[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 29 (Wednesday, February 24, 1999)]
[House]
[Page H769]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                 SUPPORT THE EDUCATION FLEXIBILITY ACT

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Washington (Mr. Smith) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. SMITH of Washington. Mr. Speaker, I address the House today to 
support the Education Flexibility Act, a bill sponsored by the 
gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Roemer) and the gentleman from Delaware 
(Mr. Castle). It is a bipartisan bill aimed at giving greater 
flexibility to local schools to do their job, the important job they do 
of educating our children.
  During the past couple of months I have visited 10 or 12 schools in 
my district, and visited the school districts there to sort of find out 
what they think of the Federal role in education. The Federal role in 
education usually accounts for about 4 to 8 percent of the budgets of 
the average school district, and I wanted to know if they thought that 
was helping.
  The answer I got back was, yes, the money helps, but there is too 
much red tape and there is too much regulation. They want greater 
freedom so that they can exercise their skills and use the teachers and 
principals and parents and everybody involved in education on the local 
level. There is too much Federal red tape, and the Education 
Flexibility Act would target that red tape.

  Right now we have a pilot project that allows some 12 States in the 
country to take advantage of education flexibility. This bill would 
expand it to all 50 States. And what it would do is give local school 
districts the ability to get waivers from those Federal regulations.
  But the important thing about education flexibility is that it 
combines flexibility with accountability, which is the way it ought to 
be done. You can get the waiver, the local school districts can get the 
waiver from the Federal requirements, but only if they have local 
standards that they can demonstrate that they are meeting.
  The key word in there is local. Not national standards. They can have 
their own standards, but they have to have that accountability/
flexibility mix. The Education Flexibility Act that is being proposed 
and introduced this week offers that mix and is a key to helping our 
schools move forward with the important job they do of reforming the 
education system and educating our children.
  I think it is very important that we go further than the Education 
Flexibility Act. Right now there is far too much red tape and far too 
many regulations in hundreds of different areas generated from the 
Federal Government. That does not really help our local schools but 
only ties them in knots.
  I do not want the people working in the schools in my community to 
spend all of their time filling out forms and justifying their 
existence to the Federal Government. I want them to be educating the 
children there and doing the job that really matters. Right now, far 
too often, they are filling out the forms and trying to qualify for the 
money and continually justifying what they are doing. We need to change 
that. We need to shift to local control.
  From one end of this country to the other exciting things are going 
on in States and school districts. They are making the reforms 
necessary. They are moving towards accountability. And right now the 
Federal Government is too big of a noose stopping them from making 
progress on that. We need to make changes like the Education 
Flexibility Act.
  As a Democrat, I have always been a strong supporter of education, 
and I support my fellow Democrats in supporting spending the money 
necessary to help with education and supporting public education. 
Public education is responsible for over 90 percent of the children in 
this country getting educated. It needs our support.
  But we cannot simply spend money on it. We must show that we are 
willing to move in two other critical directions. One is accountability 
and the other is flexibility, which means local control. Giving the 
power back to the individual school districts and the individual 
schools, and ultimately to the teachers and parents who are closest to 
the product, closest to our children and closest to educating them and 
who know best how to do it.
  We need to make those changes so that we can have the world class 
public education system we need. The Education Flexibility Act that we 
introduce this week, as I mentioned, primarily sponsored by the 
gentleman from Indiana and the gentleman from Delaware, is a critical 
step. I urge all of my colleagues to support Ed-Flex, pass it as soon 
as possible, and then go further to encourage the flexibility and 
accountability that we need in our local schools.

                          ____________________