[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 143 (Sunday, October 11, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H10521-H10522]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 THE ROLE OF FEDERAL MONEY IN EDUCATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from California (Mr. Farr) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. FARR of California. Mr. Speaker, I want to go back to my 
statement that I made in the 1-minutes on the spirit I felt in this 
country when I remember first getting involved and getting committed.
  Many of us are sitting here as parents. I think we have children 
growing up, and as a parent, we are more worried about the future of 
this country and this world for their livelihood. We all want to make 
the world better. I do not think that our Congress, with all the 
capability we have, a lot of very bright people elected on both sides 
of the aisle, are really focusing in on trying to bring out the best 
that is in America. I think that is where we are failing.
  We can get into the specifics of a program, and whether it is a mood 
to go to what I think is a fear of privatization, let us remove the 
safety nets, the gentleman is right. The last speaker talked about it. 
It is not who gets the credit. I believe that. We can accomplish a lot 
in life if we do not care who gets credit for it. But we have to 
accomplish it. What we are doing is not accomplishing it.
  One of the speakers earlier said we have too much Federal money in 
education. That is just factually wrong. That is wrong, wrong, wrong. 
Of all the money spent in education in America, the Federal 
contribution is 7 percent. Seven percent. That is not too much money. 
There is not anybody in America that will not tell us that if we have a 
top priority, it is educating our kids to prepare them for the 21st 
century.
  We have heard a lot of reasons. It has been debated and it will be 
stated here again today, I am sure. Why can we not do that? The one 
thing we have never done in this country, the Federal Government has 
never put one Federal dollar into school construction, not even a 
penny.
  If we are going to have overcrowded classrooms, and we all agree they 
are, if we are going to have more teachers to have smaller classrooms, 
which everybody agrees we need, then we have to build more space. We 
have to do that by offering incentives other than the mechanisms that 
are there.
  My colleagues, the gentlemen from California, know that we have a 
requirement in California that to pass the school bond issue to 
construct school buildings, you have to get a two-thirds vote. In a lot 
of communities where the need is great, they can never get the two-
thirds vote. There is no option. There is no option. Nobody is out 
there volunteering to build public schools for free out of their own 
private contributions.
  Mr. Speaker, we have to put some money into the school construction 
effort. The President, as we all learned in high school when we took 
government classes, the President proposes and we dispose. The 
President stood here in this very room and proposed to us that we put 
money into school construction.
  He had a clever idea, that we would give tax incentives so private 
individuals could pick up the interest rates on school bonds, as an 
incentive for schools to use more of the money for school construction, 
rather than less.
  What happened to it? It was destroyed here in Congress. We talked 
about putting 100,000 new teachers in the classroom. People say that is 
too much Federalism. If we go to a police chief in the United States 
today and ask if the Cops on the Street program is too much federalism, 
all of my chiefs of police that have received these Cops in the Street 
program told me they have never seen less bureaucracy. It is very easy, 
once you have made the decision that you want them, to get them. The 
program for schools would be the same way. There is not a lot of 
Federal bureaucracy there.
  Do Members know what it would do over the next 7-year period if we 
took the President's proposal and adopted it here? It would provide in 
our State alone, in California, 9,271 new teachers by the year 2005. We 
need those teachers. We need those classrooms. We need computers. We 
need all of the things that people talk about. But we are not going to 
get there if we are going to try to say well, the Federal Government 
should not help.
  I am passionate about this, because I think what we do in this 
country that is so great, and we are picking away at it and wanting to 
lose it, is that we have one Nation, indivisible. That indivisibility, 
it seems to me, is the safety net; that we will treat everybody, at 
least in this country, with a minimum amount of care.
  If we look at the education programs that we have created in the 
United States, they are that safety net. They are Head Start, they are 
ESEA Title I, they are grants to college students, Pell grants, they 
are things that are out there as safety nets. They are not the 
education system. The gentleman is absolutely right; America's 
education is run by the local school districts. But they cannot do it 
alone. We

[[Page H10522]]

need to help them. Do not deny them the opportunity to do that.

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