[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 73 (Tuesday, June 9, 1998)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E1064]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                  HOW TO BUILD A BETTER SCHOOL SYSTEM

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. NEWT GINGRICH

                               of georgia

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, June 9, 1998

  Mr. GINGRICH. Mr. Speaker, the attached editorial from The Washington 
Times illustrates why we should help parents send their children to 
schools of their choice. Mayor Stephen Goldsmith of Indianapolis uses 
the situation in that city to demonstrate why Catholic schools have 
been able to perform better than the public schools. I submit the 
editorial to the Congressional Record.

                  How To Build a Better School System

                         (By Stephen Goldsmith)

       President Clinton found ardent supporters of his proposal 
     to invest in public school buildings at a recent meeting with 
     members of the U.S. Conference of Mayors. More money for 
     schools--without having to raise local taxes--is a no-brainer 
     for many mayors seeking an answer to failing urban schools.
       Yet there are a handful of mayors from both parties who 
     believe that more than federal dollars are needed to address 
     the real problems facing urban schools. As cities have 
     experienced the downward spiral of rising taxes, declining 
     enrollment and abysmal students performance, increasingly 
     city leaders are recognizing that lack of money is not what 
     ails our public school systems.
       The Indianapolis Public School system is the largest of 
     eleven in this city, responsible for approximately 43,000 
     students from the central part of the city. During the 1990s 
     the district raised its taxes more than a third, even as 
     enrollment dropped by 10 percent. Not including teacher 
     pensions, IPS spends more than $9,000 per child--as much if 
     not more than the city's most expensive private schools. If 
     money were the key ingredient for quality schools, students 
     at IPS would rank among the best in the world. Instead, 
     student test scores are among the worst in Indiana--a state 
     that consistently ranks in the bottom 10 percent in the 
     nation.
       As the district's declining enrollment makes clear, 
     dissatisfied parents are seeking out alternatives to public 
     schools. While middle and upper class families often either 
     move to the suburbs or pay private school tuition, many less 
     affluent parents have turned to a less expensive choice: 
     Catholic schools.
       Like IPS, inner city parochial schools in Indianapolis are 
     racially diverse and serve primarily low income, non-Catholic 
     kids. At St. Philip Neri, a Catholic school on the city's 
     near east side, nearly three quarters of all students qualify 
     for the federal school lunch program, and a similar 
     proportion are not Catholic.
       Unlike IPS, tuition at these schools averages a mere $2700 
     per child. Yet each year parochial students demonstrate a 
     better grasp of learning fundamentals than students in the 
     public school system. Perhaps even more telling, student 
     performance improves for each year spend in Catholic schools, 
     while scores at IPS decline. In a recent evaluation of 
     standardized test scores, Catholic school third graders held 
     relatively small advantages over IPS students in math and 
     English. By the eighth grade, however, Catholic school 
     students scored nearly twice as high as students in the 
     public system.
       There are two important reasons why Catholic schools 
     outperform their public counterparts.
       First, they are allowed to succeed. Catholic schools are 
     free from the bloated education bureaucracies that divert tax 
     dollars away from public classrooms. The Friedman Foundation 
     estimates that as little as 30 cents out of every dollar 
     spent on education in Indianapolis actually make their way to 
     the places where children learn. The rest is lost on the 
     layers of bureaucracy between Indiana's Department of 
     Education and teachers. For example, over the next three 
     years the IPS Service Center, which houses support services 
     such as vehicle maintenance, media services, and a print 
     shop, will undertake a nearly $7.5 million capital 
     improvement project. The task: constructing a new kitchen.
       In addition to siphoning off dollars, the school 
     bureaucracy undermines public education by dictating in great 
     detail how principals can run their schools and teachers can 
     teach their students. The morass of regulations governing 
     public education prevents teachers from tailoring their 
     teaching to the diverse needs of students and taking 
     innovative approaches to educating. Not coincidentally, some 
     of the best IPS schools are those at which teachers routinely 
     disregard many of these rules, using their own choice of 
     textbooks, curricula, and teaching methods to ensure that 
     kids learn.
       The other reason that Catholic schools succeed is equally 
     simple: they have to. If St. Philip Neri fails to satisfy its 
     customers, parents will take their tuition dollars elsewhere. 
     In contrast, customer satisfaction is irrelevant to public 
     schools, especially those serving low income families. 
     Government simply tells these parents which school their 
     children must attend, and parents who cannot afford a private 
     alternative have no choice but to send their children there, 
     regardless of how poorly that school performs.
       If we are committed to giving all our children an 
     opportunity, we must apply to the public school system the 
     same simple principles that enable private and parochial 
     schools to succeed.
       In Indianapolis, our experience with allowing public 
     employees and private companies to compete for contracts to 
     provide city services has consistently demonstrated that 
     competition improves government-run enterprises. For each of 
     the 75 services subjected to competition, marketplace 
     pressure has exploded bureaucracies, reducing layers of 
     management, empowering workers, and refocusing these agencies 
     on satisfying their customers. In order to win business, 
     public employees have cut their own budgets while improving 
     service quality, dramatically outperforming their previous, 
     better-funded monopoly.
       The same competitive forces can empower public schools to 
     succeed. Committed reformers have offered numerous proposals 
     to break up the government school monopoly and empower public 
     schools to educate more effectively, including vouchers, 
     charter schools, and the education savings accounts currently 
     before Congress. Unfortunately, the president's threatened 
     veto of the education savings proposal demonstrates that this 
     administration continues to believe that any problem can be 
     cured with more federal dollars.
       Forcing lower income parents to send their children to 
     poorly performing schools (even in nice buildings) will not 
     improve the prospects of urban youths. What our cities' 
     mayors should be advocating for in Washington is not simply 
     more money to support a failing school bureaucracy, but more 
     help for parents to send their children to the schools of 
     their choice.

     

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