[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 38 (Wednesday, March 10, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Page S2500]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               THE EDUCATION FLEXIBILITY PARTNERSHIP ACT

  Mr. JEFFORDS. Mr. President, I will use a little of the morning 
business time myself to just bring everyone up to date as to where we 
are at this point. This concludes the debate time for today. Tomorrow 
there will be, I believe, 1 hour evenly divided for Members to talk on 
the amendment process.
  The purpose of that time will be to try to make sure everybody 
understands the amendments, because we have a number of amendments. 
They seem low in number--there are about eight or nine amendments--but 
some of those are complicated by combinations of amendments. So I urge 
all of our Members to make sure that they understand the amendments.
  Because this is an important piece of legislation, which I want to 
get through, and the leader does also, we will be using probably a 
tabling situation for many of the amendments. I want to explain why 
that is. That is because most of these amendments should be on the 
Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization which is being 
worked on at this time. That is a very important bill. It is a $15 
billion bill. It has most of the Federal programs. And we will be 
looking at it very closely to determine whether there should be a 
paring down of programs, how effective the various agencies and 
departments have been, and we will be spending the time of deliberation 
to better utilize and to make sure we can maximize our improvement.
  As I said earlier today, the evidence is very clear that we have made 
very little improvement in our schools over the last 15 years, although 
we have been trying. Thus, it is important we take a close look at the 
Department of Education to see that those funds are being well spent.

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