[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 47 (Friday, April 24, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Page S3562]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                           THE EDUCATION BILL

  Mr. LOTT. Mr. President, I wish to speak briefly on a couple of 
issues. I will not take long. But I want to again express my 
appreciation to a number of Senators and to the Senate as a whole for 
the passage of the education bill on Thursday night by a bipartisan 
vote of 56 to 43 with one Senator being absent. I think you have to 
acknowledge that Senator Coverdell of Georgia was persistent. He was 
fair. This issue really has been considered in one form or another for 
over a month. But he stuck with it. There was a lot of give and take. I 
appreciate the involvement of Senator Torricelli of New Jersey and his 
support of the bill. But more important than that, I appreciated the 
tone of the debate. There are fundamental disagreements on how we begin 
to improve the quality of education in America, deal with violence in 
the schools, and drugs in the schools. That is understandable. But we 
don't have to be nasty in our disagreements. We weren't.
  I thought the debate was of a high quality. While the disagreements 
are passionate, we covered a lot of subjects over the last week, a lot 
of amendments. We probably voted on 10 or 12 amendments on this bill. 
Others were accepted or agreed to in one way or another or set aside by 
agreements. It took cooperation to get it done even after most of the 
week was spent on that. I think we came up with a good bill. Education 
is important. This is the best debate I have seen on education in many 
years. Having been in Congress for 25 years, the debate on education 
over those 25 years has always been the same: more decisions from 
Washington, more programs from Washington, more strings from 
Washington, more money from Washington. And the test scores and the 
violence--the test scores have been going down and the violence and 
drugs have been going up. What we have been doing is not working. We 
need to try some different things.
  This bill does that: More choice in elementary and secondary 
education, No. 1.
  I emphasized in my remarks that in my own State, higher education in 
America is the best in the world. People want to come from all over the 
world and go to schools, from Stanford to Harvard to Ole Miss, to get 
degrees in science and engineering, business, or whatever.
  But our elementary and secondary education has been deteriorating, 
and we are way down on most lists. Why is that? What is the difference 
between higher education and elementary and secondary education? One 
difference is choice. When you finish high school you can go to a trade 
school, you can go to a community college, you can go to a 
denominational college, or you can go to a university. You have a 
choice. The second big difference is you have financial assistance to 
be able to do it.
  For 2 years I worked in the placement and financial aid office at the 
University of Mississippi. I know the importance of grants, loans, 
scholarships, and work-study programs for any student in America. Any 
student in America can go to college. He or she has a choice. Not so in 
elementary and secondary. If you are poor, if you come from a blue-
collar working family like I did, son of a shipyard worker and a mother 
that taught school to help make ends meet, they couldn't afford to send 
me to a different school. They couldn't afford today's market. They 
wouldn't have been able to afford tutors or computers. They just 
couldn't have done it. We don't have financial assistance. There needs 
to be some. How can you get it?
  No. 1, allow the parents to keep more of their money and make choices 
about how to spend their money in helping their children. This is not 
an attack on public schools.
  I am a product of public schools. My wife is a product of public 
schools. Both of my children went to public schools from the first 
grade through college. Now, a lot of people who are pontificating as 
great defenders of public education went to private schools and send 
their children to private schools. It makes it difficult to believe 
that you are as sincere as I am. I want to help public education, but I 
want to give parents a choice.
  When I give this sort of speech to some of the traditional education 
groups, they say, ``But the bad schools, the bad public schools may not 
make it.'' Right. That is the idea. It is called competition. It is 
called quality. Get right, improve the quality of your teachers, 
improve the quality of the administration, or go out of business; let 
somebody else do it that can do a better job.
  This bill also included merit pay for teachers, teacher testing. I 
still don't understand why it is OK to test and test and test the 
students but, oh, you can't test the teachers. That is one of the 
problems we have all over this country. We don't always have good-
quality teachers. Should we encourage it? Should we pay them better? 
Yes. Should they be paid by the Federal Government? No. That is a local 
decision, State decision.
  Senator Gorton came up with a block grant approach, but it was an 
interesting approach. Again, it is a choice. He took programs, 
consolidated them into something over $10 billion, and he said, Well, 
now, States, if you want to continue with the traditional strings-
attached, Washington-knows-best controls from the bureaucracy, you can 
do that. If Massachusetts wants its money to come through the Federal 
multiplicity of programs with directions of how it must be spent, 
Massachusetts can choose that. But if Texas wants to bring it through 
their State government and then to the local schools, they can choose 
that.
  Or in my State of Mississippi, I hope we would choose to let it go 
direct to the schools. Why does it have to stop in Atlanta or Jackson 
and trickle down and trickle down and trickle down, with everybody 
taking a bite for administrative costs--5 percent, 10 percent, 15 
percent? Why not let it go from Washington directly to the schools and 
let the administrators, the parents, the teachers, and the children 
decide where that $10 billion portion that they get would be spent? 
Hopefully, they would spend it for STAR teachers, merit pay for better 
teachers, teachers who work hard, do the extra thing. Maybe they would 
decide to spend it on construction. That is OK if they make the 
decision at the local level. That is their choice.
  I think they are crying wolf. Those who want the status quo, those 
who want Washington to make the decisions, those who want controls and 
directions of how the money is going to be spent from Washington, they 
didn't like what we did this week and what we voted on last night. 
Those who say the status quo is not good enough when it comes to 
education should feel good about our effort last night. Now, they say, 
Well, the President is going to veto it. I don't know that he will. It 
is like laws; they are not unconstitutional until some court or the 
Supreme Court says they are unconstitutional. A bill is not vetoed 
until a President vetoes it. It will have to go through conference. 
Perhaps changes will be made. Perhaps the President will have a 
conversion and decide this is good legislation. But if he does veto it, 
the parents will know who has faith in them and the local education 
apparatus and those who believe Washington is the only place that can 
decide what is best for education in America.

  So I slept better last night knowing that at least we were trying to 
make sure that my prospective grandson will have more opportunity and 
greater choices in education.

                          ____________________