we have had 
several opportunities to have statements made on the floor on behalf of 
Mr. Dellums, and all of those occasions, the first hour, the second 
hour, the extra half hour, the extra time made today, all that time has 
been crowded, and it has been impossible to get the statement in, 
because so many people from both sides of the aisle have wanted to come 
forward and praise Ronald Dellums.
  He is a magnificent human being, he is a magnificent leader, he has 
been a magnificent Congressman. Certainly whatever Ronald Dellums 
decides to do in the future, he will be a magnificent person in that 
arena also.
  He is leaving the Congress, and his life and record, in my opinion, 
is a profound statement, and that statement sends a message of 
inspiration to all ages, including school age students. If I wanted to 
stay on the theme of education, I could certainly do it in discussing 
the life of Ronald Dellums.
  I am by profession a librarian, an educator. As a librarian, I saw 
how popular biographies were with young people. Probably the section of 
the library most popular with young people is biographies. The fiction 
section, of course, is very popular.
  Girls, I notice, read a lot of fiction, but girls also read 
biographies, and boys read a lot of biographies. So, in combination, 
biography, the study of the life of people, was the most popular 
section that I saw among young people when I was a librarian. I think 
it is good that that is so.
  I have seen the development of channels on cable television which 
deal with a lot of biography, the History Channel, the Discovery 
Channel, the Biography Channel, and I think they are very entertaining 
and a very good way to pass on knowledge of our history and our 
culture.
  The biography of Ronald Dellums is one that fascinates me. In my next 
career I want to be a writer, I want to write many things of many 
kinds, but I never was inspired to think of writing somebody's 
biography until the past few days when I have heard people making 
statements about Ron Dellums. I have learned a great deal more about 
him as a result of these statements and some of his responses to these 
statements that I never knew before. I had quite a bit that inspired me 
that I observed on my own, but I have learned so much more.
  Ron Dellums' life is the kind of life you would like to have between 
the pages of a book on a shelf in a library where young people come in 
to read. In terms of being a role model for inner-city African American 
youth, I can think of no better role model than Ronald Dellums, an 
exciting role model. His life has been an adventure, an adventure of 
ups and downs and taking great risk and getting pretty close to the 
edge of the precipice in many cases.

  He is a man who is an ex-marine, and young men like the whole macho 
nature of the Marine Corps and what that means, a guy who is a marine. 
He also in the crowning achievement of his career became the chairman 
of the Committee on Armed Services. The Committee on Armed Services is 
responsible for the legislation relating to the defense of the United 
States, the defense of the free world, the maintenance of some 
semblance of law and order in the entire world. That is where this 
marine rose to, the point that he was at at the height of his career.
  How fascinating that is. He recently was given a Medal of Honor at 
the Department of Defense, and that, too, I am sure is an exciting 
story for many young people.
  But we have learned from Ron Dellums' own mouth that he was like a 
lot of inner-city youth out there today, on the precipice, walking on 
the edge of the cliff in many cases.
  He was always very bright in high school and was slated to go places, 
and there was a chance for him to win a scholarship that would have 
paid for his entire college education, 4 years in college. But 
according to Ron, in his junior year began to slack up and become 
interested in girls and the kinds of things and pitfalls that many 
youth fall into, not only in the inner-city but elsewhere, too. But he 
was very bright, began to take things for granted, slacked off, and he 
missed off on winning that scholarship that would have paid his way to 
college, and his parents were very poor. So he had to begin college 
working. And like a lot of young people out there, it was tough to work 
and try to go to college, so he dropped out.
  There are a lot of dropouts out there, and they ought to know the 
story of Ron Dellums. He dropped out. He could have just kept dropping, 
but he wanted to make something of his life, and he saw military 
service as an opportunity. This relates to something my colleague was 
saying before, it was an opportunity to get an education. Go into the 
military service, and you come out using the provisions of the GI Bill, 
and you get an education. You can have an education paid for.
  That GI Bill was a revolutionary bill in the history of this country. 
They gave returning veterans an opportunity. They kept it going for 
quite a long time after that. So Ron Dellums decided to join the 
Marines in order, really, his ultimate goal was to go to college and 
get an education. When he came out of the Marines, he was true to his 
dream and went to college and got his bachelor's degree.
  While he was in the Marines, his experience there is a good example 
also to hold up to a whole lot of minority youth out there, African 
American, Hispanic, Asian, who from time to time, and I know, because I 
have been there, are going to face outright ugly immediate 
discrimination staring you in the face. Something is going to happen, 
and it happens all too frequently, that is going to make you seethe and 
boil, want to hit somebody, or give up.
  Ron Dellums had that kind of experience while he was in the Marine 
Corps. He had the highest score on a battery of tests that were given 
in his battalion. He came out with the highest score of all of the 
members of his battalion. So naturally there was interest in him. When 
they saw the score, people who were interviewing people for officers 
school, candidates for officer's school, wanted to interview Ron 
Dellums.
  Somebody had made a mistake and had not appropriately noted on the 
statement recommending that he be interviewed that he was not white, 
and Ron was told by his sergeant to go down to the quonset hut where 
they were interviewing candidates for officer's school, and, of course, 
he was thrilled and went down and reported. The officer looked up at 
him and said, you know, what race are you? They noticed that he looked 
a bit darker than most whites. And they corrected the error, the 
omission that had been made, and they told him, you know, we thought 
you were white. I am sorry, we don't need you. I am not sure they said, 
I am sorry. They said, we don't need you, we can't use you.
  That was one of those points in his life where he could have blown up 
on the spot and done something outrageous and gotten into serious 
trouble, or he could have crumbled away into a mass of suffering and 
feeling sorry for himself and hating the world and given up, but he 
didn't.
  That incident, and many others like that, of course, only gave Ron 
greater strength. So he went on, finished the Marine Corps, finished 
his college career.
  Ron Dellums came to politics in a very strange way. He was not 
seeking to run for office, he was just known among some young people to 
be a person of considerable leadership ability, and one day he was sort 
of tapped when they were considering a person to run for the city 
council, and he was a person who impressed them most as being most 
independent and caring the least about the glory or the patronage or 
spoils that might come with the job. He cared only about the fact that 
he wanted to speak his mind.
  He so impressed the people making the selection that they chose him 
to run for the city council, and he spent a lot of time trying to run 
away from that call of the people. But he finally succumbed, and he ran 
and he won.
  A similar call came later on for him to run for Congress against an 
incumbent in the Democratic primary, and

[[Page H319]]

he ran there and came to Congress as an African American from a 
predominantly white district. That is the way Ron Dellums came to 
Congress.
  He came to Congress as an advocate known for his stance on peace, an 
advocate for peace and the environment. He came as an advocate for 
those principles that had been enunciated in the Berkeley movement. He 
came and found a lot of people waiting for him with all kinds of 
insults and traps.

                              {time}  2145

  His office was bugged and his phone was tapped and a number of things 
happened because Ron Dellums was considered a great radical. Ron 
Dellums came as the advocate for peace and saw that peace and the kind 
of life that was needed, the kind of resources that were needed to 
create a just society where people could live in peace and want to live 
in peace was being blocked by the humongous military budget and the 
amount of resources and dollars going into the military. So Ron Dellums 
did another amazing thing, contradictory, the peace advocate became a 
member of the Committee on National Security. The Committee on National 
Security had on it a peace advocate that they did not welcome so much, 
so he had to endure quite a number of hardships there also.
  I could go on and on, but there are a whole lot of things that we 
could write in a special book just for young people as we often write 
biographies and shelve them in young adult section and the children's 
section; there are biographies written particularly for children, 
particularly for young people, and there are numerous examples of the 
kinds of problems faced by young people today that would be very 
inspiring for young people if they were to read them. There are 
numerous things that also should inspire all of us.
  Adults confronted with difficulties should take a page, a few pages 
from Ron Dellum's book, adults who want nice, tidy lives and see things 
in straight formulas should understand how this man's life is so 
admired and has become so productive as a result of dealing with these 
contradictions.
  The advocate of peace who went on to the Committee on National 
Security. The advocate of peace who stayed on the Committee on National 
Security long enough to become a chairman of the Committee on National 
Security. The advocate of peace who would come to the floor and make a 
presentation reporting what his committee had decided and the votes of 
his committee, and usually the votes of his committee were 
overwhelmingly in favor of whatever had been decided and alone in the 
center would sometimes be the Chairman himself. The Chairman of the 
Committee on National Security often would have to vote, feel compelled 
to vote against his own committee's proposals on the floor. The 
authorizing legislation for defense often received a no vote from Ron 
Dellums.
  Ron Dellums set us free. Those of us who always saw the military 
budget and the discussion of military strategy and security of the 
Nation as being off limits to laymen and felt we were sort of dependent 
on the experts, Ron became an expert, an expert with the point of view 
of a man of peace. Ron could explain the military budget in as graphic 
detail as any person in America. Ron could discuss military strategy 
with the same kind of precision and sense of vision and understanding 
of what had to happen, what resources had to be matched with what 
forces, et cetera, in order to guarantee that America was prepared to 
defend itself. Ron Dellums set us free and made it clear that a person 
who was a proponent of peace and a person who wanted to cut the 
military budget in order to create more resources for the education 
budget or for health care or for child care, that person was not 
unpatriotic. He sat there and talked about the defense of America first 
and talked about national security in terms which did not require a lot 
of wasteful spending that gobbled up and devoured resources that could 
go somewhere else.
  Ron Dellums set us free to understand the Trident submarine and many 
other kinds of submarines and the warheads on the submarines versus the 
warheads on the land base, versus the warheads of the air, and when we 
put it all together in terms of being able to defend ourselves against 
anyone, and how when we start adding to that we were just adding more 
expensive weapons that added nothing to our defense. He made us 
understand and set us free from the mystery and the mystique that most 
people like to bring and surround the whole matter of the military 
defense of the Nation with. Ron Dellums was the kind of person who 
could come on this floor and actually change the minds of his 
colleagues. There are not many Congressmen who can do that. I have seen 
it happen over and over again. We make wonderful speeches on the floor, 
but we seldom change the minds of our colleagues. Ron Dellums had the 
capacity.
  Some people have said, some people that believe in democracy, who are 
not cynical about democracy, have said that the Representatives and 
Members of Congress are the tribunes of the people in our democracy, 
they are the tribunes. If we are tribunes, then Ron Dellums was a 
tribune for the Members of Congress. He would summon us to do things 
that we normally might not have done. He could provide leadership and 
he could change minds and he could make those who disagreed with him 
always respect him.
  In summary, I would say that in one single body Ron Dellums carries 
the capacity for great passion as well as great wisdom. He was a person 
who felt--he is, this is not his eulogy, he still lives. He is a person 
that cares about whatever he undertakes with a great deal of intensity. 
He cares and lives with a great deal of intensity. But he also has a 
great deal of wisdom behind that intensity. I can think of no more 
noble mixture to describe and that I think all human beings should 
aspire to, the mixture of great passion and great wisdom, and that is 
the kind of person that we have been saluting for the last 3 days here 
in Congress. He deserves all the accolades that he has received and 
many more. Ron Dellums is a model for all Congressmen and 
Congresswomen.
  Ron Dellums cared about education and he made a great sacrifice when 
he left the arena of education and social service. He was a trained 
social worker. He left that arena to go on to the Committee on National 
Security because there was no one else to go from the peace movement. 
There was no one who had the peace perspective who was willing to go, 
so he was a social worker, he was very much concerned about education. 
He wrote, authored several bills related to education as well as to 
health care and some other items not related to defense, and he would 
certainly agree with the kind of proposals that I have been making here 
related to our education agenda for 1998.
  Before I go back to that agenda directly, there is one other item 
that I want to also mention, and that is the fact that tonight, I came 
here from an exhibit called the African-American Odyssey. The African-
American Odyssey is an exhibit across the street in the Library of 
Congress. It opened tonight and will be running for quite some time, 
about just that, the African-American Odyssey from the time the first 
slaves were brought into this Nation to the Civil War, and--not the 
Civil War, civil rights movement, past the Civil War to the civil 
rights movement. I think it is an exhibit that everybody in Washington 
ought to take a few moments to go over and take a look at. I think it 
relates very much to the President's initiative on race.
  The President's initiative on race is one of his farsighted 
initiatives where he deliberately started a discussion of race and the 
implications of race relations in this Nation before there was a crisis 
and before there was a crisis, he wanted some basic items put on the 
table, he wanted Americans from all walks of life and all ethnic and 
racial groups to talk about race, talk about relations between groups, 
and I think that this African-American Odyssey exhibition and items 
like this have a major role in this discussion.

  What has been absent in the discussion on race, the President's 
initiative so far, is a set of facts, pieces of history that everybody 
agrees to and understands on a just simple, factual basis. So much is 
not known about slavery, so much is not known about one of these raises 
that evolved from this discussion. Perhaps the race that is at the 
center of all of these discussions are African-Americans. Our relations 
with others, our relations certainly with the majority population is 
the most complex one. It has the most tangled roots,

[[Page H320]]

the roots are more tangled than any others in terms of history.
  There are many reasons why this discussion of race has to deal first 
of all and most of all with African-Americans and their experience here 
and their experience in relation to the majority, the white Americans 
who are in the majority. So we need to, in this effort, and I would 
strongly recommend this to the President, I will do it in writing soon, 
we need to have a grounding, a scholarly grounding as we go forward in 
these discussions now and for the future.
  The future may be 10 years, it may be 20 years. Nobody expects to 
solve any profound problems related to race as a result of initiating 
these discussions. It is where they have directed us, it is a sense of 
where we can go with these discussions that is most important.
  So I would urge the President to commission a group of Nobel Prize 
winners from all over the world. Maybe 10 Nobel Prize winners who would 
be charged with the job of laying out a study of the history of slavery 
and race relations starting back to the beginning of mankind and bring 
it right up to the rape of Africa where large levels of human beings 
for the first time were uprooted and hauled away. They were not 
involved in a war where it was a result of a war and losing a war; they 
became slaves. They were not involved in a situation where the 
conqueror, despite the fact that he was in power, respected them as 
human beings. They were not involved in a situation like the Romans and 
the Greeks where the Romans chose to learn a great deal from the 
Greeks, although they had the power to enslave them; they were involved 
in a situation where because of the fact that basically the European 
nations were Christian, they had to justify what they did by reducing 
these slaves to a category of being subhuman. The rape of Africa, the 
Atlantic slave trade and the fact that so many were transported across 
the Atlantic in subhuman conditions and the fact of exactly how many. 
If we try to find out exactly how many or anything close to a 
reasonable discussion of how many, and we read the books that are 
written and find that they are ridiculous. We cannot find anything 
which really has substance on some of these fundamental issues like 
exactly how many people were on the continent of Africa, not exactly, 
but approximately how many people were on the continent of Africa when 
the slave trade began.
  If we took a certain percentage out of Africa, what did that 
percentage look like? If we had the same ratio in today's population 
terms, what percentage of Africans were hauled away and what would the 
numbers be like if they were percentages of populations that exist now, 
so we would have a better idea of what terrible thing was done to a 
continent, black Africa, part of a continent.
  I would like to see scholars who are more or less objective, who have 
been cited as being great scholars by Nobel Prize, the Nobel Prize 
process; I would like to see them be given the charge of assembling a 
body of people, other scholars and historians and sociologists like 
Gunnar Myrdal, the Swedish scholar did a study called the American 
Dilemma. He did it on one person and it had a lot of value at that 
time. There is a great deal of value having someone who is not immersed 
in the situation take part in a process of really trying to lay out all 
of the problems and having us look at the facts, the history 
surrounding the problems.

                              {time}  2200

  I do not think the government should pay for this. I do not think we 
should get into government paying for it, because it will lead to a 
whole series of restrictions and political decision-making about the 
results and the final product that would probably jeopardize the whole 
project.
  I think foundations, and we have many rich foundations in this 
country and throughout the world. We do not talk much about the fact 
that there are a lot of big foundations in a few other countries, but 
certainly in this country foundations could pay whatever had to be paid 
to support this process. They could finance it.
  So if we have a combination of top scholars recognized all over the 
world, being able to buy the best expertise available, they could pay 
for a staff of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and write a 
total history. It may be encyclopedic and be quite long and take 5 or 
10 years, but write a history that more or less every civilized human 
being everywhere in the world could respect because of the process that 
produced it.
  From that history we could make some deductions. We could begin to 
see the truth. We could see a little part of that truth by going to 
visit this exhibit that I just mentioned.
  It is a beginning of opening the eyes of a lot of people who take for 
granted a lot of myths about slavery and the process of slavery, the 
process of arriving to the point where a Civil War had to be fought, 
the role of the abolitionists. There are a lot of young black men who 
ought to know the role of the white abolitionists and other whites, 
including the white soldiers who gave their lives on the battlefields 
in the process of setting them free, of setting their ancestors free, 
and of standing for the principle that all men are created equal at a 
time that they could not do it for themselves.
  That is one thing ought to bring us together and lessen the animosity 
among young blacks who feel that they have been victimized, is 
understanding the history that the whole flame of freedom and the whole 
insistence that every man is created equal.
  What we see in the movie, ``Amistad,'' the principle that John Quincy 
Adams sets forth, it was not self-evident at all because a great deal 
of propaganda and a great deal of rationalization, including bringing 
the Bible in and the myth of Ham, and Ham being cursed by Noah and told 
that his descendants had to serve everybody else. All of those myths 
can be laid to rest if we had a really factual history of slavery from 
the beginning, a history of the freedom struggle here in this Nation 
that began with whites insisting that the institution of slavery was an 
evil institution.
  The African-American Odyssey talks about that. It is a presentation 
at the Library of Congress which will have parts that will go on line. 
We can get it on the Internet. There are certain parts of this African-
American Odyssey that will go into any school, college, library 
anywhere in the country because they have put it on line and we can get 
it from the Internet.
  The Library of Congress is proud to announce it. This is paid for by 
gifts from Anheuser-Busch, the Philip Morris Company, Citibank, Fannie 
Mae Foundation, Home Box Office, James Madison Council, Library of 
Congress. In addition, a major gift from Citicorp Foundation to the 
National Digital Library of the Library of Congress allows this 5-year 
effort to transmit portions of the African-American Odyssey and some 
related rare and unique items from the Library's vast African-American 
collections to the classrooms, libraries, and community centers on the 
Internet electronically.
  I think that if we interject this profound note into the discussions 
that are going on as a result of the President's initiative on race, it 
will lift up the discussions to new levels. I am not criticizing what 
has happened before. There are a lot of important things happening in 
small ways.
  By the way, on the Internet there is a site called Promising 
Practices, and on that site one can find out what is being done in the 
race initiative, the President's initiative on race.
  They also have a section which, from day to day, lists the kinds of 
activities that are going on related to the initiative; and another 
section called Promising Practices, which delineates results that have 
been reported, the kinds of things they recommend all over the country.
  So this discussion of race and this understanding of race relations 
is not unrelated to my discussion of education in general.
  Because I am now going to conclude by discussing the collapse of the 
school system in New York City literally. School construction, the 
dangerous nature of going to school in New York right now, February, 
1998, and how the danger has mushroomed and why we are in a state of 
paralysis because people making decisions in New York City are not the 
same people whose kids are in those schools.
  There is a difference in race. There is an element of racism combined 
with incompetence and bureaucracy that make its impossible to move 
forward

[[Page H321]]

on providing a decent place to study for the schoolchildren in New York 
City.
  Even when the money is available, the evidence is that they cannot 
move. Nobody has a sense of urgency. There are not enough people in 
leadership who really care, so millions of dollars are sitting there 
waiting for something as simple and obvious as a conversion of a coal-
burning furnace to a gas-burning furnace which does not pollute.
  Mr. Speaker, we have 300 schools that have coal-burning furnaces. Of 
the 1,100 schools in New York, 300 have coal-burning furnaces. That is 
the statistic given to me. Some say 274, some say 284.
  Mr. Speaker, would the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cummings) like to 
speak? I would be happy to yield to the gentleman.
  Mr. CUMMINGS. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New York very 
much for yielding.
  I want to, first of all, compliment the gentleman. I was listening to 
him a few minutes ago as he talked about education.
  I also heard him talk about our distinguished colleague, Congressman 
Ron Dellums; and I just, when I look at the gentleman's career and I 
look at that of Ron Dellums' and I look at other congressmen and women 
who came before I did, it is sort of a sad day to see him go. And I 
know the gentleman from New York feels the same way.
  But as I listen to the gentleman's comments, and I listen to others, 
there is one element that I wanted to add, tack on to it, and I really 
appreciate the gentleman giving me this opportunity.
  When I was a student at Howard University here in Washington, Ron 
Dellums was one of my heroes. We were at Howard protesting all kinds of 
things, and a lot of us saw government as not something we wanted to 
get into. We felt that it would be very difficult to go into government 
and not have to sacrifice our feelings, our concerns and our 
convictions.
  Ron Dellums was someone who was a hero for us. When we saw this man 
come into the Congress, a man who stood tall, who refused to bow to 
anything that was not consistent with his conscience, it made us feel 
good.
  He also, as the gentleman well knows, is a man who is, like the 
gentleman from New York, consistently pursuing excellence, always 
standing up for what he believes in, always synchronizing his conduct 
with his conscience.
  So, Mr. Speaker, I just wanted to take this moment to not only 
compliment the gentleman from New York for all that he has been doing, 
and he has been certainly a tremendous leader in the area of education. 
I have long followed his career, and I want to thank the gentleman for 
constantly pounding the podium, constantly standing up for children and 
constantly making the case known about African-American people as they 
struggle through very difficult times.
  I was pleased to hear the gentleman talk about the exhibit, because 
that is very important, too. As was said a little bit earlier, we have 
to make sure that all Americans know the story of African-Americans and 
know the story of all the people and what part they played in creating 
this country.
  So I take this moment not only to salute Ron Dellums, but I also 
salute the gentleman from New York.
  I thank the gentleman for yielding.
  Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, reclaiming my time, I thank the gentleman for 
his remarks and would like to certainly say that Ron Dellums used to 
frequent special orders when he first came to Congress and was first 
frustrated. He spoke repeatedly about defense issues, Armed Services 
issues. The things that he was not allowed to say in the committee and 
could not get time to say on the floor, he came to say them in special 
orders.
  So I am here because I am inspired by his record; and I hope that, on 
the matter of education, we will achieve the same results so that 
somewhere down the line we are going to make a breakthrough to the 
conscience of Americans and they will understand as much about the fact 
that education is the number one national security issue as we now 
understand about certain more obvious defense issues.
  I thank the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cummings).
  Mr. Speaker, I think it is important to note that it is not only a 
national security issue, what happens with education. As my colleague, 
my Republican colleague, was talking about before, the workforce is 
going to be determined by the quality of education that we produce 
today. The workforce of tomorrow will be determined by that effort now.
  It also is important for us to understand that we are subjecting our 
children to conditions. And I say we because, regardless of where you 
live, you may have a suburban school which is perfect, but if you are a 
decision maker here in Congress then you are part of the problem, too. 
Any Congressman who does not wake up to the fact that we have an 
education emergency in our inner-city communities, that emergency 
begins with something as basic as buildings, as basic as bricks falling 
from school buildings and striking children.
  I talked about Yanahan Zhao last week. Just a week ago last 
Wednesday, I talked about Yanahan Zhao who was killed after bricks fell 
from a scaffolding that was being repaired by careless contractors who 
allowed that to happen.
  I talked last week about East New York Transit Technical High School. 
That is a high school building where the back wall, the whole wall, a 
wall that weighs 10 tons and was 500 square feet collapsed into the 
school yard. And the only reason large numbers of children were not 
injured or maybe killed was that the wall collapsed on Martin Luther 
King's birthday when school was out. It was a holiday.
  I talked about that was only the beginning. I gave some examples from 
across the country where other kinds of accidents are happening that 
are endangering children and teachers in schools, and I invited all of 
my colleagues to begin the process of collecting examples of mishaps 
that have endangered children or injured children or certainly that 
have taken the lives of children.
  There are many that never get reported. There are many that may get 
reported in the local paper and we may never know about nationally, but 
I think we do ourselves a great favor. It would be very useful for all 
of us to start collecting examples of where we fail children in the 
most basic way.
  We can debate a long time about whether we are teaching them reading 
properly. There is a great debate whether we should use the whole word 
method or phonics. There are debates about the importance of technology 
versus the importance of fewer teachers. There are all kinds of debates 
raging around instruction and pedagogy which will not be settled 
easily.
  But, Mr. Speaker, we can see a building where the ceiling has fallen 
in many classrooms. We can see the walls on the top floors of many 
schools. We can look at the age of many schools that are 100 years old 
and know the problems they are going to have.
  We know they have lead pipes in the plumbing and that if the children 
are drinking water and the pipes have not been changed and they have 
lead pipes, that may be a danger.
  We know if they have been built in the last 50 years that they have 
large amounts of asbestos in the walls for various purposes, not just 
the roof but also in the insulation.
  We know certain things are directly related to the age of a building, 
and we know that certain buildings cannot be wired with new technology 
because the facts are the wires will not take it. We know these things 
are happening.
  So let us document it for ourselves. Let us document it for all of 
those who do not believe it.
  The sight in New York is more obvious. We have The New York Times, 
which goes all over the country, which reports the most dramatic local 
news when children are killed by bricks falling; and the New York 
Times, along with other local papers, reports another incident that 
took place this Monday. Those who are skeptics and do not believe it, 
listen: Seventy-five children, three teachers and a custodian were 
stricken with nausea, dizziness and headaches; and 1,250 people were 
evacuated as carbon monoxide and other poisonous gases from a 70-year-
old coal-fired furnace drifted through an elementary school in Queens.

[[Page H322]]

                              {time}  2215

  This is a report from the New York Times dated yesterday, February 3. 
Seventy-five children, three teachers and a custodian stricken. Every 
child was traumatized. They had to be marched out of the school. There 
were ambulances and fire trucks. Every child experienced that, I assure 
you; whether they vomited or fainted or were clutching their throbbing 
heads and churning stomachs or not, they still were affected in a very 
negative way by this experience. So it is impacting everybody.
  The cause of the fumes were still under investigation on Monday 
night, but the board of education suspected human error. On the morning 
of chaos that raised questions about the safety of coal-fired furnaces 
in the city's schools and about funding and priorities and 
rehabilitating an aging, often crumbling school system, the pupils of 
PS 127 and its staff of 100 were evacuated twice. First they had a 
terrible smell that took the kids out, but it did not smell bad enough 
and it was not obvious enough, so they took them back in. But on the 
second time when they came out, there were ambulances and fire trucks, 
and many had to be treated at a hospital.
  I talked about Yanahan Zhao as one of those heroes that we do not 
want to see repeated. We do not want to see any more children killed as 
Yanahan Zhao was killed. I do not want to see any other kid like 
Jodyann Sibbles, 10 years old, a fifth-grader who said that the school 
smelled like rotten eggs, or any of her colleagues who found 
themselves, her fellow students who found themselves vomiting. Francine 
Johnson who stood with her daughter Yolanda, I do not want to see 
children like that who think that they might have been killed. Her 
mother said maybe she was overreacting, but carbon monoxide can kill 
you.
  I do not want do see children subjected to bureaucratese of the kind 
that has appeared in today's paper where you have officials of the 
board of education using very strange language. If you want to know 
exactly what I am talking about, listen closely to these statements. 
The officials say that the incident was the result of human error and 
not caused by the age of the furnace or the crack in it that was 
discovered during the investigation. The furnace is 70 years old and 
fumes were escaping, and they have some explanation about a new man 
that was putting the coal in, left a door ajar, and that interfered 
with the way the fan was blowing the air, et cetera. But during the 
investigation they discovered that there was a crack in the furnace and 
they said, no, there is a crack in the furnace, but do not worry about 
it. That is not the cause. Why would not a crack in the furnace, where 
the furnace is 70 years old, not be a possible cause?
  These same school officials admitted that they had made a mistake 
last month when they investigated the school heating system, and they 
put in a request for funding for a heating system upgrade. They did not 
put in a request for a new boiler. The money is available to replace 
the coal-burning furnace, the boiler that burns coal. All they put in 
for was an upgrade of the radiators and the ventilation system, not the 
boiler.
  The spokesman for the board of education says that now they are going 
to put the school on the list to have a boiler replacement. What reason 
does she give? Parents are alarmed. It is not that they made a mistake, 
not that they were callous, it is not that they are guilty of child 
abuse and neglect, they do not care enough to use the money available 
in the right way. No, parents are alarmed, and since parents are 
alarmed, rather than just make repairs, they decided to go ahead and do 
the full conversion. Almost half of the students stayed home yesterday 
because the parents felt the school is still not safe despite the fact 
that it is now open again.
  The city council has agreed this year to fund 21 boiler conversions 
in 279 city schools that are still heated by coal-fueled furnaces. 
Those numbers continue. Another 63 conversions are being funded with 
State bond money and board of education funds. Not all the schools have 
been identified.
  The board of education officials say there was no serious health 
problem at this school, PS 127, as a result of the exposure to carbon 
monoxide which was three times the acceptable levels on the school's 
first floor. Seventy-five children, four adults were treated at area 
hospitals for headaches, nausea and symptoms. The board of education 
said there was no serious health problem. The air quality returned to 
normal, they said, with a level of carbon monoxide measurable three 
parts per million, well below the acceptable level of 34.
  It has not been mentioned at any time by any official of the board of 
education that if a furnace has a crack in it or if there is something 
wrong with the ventilation system, the employees make mistakes and more 
carbon monoxide comes up into the school than should come from the 
basement where the boiler is, that children may be harmed if it happens 
on a small scale every day, and you cannot detect it because it is not 
so dramatic and obvious. I would not want to send my child back to that 
school until the coal-burning furnaces were replaced or something 
happened to remove that danger.
  It is highly probable that if the boilers, all three of them, this is 
one of three boilers, all are 70 years old, that there is enough carbon 
monoxide or other pollutants escaping on a small scale every day to 
cause harm to the health of the children because children are very 
susceptible to pollutants. They are the most endangered. So if you have 
that condition, you do not have to talk about three parts per million, 
well below acceptable levels of 34, if you know seepage is there.
  I do not think any member of the school bureaucracy would want their 
child to go to that school. I do not think any person with any common 
sense would want their child to continue to go to that school. Yet this 
is the kind of condition which probably exists in all of the coal-
burning schools.
  The efficiency of a coal-burning boiler that is 70 years old, and 
most of them are about that age, is such that you know you have the 
leakage. Even the most efficient coal-burning boiler is spewing 
pollutants high into the air which fall back and create other problems 
like the high rate of asthma in New York City.
  Let me just close my argument. These things are happening in a city 
that has the money to make the repairs and to convert the boilers. 
There are three sources of money. The school, the City Council of New 
York City several years ago appropriated $1 billion to start the 
process of converting the coal-burning furnaces to oil or gas, less 
polluting substances. They made the money available. The board of 
education has no explanation as to where the money went.
  We had an environmental bond issue at the State level, and part of 
the money raised from a more than a billion-dollar environmental bond 
issue was dedicated to the conversion of coal-burning boilers in the 
schools to updated, more efficient boiler systems. The power authority, 
the New York power authority, was given money even before that to start 
the process of converting the boilers in the schools. That money 
came from a consent decree which showed that one Exxon was not doing 
some things properly. They had to agree to compensate for it by making 
a lot of money available for some projects designated, related to 
energy. So the power authority was given the authority to spend money 
to convert the boilers. The money is there.

  For some reason they say it costs $1.3 million for the conversion of 
each school heating system; 1.3 million seems like a lot of money to me 
but I will not quarrel with that at this point. If you divide 1.3 
million into the amount of money that has been appropriated, I told you 
a billion before came from the city council, 28 million came to the 
school construction authority from the State environmental bond issue 
in fiscal year 1997, another 50 million in fiscal year 1998, this year, 
and the power authority had a large amount, several million before 
that. With all these millions, if you divide them by 1.3, you will find 
that the number of schools, eight schools, they are working on eight 
schools, they have not fully converted any, eight schools.
  So I close by saying the fact that bureaucrats who do not feel any 
sense of urgency are in charge of the schools impedes the process of 
improving the

[[Page H323]]

infrastructure even when you have the money. Nothing is more important, 
and we feel that there is a state of emergency and that we do what is 
necessary to take control from these bureaucrats and upgrade our school 
infrastructure as rapidly as possible.

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