[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 146 (Wednesday, October 14, 1998)]
[Senate]
[Pages S12533-S12534]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                               EDUCATION

  Mr. GRAMM. Mr. President, let me begin with education. First of all, 
I want to express some concern about the fact that the administration 
has decided, in the waning hours of this Congress, to suddenly bring 
education up as an issue in this omnibus spending bill that we are 
working on. I want to explain why I have concerns about this.
  First of all, so far as I am aware, the administration never 
mentioned education as an issue, despite the fact that we have been 
negotiating now for several weeks, until last Friday. All the time we 
were working, trying to finish the business of the American people, the 
administration never raised education as an issue, and suddenly on 
Saturday the President brings it up in his radio address, and now every 
day the President is somewhere doing a photo opportunity, or a press 
conference, or having a fundraiser on the education issue.
  I want to say a little bit about that because part of what makes it 
possible for you to finish your work, under very difficult 
circumstances at the end of a session, is when you have mutual trust, 
when you believe that both sides to the negotiation are acting in good 
faith and that we are trying to do the work of the American people and 
not gain political advantage. I am afraid that in this case the 
President is not acting in good faith in dealing with us on this issue.
  A second reason I was surprised this issue surfaced so late in our 
negotiations is that the President, in January, proposed in his initial 
budget that we spend $32 billion in appropriations on education. When 
we reported our funding bill, we spent $32 billion on education. So it 
seems strange to me to now have this issue raised about education when, 
in fact, we have provided almost exactly the amount of money that the 
President sought in January. But whether we think it is political or 
not, whether it makes any sense, given that we have funded almost 
identical levels to those requested by the President, the President has 
raised the education issue and I thought it was important to give a 
brief response of what the difference is.
  The dispute is not about how much money is going to be spent on 
education. As I said earlier, the President requested $32 billion; we 
have provided $32 billion. The question is not about how much money is 
going to be spent but the debate is about who is going to do the 
spending. Despite all the rhetoric of the President and the 
administration, the debate is not about the level of spending but who 
is going to do the spending. They want the Federal Government to do the 
spending. They want bureaucrats in Washington, DC, to do the spending. 
And what Republicans have done in the first change in national 
education policy in over 30 years is, we have voted to pass money back 
to local school districts so that local parents, local teachers, and 
locally elected school board members can set education priority. So the 
debate is not about how much money is going to be spent, the debate is 
about who is going to do the spending.
  Since the President has raised the issue, let me tell you our side of 
the story. Our side of the story first points out that we spend a lot 
of money on education, and we should. In 1969, we were spending $68.5 
billion on primary and secondary education in America.

[[Page S12534]]

 Today, we are spending a whopping $564.2 billion. So, in dollar terms, 
we have almost increased education funding tenfold.
  But yet, while education funding has exploded since 1969, we have 
seen SAT scores, which measure high school achievement, stagnate, we 
have seen reading stores stagnate, and we have seen, since 1969, a 
systematic decline of American student performance on international 
tests, where we have gone from virtually the top of each major learning 
category to near the bottom on each learning category.
  In fact, I just pick two here. This last year on international tests 
on physics, of all the nations that participated in the program, the 
United States of America ranked dead last. On math, a critically 
important ability given the modern era we live in--and we all 
understand the importance of mathematical skills in the information 
age--America ranked second to last of all nations that participated in 
the math testing program. This despite the fact that, on a per capita 
basis, we are one of the largest spenders on education in the world, 
spending in some cases two or three times as much per student as the 
nations that achieved the top scores on these tests.
  One of the reasons we are spending so much money and getting so 
little for it is really encapsulated in this chart. What this chart 
seeks to do is to show the 23 different federal government agencies 
that we have funding education through 300 different Federal programs, 
in trying to provide money for teachers, for at-risk students, and for 
young children. As you can see, looking at this chart, what we have 
created is a massive bureaucracy which has overlapping responsibilities 
and where we have 300 different programs basically all trying to 
achieve the same thing.
  Looking at this chart, you will not be shocked by the next chart. The 
next chart really is the measure of how efficient we are in getting the 
dollar we spend in Washington through to the classroom where the child 
is learning. What this tries to show is, starting out with $1 we spend 
here--not just through the Department of Education, but all federal 
education spending--how much of it actually gets to the classroom. 
Fifteen cents of every dollar we spend never gets to the school 
district because, for all practical purposes, it never gets out of the 
State and Federal bureaucracy. It basically is consumed here and in 
various State capitals, with Federal bureaucracies that we are 
basically paying to tell people how to run education. Forty-eight cents 
out of every dollar can go to support local bureaucracies--support 
staff, administration staff, people who are not directly involved in 
classroom instruction.
  So the bottom line is, from all of this mass of bureaucracy, we are 
getting 37 cents out of every dollar the federal government is spending 
on education into the classroom. So no wonder we are spending all this 
money with such poor results. This is the existing system. It is the 
37-cent solution. And the President says, many of our colleagues say, 
give this system more money.
  Our answer has been, look, if this system can only get 37 cents out 
of every dollar to the classroom, this system is fundamentally broken 
and it needs to be changed. What we would do in changing it is, 
basically, we want to go to a block grant system which takes much of 
the money that we spend in Washington, except for the amount that is 
targeted to critical needs such as children with special learning 
disabilities, special education programs, and what we would like to do 
is take $10.2 billion of the money we are spending in Washington and, 
rather than giving 63 cents out of every dollar of it to bureaucrats, 
which we do now, we would like to take the $10.2 billion and give it 
directly to local school systems. So local parents, local teachers, and 
locally elected school board members would determine how that money is 
spent. That gives us a 100-cent solution, because then every dollar 
will go to local teachers, local parents, and locally elected school 
board members.
  The President and, obviously, many people in Washington believe we 
know better; that it is worth having a program where only 37 cents out 
of every dollar gets to the classroom because the bureaucracy is adding 
so much value by telling parents and teachers and locally elected 
school board members, who do not understand education, how to do it.
  If anybody ever believed that, surely when we are in a situation 
where our test scores have stagnated, our reading scores are flat or 
declining, and where we are ranking last, or near last, in every 
achievement test given internationally, I just think it is 
unconscionable and hurtful to the country and to the children to stay 
with a system where only 37 cents out of every dollar we spend gets 
through to the classroom.
  That is what the debate is about. When you hear the President say, 
``We want Congress to act on education,'' we have already acted. The 
President wanted $32 billion. We have given the President $32 billion. 
But where the difference is, the President wanted the Federal 
Government to spend the money, the President wanted to keep a system 
where 63 cents out of every dollar gets lost before it gets to the 
classroom, and what we are trying to do is to give the money directly 
to local school systems and cut the bureaucrats out of it.
  When you hear the President talking about this issue, understand 
that, despite what he appears to be saying, the dispute is not about 
how much money is going to be spent, the dispute is about who is going 
to do the spending. Bill Clinton and our Democrat colleagues want the 
Federal Government to do the spending with an old system where 
bureaucrats get 63 cents out of every dollar. We want local parents, 
local teachers, locally elected school board members to do the 
spending, because we believe that people love their children more than 
the Government does. We believe that parents know better about 
education than the Government does.
  Let me also say for those who say, ``Where are the education bills 
that have been passed in this Congress?'' let me just remind those who 
are interested that we passed a bill in this Congress, this year, that 
provided parents with the ability to set aside tax free up to $2,000 a 
year to use to send their children to summer school or to get 
afterschool tutoring or to buy education equipment, like a computer, or 
to send their children to parochial or private schools, if they choose. 
The President vetoed that bill.
  We passed literacy funding. The President vetoed that bill.
  We passed a teacher merit pay program. The President, standing with 
the teachers unions and not with the students, vetoed that bill.
  We passed a bill giving low-income families some choice in education. 
The President sent his child to private school in the District of 
Columbia, and he had every right to do it. The point is, however, that 
we wanted to give working families the same rights the President had, 
and the President vetoed it.
  We had tax relief for parents whose children use the State tuition 
prepaid plan where you can start paying, even before your child is 
born, for him or her to go to Texas A&M, and you can do it at a 
discount because your money is building up. If they pass the test and 
can get in, you have paid for it. We wanted to give tax advantages to 
encourage families to do that. The President vetoed it.
  We had tax relief for employer-provided education assistance. We have 
all heard employers everywhere saying to us, ``The kids who come to 
work for us out of high school don't have the skills they need. They 
can't read, they can't write, they can't reason.'' So employers are 
beginning to pay their own money to reeducate their workers. We wanted 
to encourage it by making it tax free if they do that, because they 
know the skills they need. The President vetoed it.
  Finally, we now are trying to give local school systems more control, 
to take control away from Federal bureaucrats. The President says he 
will veto it unless we change it to spend the money his way, which is 
63 cents for bureaucrats and 37 cents for classrooms. That is not good 
enough for America anymore.
  Mr. President, how much time do I have left?
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has 13 minutes left.




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