[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 96 (Thursday, July 1, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S8071-S8073]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




          A BUDGET SURPLUS TO REFORM AMERICA'S PUBLIC SCHOOLS

  Mr. KERRY. Mr. President, I want to spend a few moments today to talk 
about one of the great questions to which I believe the Senate has yet 
to take a stand. That is the question of reform of our public school 
system. And Mr. President, I would suggest that today the 
responsibility to be creative, to be resourceful, and to empower our 
schools resides right here in the United States Senate.
  I am grateful that President Clinton has recently taken a position a 
number of us have advocated in this age of budget surpluses. Now it's 
time for all of us to acknowledge that some proportion of these 
projected budget surpluses should be set aside for education reform--
set aside in a lockbox. And, Mr. President, I would suggest that we 
should all be able to agree that any budget we conclude this year--if 
it is a budget that reflects the American people's most urgent need--
must include more funding for school reform.
  Let's be honest--as a society, there is no decision of greater 
importance to the long term health, stability, and competitiveness of 
this nation than the way we decide to educate our children. We look to 
public schools today to educate our children to lead in an information 
age and a global economy where borders have vanished--and the wealth of 
nations will be determined by the wisdom of their workers--by their 
level of training, the depth of their knowledge, and their ability to 
compete with workers around the world.
  Mr. President, two hundred years ago Thomas Jefferson told us that 
our public schools would be ``the pillars of the republic''--he was 
right then, he is right now--but today there is a caveat: those public 
schools must also be--more than ever--the pillars of our economy and 
the pillars of our communities.
  And I would respectfully suggest to you that there has not been a 
more urgent time than the present to reevaluate the way America's 
greatest democratic experiment is working--the experiment of our 
nation's public schools.
  Those pillars of the republic have never before had to support so 
heavy a burden as they do today. In our world of telecommuting; the 
Internet; hundreds and soon thousands of television channels; sixty, 
seventy and eighty hour work weeks--there are fewer and fewer places 
where Americans come together in person to share in that common civic 
culture, fewer ways in which we unite as citizens. And more reasons, I 
believe, why this nation must have a great public school system.
  And what can we say of the system before us today? I think we must 
say that--although there are thousands of public schools in this 
country doing a magnificent job of educating our children to a world 
class level--too many of our schools are struggling and too many kids 
are being left behind.
  I believe we have a responsibility to be the true friends of public 
education--and the best friends are critical friends, and it is time 
that we seek the truth and offer our help to a system that is not doing 
enough for a large proportion of the 50 million children in our public 
schools today--children whose reading scores show that of 2.6 million 
graduating high school students, one-third are below basic reading 
level, one-third are at basic, only one-third are proficient and only 
100,000 are at a world class reading level; children who edge out only 
South Africa and Cyprus on international tests in science and math, 
with 29 percent of all college freshmen requiring remedial classes in 
basic skills.
  This year we have already passed the Ed-Flex Bill, a step forward in 
giving our schools the flexibility and the accountability they need to 
enact reform, making it a matter of law that we won't tie their hands 
with red tape when Governors and Mayors and local school districts are 
doing all they can to educate our kids, but also emphasizing that with 
added flexibility comes a responsibility to raise student achievement.
  But EdFlex was just one step to balance accountability and 
flexibility--to continue the process of real education reform--and that 
is why my colleague, the Senator from Oregon, Gordon Smith, and I have 
come together, in a bipartisan way--through the Kerry-Smith approach to 
education reform we've introduced with Ted Kennedy, Max Cleland, Evan 
Bayh, John Edwards, Carl Levin, Patty Murray, Richard Bryan, as well as 
John Chafee, Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe from Maine. Ours is an 
approach which will make a difference in our schools and which can 
bring together leaders from across the political spectrum around good 
ideas which unite us.
  For too long in this country the education debate has been stuck both 
nationally and locally. Leaders have been unable or unwilling to answer 
the challenge, trapped in a debate that is little more than an echo of 
old and irrelevant positions with promising solutions stymied by 
ideology and interest groups--both on the right and on the left.
  Nowhere more than in the venerable United States Senate, where we 
pride ourselves on our ability to work together across partisan lines, 
have we--in so many debates--been stuck in a place where Democrats and 
Republicans seem to talk past each other. Democrats are perceived to be 
always ready to throw money at the problem but never for sufficient 
accountability or creativity; Republicans are perceived as always ready 
to give a voucher to go somewhere else but rarely supportive of 
investing sufficient resources to make the public schools work.
  Well, I think it is in this Congress, this year, that we can finally 
disengage ourselves from the political combat, and acknowledge that 
with so much on the line, such high stakes in our schools, you can't 
just talk past each other and call it reform.

[[Page S8072]]

  We all need to do our part to find a new answer, and Mr. President I 
would respectfully suggest that in the bipartisan support you see for 
this approach, there is a different road we can meet on to make it 
happen.
  Together we are introducing the kind of comprehensive education 
reform legislation that I believe will provide us a chance to come 
together not as Democrats and Republicans, but as the true friends of 
parents, children, teachers, and principals--to come together as 
citizens--and help our schools reclaim the promise of public education 
in this country. We need to ask one question: ``What provides our 
children with the best education?'' And whether the answer is 
conservative, liberal or simply practical, we need to commit ourselves 
to that course.
  Our bill is built on the notion of providing grants for schools with 
real accountability to pursue comprehensive reform and adopt the proven 
best practices of any other school--Voluntary State Reform Incentive 
Grants so school districts that choose to finance and implement 
comprehensive reform based on proven high-performance models can bring 
forth change. We will target investments at school districts with high 
numbers of at-risk students and leverage local dollars through matching 
grants. This component of the legislation will give schools the chance 
to quickly and easily put in place the best of what works in any other 
school--private, parochial or public--with decentralized control, site-
based management, parental engagement, and high levels of 
volunteerism--while at the same time meeting high standards of student 
achievement and public accountability. I believe public schools need to 
have the chance to make changes not tomorrow, not five years from now, 
not after another study--but now--today.

  So if schools will embrace this new framework--every school adopting 
the best practices of high achieving schools, building accountability 
into the system--what then are the key ingredients of excellence that 
every school needs to succeed?
  Well, I think we can start by guaranteeing that every one of our 
nation's 80,000 principals have the capacity to lead--the talents and 
the know-how to do the job; effective leadership skills; the vision to 
create an effective team--to recruit, hire, and transfer teachers and 
engage parents. Without those abilities, the title of principal and the 
freedom to lead means little. We are proposing an ``Excellent 
Principals Challenge Grant'' which would provide funds to local school 
districts to train principals in sound management skills and effective 
classroom practices. This bill helps our schools make being a principal 
the great calling of our time.
  But as we set our sights on recruiting a new generation of effective 
principals, we must acknowledge what today's best principals know: 
principals can only produce results as good as the teachers with whom 
they must work. To get the best results, we need the best teachers. And 
we must act immediately to guarantee that we get the best as the United 
States hires 2 million new teachers in the next ten years, 60% of them 
in the next five years. In the Kerry-Smith Bill we will empower our 
states and school districts to find new ways to hire and train 
outstanding teachers: through a focus on teacher quality and training--
in Title V of this bill--we can use financial incentives to attract a 
larger group of qualified people into the teaching profession and we 
can provide real ongoing education and continued training for our 
nation's teachers.
  This legislation will allow states to reconfigure their certification 
policies and their teaching standards to address the reality that our 
standards for teachers are not high enough--and at the same time, they 
are too rigid in setting out irrelevant requirements that don't make 
teaching better; they make it harder for some who choose to teach. We 
know we need to streamline teacher certification rules in this country 
to recruit the best college graduates to teach in the United States. 
Today we hire almost exclusively education majors to teach, and liberal 
arts graduates are only welcomed in our country's top private schools. 
Our legislation will allow states to rewrite the rules so principals 
have a far greater flexibility to hire liberal arts graduates as 
teachers, graduates who can meet high standards; while at the same time 
allowing hundreds of thousands more teachers to achieve a more broad 
based meaningful certification--the National Board for Professional 
Teaching Standards certification with its rigorous test of subject 
matter knowledge and teaching ability.
  This legislation will build a new teacher recruitment system for our 
public schools--providing college scholarships for our highest 
achieving high school graduates if they agree to come back and teach in 
our public schools.
  We will demand a great deal from our principals and our teachers--
holding them accountable for student achievement--but Mr. President we 
also hope to build a new consensus in America that recognizes that you 
can't hold someone accountable if they don't have the tools to succeed.
  Our bill helps to close the resource gap in public education: helping 
to eliminate the crime that turns too many hallways and classrooms into 
arenas of violence by giving school districts incentives to write 
discipline codes and create ``Second Chance'' schools with a range of 
alternatives for chronically disruptive and violent students--
everything from short-term in-school crisis centers, to medium duration 
in-school suspension rooms, to high quality off-campus alternatives, 
providing the resources that can, in tandem with values and character 
education, prevent senseless tragedy before it happens; the resources 
to help every child come to school ready to learn by funding 
successful, local early childhood development efforts; and making 
schools the hubs of our communities once more by providing support for 
after school programs where students receive tutoring, mentoring, and 
values-based education--the kind of programs that are open to entire 
communities, making public schools truly public.
  And our legislation will help us bring a new kind accountability to 
public education by injecting choice and competition into a public 
school system badly in need of both. We are not a country that believes 
in monopolies. We are a country that believes competition raises 
quality. And we ought to merge the best of those ideas by ending a 
system that restricts each child to an administrator's choice and not a 
parent's choice where possible. It is time we adopt a competitive 
system of public school choice with grants awarded to schools that meet 
parents' test of quality and assistance to schools that must catch up 
rapidly. That is why our bill creates an incentive for schools all 
across the nation to adopt public school choice to the extent 
logistically feasible.
  We are not just asking Democrats and Republicans to meet in a 
compromise, a grand bargain to reform public education. We are offering 
legislation that helps us do it, that forces not just a debate, but a 
vote--yes or no, up or down, change or more of the same. Together we 
can embrace new rights and responsibilities on both sides of the 
ideological divide and admit that the answer to the crisis of public 
education is not found in one concept alone--in private school vouchers 
or bricks and mortar alone. We can find answers for our children by 
breaking with the instinct for the symbolic, and especially the notion 
that a speech here and there will make education better in this 
country. It can't and it won't. But our hard work together in the 
coming year--Democrats and Republicans together--can make a difference. 
Education reform can work in a bi-partisan way. There is no shortage of 
good ideas or leadership here in the Senate--the experience of Gordon 
Smith who spent years in the Oregon legislature working to balance 
resources and accountability to raise the quality of public education; 
with tireless leadership from former Governors like Evan Bayh and John 
Chafee; bi-partisan creativity from Patty Murray and Olympia Snowe; and 
the leadership and passion, of course, of the senior Senator from my 
state, Senator Kennedy, who has led the fight on education in this 
Senate, and who has provided this body with over 30 years of unrivaled 
leadership and support for education.
  We look forward to working with all of our colleagues this year to 
pass this legislation, in this important year as we undergo the process 
of reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary

[[Page S8073]]

Education Act, to find common ground in ideas that we can all support--
bold legislation that sends the message to parents and children 
struggling to find schools that work, and to teachers and principals 
struggling in schools simultaneously bloated with bureaucracy and 
starved for resources--to prove to them not just that we hear their 
cries for help, but that we will respond not with sound bites and 
salvos, but with real answers. And Mr. President, I would suggest that 
in this time when the United States, the richest nation on the face of 
the earth, leading a global economy, pushing our stock market well over 
10,000, with budget surpluses we all herald at every turn, I would 
suggest that at this time we need to make the commitment--together, 
Democrats and Republicans--to give every school the chance to give 
every child in our country a world class education. That is an 
investment we can not afford to pass up--and Mr. President this is the 
time to do it. I look forward to working with all colleagues, Mr. 
President, in fashioning a budget that takes serious the American 
people's call for real and comprehensive education reform.

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