[Congressional Record Volume 146, Number 32 (Tuesday, March 21, 2000)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1512-S1516]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

      By Mr. LIEBERMAN (for himself, Mr. Bayh, Ms. Landrieu, Mrs. 
        Lincoln, Mr. Kohl, Mr. Graham, Mr. Robb, and Mr. Breaux):
  S. 2254. A bill to amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act 
of 1965, to reauthorize and make improvements to that Act, and for 
other purposes; to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and 
Pensions.


   public education reinvestment, reinvention, and responsibility act

  Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to offer a new plan for 
Federal education spending to refocus our national education policy on 
helping states and local school districts raise academic achievement 
for all children, putting the priority for federal programs on 
performance instead of process, and on delivering results instead of 
developing rules.
  In broad terms, the public Education Reinvestment, Reinvention, and 
Responsibility Act--better known as the ``Three R's''--calls on states 
and local districts to enter into a new compact with the federal 
government to work together to strengthen standards and improve 
educational opportunities, particularly for America's poorest children. 
It would provide states and local educators with significantly more 
federal funding and significantly more flexibility in targeting aid to 
meet their specific needs. In exchange, it would demand real 
accountability, and for the first time consequences on schools that 
continually fail to show progress.
  From my visits with parents, teachers, and principals over this past 
year, it is clear that we as a nation still share a common love for the 
common school, for its egalitarian mission, for its democratizing 
force, and for its unmatched role in helping generation

[[Page S1513]]

after generation rise and shine. Unfortunately, we are asking schools 
to do more than they were designed to do, to compensate for disengaged 
parents and divided communities--for instructing teenage girls on how 
to raise their children while they try to raise the GPAs, to nourishing 
the bodies and psyches of grade-schoolers who often begin the day 
without breakfast or affection, to policing school halls for guns and 
narcotics.
  At the same that schools are trying to cope with these new and 
complex stresses and strains, we are demanding that they teach more 
than that have ever taught before in our history. The reality is that 
in this high-tech, highly-competitive era, there are fewer low-skilled 
industrial jobs available, and a premium on knowledge and critical 
thinking, meaning it is no longer enough to provide some kids with just 
a rudimentary understanding of the basics. Employers and parents alike 
with better teachers, stronger standards, and higher test scores for 
all students, as well as state-of the art technology and the 
Information Age skills to match.
  It is a tribute to the many dedicated men and women who are 
responsible for teaching our children that the bulk of our schools are 
as good as they are, in light of these intensifying pressures. But the 
strain is nevertheless building, and with it serious doubts about our 
public schools and their capability to meet these challenges. Just this 
fall the Democratic Leadership Council, of which I am proud to serve as 
chairman, released a national survey showing that two-thirds of the 
American people believe our public schools are in crisis.
  I was surprised by that high percentage, which may be skewed somewhat 
by lingering shock over the growing incidents of school shootings. But 
we must admit that our public schools are not working for a lot of our 
kids. And, as a result, I believe that our public education system is 
facing an enormously consequential test, which will go a long way 
toward determining our future strength as a nation. It is a test of our 
time whether we can reform and in some ways reinvent our public 
education system to meet these new demands, without compromising the 
old ideals that have sustained the common school for generations.
  For us to pass this test, we have to first recognize that there are 
serious problems with the performance of many public schools, and that 
public confidence in public education will continue to erode if we do 
not acknowledge and address those problems soon. While student 
achievement is up, we must realize the alarming achievement gap that 
separates minorities from Whites and low-income students from their 
more affluent counterparts. According to the state-by-state reading 
scores of fourth-graders on the National Assessment of Educational 
Progress, the achievement gap between African American and White 
students grew in 16 states between 1992 and 1998. The gap between 
Hispanic and White students grew in nine states over the same period of 
time. We must also question whether our schools are adequately 
preparing our youth to enter the global economy when, in international 
students, U.S. 12th graders score below the international average in 
mathematics and science compared to 21 other nations.
  We also have to acknowledge that we have not done a very good job in 
recent years in providing every child with a well-qualified teacher, a 
critical component to higher student achievement. We are failing to 
attract enough good minds in the teaching profession--one survey of 
college students in 21 different fields of study found that education 
majors ranked 17th in their performance on the SAT. We are failing to 
adequately train enough of these aspiring teachers at education 
schools--in Massachusetts last year, to cite one particularly egregious 
example, 59 percent of the 1,800 candidates who took the state's first-
ever certification exam flunked a literacy test that the state board of 
education chairman rated as at ``about the eighth-grade level.'' And, 
we are failing to deliver teachers to the classroom who truly know 
their subject matter--our national survey found that one-fourth of all 
secondary school teachers did not major in the core area of 
instruction, and that in the school districts with the highest 
concentration of minorities, students have less than a 50 percent 
chance of getting a math or science teacher who has a license or a 
degree in their field.
  With that said, we also have to acknowledge that while more money 
alone wont solve our problems, we cannot honesty expect to reinvent our 
schools without it either. The reality is that there is a tremendous 
need for additional investment in our public schools, not just in urban 
areas but in every kind of community. Thousands of crumbling and 
overcrowded schools to modernize. Two million new teachers to hire and 
train. Billions in spiraling special education costs to meet.

  We also have to recognize the basic math of trying to raise standards 
at a time of profound social turbulence that we will need to expend new 
sums to reach and teach children who in the past we never asked to 
excel, and who in the present will have to overcome enormous hurdles to 
do so. I believe any child can learn--any child--and that has been 
proven over and over again in the best schools in both my home state of 
Connecticut and in many of America's cities.
  There are in fact plenty of positives to highlight in public 
education today, which is something else that we have to acknowledge, 
yet too often don't. I have made a concerted effort over the last few 
years to visit a broad range of schools and programs in Connecticut, 
and I can tell you that there is much happening in our public schools 
that we can be heartened by, proud of, and learn from.
  There is the John Barry Elementary School in Meriden, Connecticut, 
which was singled out by the U.S. Department of Education as a 
Distinguished title I School for its work with disadvantaged students. 
Like many urban schools, Barry has to contend with a high-poverty, 
high-mobility student population, but through Reading Recovery and 
other interventions, Barry has had real success improving the reading 
skills of many of its students.
  There is the Side by Side Charter School in Norwalk, one of 17 
charter schools in Connecticut, which has created an exemplary 
multiracial program in response to the challenge of Sheff v. O'Neill to 
diminish racial isolation. With the freedom that goes with its charter, 
Side by Side is experimenting with a different approach to classroom 
assignments, having students stay with teachers for two consecutive 
years to take advantage of the relationships that develop, and by all 
indications it is working quite well for those kids.
  And there is the BEST program, which, building on previous efforts to 
raise teacher skills and salaries, is now targeting additional state 
aid, training, and mentoring support to help local districts nurture 
new teachers and prepare them to excel. In this regard Connecticut is 
far ahead of most of the country in adapting its teacher quality 
programs to meet today's challenges--setting high performance standards 
both for teachers and those who train them, helping novices meet those 
standards, and holding the ones who don't accountable. The result is 
that Connecticut's blueprint is touted by some, including the National 
Commission on Teaching and America's Future, as a national model for 
others to follow.
  A number of other states, led by Texas and North Carolina, are moving 
in this same direction--refocusing their education systems not on 
process but on performance, not on prescriptive rules and regulations 
but on results. More and more of them are in fact adopting what might 
be called a ``reinvest, reinvent, and responsibility'' strategy, by (1) 
infusing new resources into their public education systems; (2) giving 
local districts more flexibility; and (3) demanding new measures and 
mechanisms of accountability, to increase the chances that these 
investments will yield the intended return, meaning improved academic 
achievement for all students.
  This move to trade flexibility for accountability, and to focus on 
performance instead of process, is not the definitive answer to passing 
the test I outlined earlier, of adapting our public schools to the 
rapidly-changing environment around us. There are obviously other parts 
of the equation, none more important that parental involvement. 
Everything we know from research indicates that an engaged parent makes 
a crucial difference in student achievement, particularly in terms of 
reading, and we have to do

[[Page S1514]]

more to get parents to play a more active role in their children's 
learning. But when it comes to improving the delivery of public 
education, the reinvestment and reinvention approach is the best 
solution I have heard yet, and probably our best hope for extending the 
promise of equal opportunity into the new century.
  In Congress, our opportunity now is with the upcoming reauthorization 
of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Today, nearly $15 
billion in Federal aid flows through ESEA programs to states and local 
education authorities, and other educational entities annually. While 
this constitutes a minute fraction of all the money spent on public 
education each year, it is still a lot of money, and past experience 
shows that Federal money has a habit of influencing local behavior. If 
we can reformulate the way we distribute those additional dollars, and 
peg our national programs to performance instead of process, we can go 
a long way toward encouraging more states and local school districts to 
reinvest and reinvent public education, while taking more 
responsibility for its outcomes.
  Unfortunately, Congress seems more interested in being an agent of 
recrimination. We spend most of our time positioning ourselves for 
partisan advantage rather than trying to fix serious problems. We 
reduce a complicated issue to a simplistic multiple choice test, 
forcing a false choice between more spending and programs, or block 
grants and vouchers. And, the answer we are left with is none of the 
above.
  Mr. President, I am pleased to join my colleagues Senators Bayh, 
Breaux, Graham, Kohl, Landrieu, Lincoln, and Robb in introducing this 
groundbreaking legislation that signifies that there is a better way, a 
third way to address education reform. It builds on the progress many 
states have already made through the standards movements. It calls for 
streamlining and consolidating the maze of programs under the 
Elementary and Secondary Education Act into five goal-oriented titles, 
each with more money and fewer strings attached, and all of them geared 
toward encouraging innovation, promoting what works, and ultimately 
raising academic achievement for all students.
  We would concentrate our efforts on closing the achievement gap 
between the haves and have-nots, fostering English proficiency for 
immigrant children, improving the quality of teaching for all children, 
promoting choice and competition within the public system, and 
stimulating innovative and high performance educational initiatives. We 
would ask the states to set performance standards in each of these 
areas, and in exchange for the new funding and flexibility we provide, 
we would hold states accountable for delivering demonstrable results. 
We would reward success and, for the first time in the history of ESEA, 
punish chronic failure.
  We agree with our Democratic colleagues that we need to invest more 
resources if we want to meet the new challenges of the new century, and 
prepare every student to succeed in the classroom. That is why we would 
boost ESEA funding by $35 billion over the next five years. But we also 
believe that the impact of this funding will be severely diluted if it 
is not better targeted to the worst-performing schools and if it is not 
coupled with a demand for results. That is why we not only increase 
Title I funding by 50 percent, but use a more targeted formula for 
distributing these new dollars to schools with the highest 
concentrations of poverty. And that is why we develop a new 
accountability system that strips federal funding from states that 
continually fail to meet their performance goals.
  We also agree with our Republican colleagues that federal education 
programs are too numerous and too bureaucratic. That is why we 
eliminate dozens of federally microtargeted, micromanaged programs that 
are redundant or incidental to our core mission of raising 
academic achievement. But we also believe that we have a great national 
interest in promoting broad national educational goals, chief among 
them delivering on the promise of equal opportunity. It is not only 
foolish, however, but irresponsible to hand out federal dollars with no 
questions asked and no thought of national priorities. That is why we 
carve out separate titles in those areas that we think are critical to 
helping local districts elevate the performance of their schools.

  The first would enhance our longstanding commitment to providing 
extra help to disadvantaged children through the Title I program, while 
better targeting $12 billion in aid--a 50 percent increase in funding--
to schools with the highest concentrations of poor students. The second 
would combine various teacher training and professional development 
programs into a single teacher quality grant, increase funding by 100 
percent to $1.6 billion annually, and challenge each state to pursue 
the kind of bold, performance-based reforms that my own state of 
Connecticut has undertaken with great success.
  The third would reform the Federal bilingual education program and 
hopefully defuse the ongoing controversy surrounding it by making 
absolutely clear that our national mission is to help immigrant 
children learn and master English, as well as achieve high levels of 
achievement in all subjects. We must be willing to back this commitment 
with essential resources required to help ensure that all limited 
English proficient students are served.
  Under our approach, funding for LEP programs would be more than 
doubled to $1 billion a year, and for the first time be distributed to 
states and local districts through a reliable formula, based on their 
LEP student population. As a result, school districts serving large LEP 
and high poverty student populations would be guaranteed federal 
funding, and would not be penalized because of their inability to hire 
savvy proposal writers for competitive grants.
  The fourth would respond to the public demands for greater choice 
within the public school framework, by providing additional resources 
for charter school start-ups and new incentives for expanding local, 
intradistrict choice programs. And the fifth would radically 
restructure the remaining ESEA and ensure that funds are much better 
targeted while giving local districts greater flexibility in addressing 
specific needs. We consolidate more than 20 different programs into a 
single High Performance Initiatives title, with a focus on supporting 
bold new ideas, expanding access to summer school and after school 
programs, improving school safety, and building technological literacy. 
We increase overall funding by more than $200 million, and distribute 
this aid through a formula that targets more resources to the highest 
poverty areas.
  The boldest change we are proposing is to create a new accountability 
title. As of today, we have plenty of rules and requirements on inputs, 
on how funding is to be allocated and who must be served, but little if 
any attention to outcomes, on how schools ultimately perform in 
educating children. This bill would reverse that imbalance by linking 
Federal funding to the progress states and local districts make in 
raising academic achievement. It would call on state and local leaders 
to set specific performance standards and adopt rigorous assessments 
for measuring how each district is faring in meeting those goals. In 
turn, states that exceed those goals would be rewarded with additional 
funds, and those that fail repeatedly to show progress would be 
penalized. In other words, for the first time, there would be 
consequences for poor performance.
  In discussing how exactly to impose those consequences, we have run 
into understandable concerns about whether you can penalize failing 
schools without also penalizing children. The truth is that we are 
punishing many children right now, especially the most vulnerable of 
them, by forcing them to attend chronically troubled schools that are 
accountable to no one, a situation that is just not acceptable anymore. 
This bill minimizes the potential negative impact of these consequences 
on students. It provides the states with three years to set their 
performance-based goals and put in place a monitoring system for 
gauging how local districts are progressing, and also provides 
additional resources for states to help school districts identify and 
improve low-performing schools. If after those three years a state is 
still failing to meet its goals, the state would be penalized by 
cutting its administrative funding by 50 percent. Only after four

[[Page S1515]]

years of under performance would dollars targeted for the classroom be 
put in jeopardy. At that point, protecting kids by continuing to 
subsidize bad schools becomes more like punishing them.
  I must address another concern that may be raised that this is a 
block grant in sheep's clothing. There are substantial differences 
between a straight block-grant approach and this streamlined structure. 
First, in most block-grant proposals the accountability mechanisms are 
vague, weak and often non-existent, which is one reason why I have 
opposed them in the Senate. Our bill would have tangible consequences, 
pegged not just to raising test scores in the more affluent suburban 
areas, but to closing the troubling achievement gap between students in 
poor, largely minority districts and their better-off peers.
  This leads me to another way this bill is different. Unlike many 
block-grant supporters, I strongly believe that we have a great 
national interest and a national obligation to promote specific 
educational goals, chief among them delivering on the promise of equal 
opportunity, and that is reflected in our legislation. While it makes 
sense to streamline and eliminate as many strings as possible on 
Federal aid, to spur innovation and also to maximize the bang for our 
Federal buck, it does not make sense to hand over those Federal bucks 
with no questions asked, and thus eliminate the Federal role in setting 
national priorities. That is why, in the restructuring we have 
developed, we have maintained separate titles for disadvantaged 
students, limited English proficient students, teacher quality, public 
school choice, and high quality education initiatives, all of which, I 
would argue, are critical to raising academic achievement and promoting 
equal opportunity. And that is why of the more than $6 billion increase 
in annual funding I am proposing, $4 billion would be devoted to title 
I and those students most in need of our help.
  It is a fairly common-sense strategy--reinvest in our public schools, 
reinvent the way we administer them, and restore a sense of 
responsibility to the children we are supposed to be serving. Hence the 
title of our bill: the Public Education Reinvention, Reinvestment, and 
Responsibility Act, or the Three R's for short. Our approach is humble 
enough to recognize there are no easy answers to turning around low-
performing schools, to lifting teaching standards, to closing the 
debilitating achievement gap, and that most of those answers won't be 
found here in Washington anyway. But it is ambitious enough to try to 
harness our unique ability to set the national agenda and recast the 
federal government as an active catalyst for success instead of a 
passive enabler of failure.
  Mr. BAYH. Mr. President, I rise today to speak on a matter of great 
importance and urgency to me. We are at a crossroads in American 
education and that is why I join with my colleagues Senators Lieberman, 
Landrieu, Kohl, Lincoln, Breaux, Graham, and Robb in offering the 
Public Education Reinvestment, Reinvention, and Responsibility Act.
  Since the middle of the 1800s, when Horace Mann and a group of others 
dedicated our country to the principle that every child should have 
access to a good public education, we have held that out as an ideal 
for our country. In the middle 1960s, there was growing recognition 
that for too many of our children, this principle was really a hollow 
dream. And so, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was 
born. We introduce our version of ESEA today in recognition of the fact 
that for too many millions of American children the dream of a quality 
public education is still sorely lacking.
  The consequences of any of our children not receiving a quality 
education are far greater than ever before. For the first time in our 
nation's history, the growing gap between the educational ``haves'' and 
``have nots'' threatens to create a permanent underclass. If we do not 
address these shortcomings, the knowledge and information gap will lock 
many of our citizens out of the marketplace and prevent them from 
accessing opportunity in the New Economy. We stand here today in 
recognition of the fact that the solutions of the 1960s are inadequate 
to meet the challenges of the 21st Century and the years beyond. We 
stand here today to say the status quo is not good enough; that we must 
do better.
  Our legislation proposes dramatic change in a significant rethinking 
of business as usual when it comes to education policy here in 
Washington, D.C. We propose a substantial increase in our nation's 
investment in education, because we recognize that we can't expect our 
schools, particularly our poorer schools, to get the job done if we 
don't give them the tools to get the job done. We propose an increase 
of $35 billion over five years in Federal education spending, a 50 
percent increase for Title I funding, 90 percent increase for 
professional development funding for teachers, over a 30 percent 
increase for innovative programs, and nearly a doubling in funding for 
Charter schools and Magnet Schools so as to give parents greater public 
school choice. This is a significant investment of public dollars.
  But we do more than just throw money at the problem, because we know 
that taxpayers, parents, and most of all our children, have a right to 
expect more from us. Instead, we focus on accountability. In return for 
increased investment, we insist upon results. We focus on outcomes, not 
incomes. No longer will we define success only in terms of how much 
money is spent, but instead of how much our children know. Can they 
read and write, add and subtract, know basic science?
  No longer will we define accountability in terms of ordering local 
school districts to spend dollars in particular ways, but instead in 
terms of whether our children are getting the skills they need to make 
a successful life for themselves. This is a significant rethinking from 
the things that have prevailed here in Washington for several decades.
  Our proposal also provides a substantial amount of flexibility. We 
don't agree with our colleagues on the far right in block grants which 
would allow money to be diverted from public education or to allow 
dollars to be diverted from focusing on our poorest students. But we do 
allow for local principals and superintendents to have a much greater 
say in determining how best to spend those dollars, because we believe 
that those at the local level who labor in the classrooms and the 
schools every day, can make those decisions far better than those of us 
who now work on the banks of the Potomac.
  It was Thomas Jefferson who said that a society that expects to be 
both ignorant and free is expecting something that never has been and 
never shall be. So we put forward this proposal because we know that 
the cause of improving public education is critically important to our 
economy, critically important to the kind of society that we will be, 
and essential to the vibrancy of our democracy itself.
  Mr. KOHL. Mr. President, I rise today as a proud cosponsor of the 
Public Education Reinvestment, Reinvention, and Responsibility Act of 
2000--better known as ``Three R's.'' I have been pleased to work with 
the education community in Wisconsin, as well as Senator Lieberman and 
our other cosponsors, on this important piece of legislation. I believe 
that this bill represents a realistic, effective approach to improving 
public education--where 90 percent of students are educated.
  We have made great strides in the past six years toward improving 
public education. Nearly all States now have academic standards in 
place. More students are taking more challenging courses. Test scores 
have risen slightly. Dropout rates have decreased.
  In Wisconsin, educators have worked hard to help students achieve. 
Fourth-graders and eighth-graders are showing continued improvement on 
State tests in nearly every subject, particularly in science and math. 
Third-graders are scoring higher on reading tests. Test results show 
some improvement across all groups, including African American, 
disabled, and economically disadvantaged groups.
  Unfortunately, despite all of our best efforts, we still face huge 
challenges in improving public schools. The most recent TIMSS study of 
students from 41 different countries found that many American students 
score far behind those in other countries. In Wisconsin, scores in 
math, science and writing are

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getting better but still need improvement. And test scores of students 
from low-income families, while showing some improvement, are still too 
low.
  Mr. President, I strongly support the notion that the Federal 
government must continue to be a partner with States and local 
educators as we strive to improve public schools. As a nation, it is in 
all of our best interests to ensure that our children receive the best 
education possible. It is vital to their future success, and the 
success of our country.
  However, addressing problems in education is going to take more than 
cosmetic reform. We are going to have to take a fresh look at the 
structure of Federal education programs. We need to let go of the tired 
partisan fighting over more spending versus block grants and take a 
middle ground approach that will truly help our States, school 
districts--and most importantly, our students.
  Our ``Three R's'' bill does just that. It makes raising student 
achievement for all students--and eliminating the achievement gap 
between low-income and more affluent students--our top priorities. To 
accomplish this, our bill centers around three principles.
  First, we believe that we must continue to make a stronger investment 
in education, and that Federal dollars must be targeted to the neediest 
students. A recent GAO study found that Federal education dollars are 
significantly more targeted to poor districts than money spent by 
States. Although Federal funds make up only 6-7 percent of all money 
spent on education, it is essential that we target those funds where 
they are needed the most.
  Second, we believe that States and local school districts are in the 
best position to know what their educational needs are. They should be 
given more flexibility to determine how they will use Federal dollars 
to meet those needs.
  Finally--and I believe this is the key component of our approach--we 
believe that in exchange for this increased flexibility, there must 
also be accountability for results. These principles are a pyramid, 
with accountability being the base that supports the federal 
government's grant of flexibility and funds.
  For too long, we have seen a steady stream of Federal dollars flow to 
States and school districts--regardless of how well they educated their 
students. This has to stop. We need to reward schools that do a good 
job. We need to provide assistance and support to schools that are 
struggling to do a better job. And we need to stop subsidizing failure. 
Our highest priority must be educating children--not perpetuating 
broken systems.
  Mr. President, I believe the ``Three R's'' bill is a strong starting 
point for taking a fresh look at public education. We need to build 
upon all the progress we've made, and work to address the problems we 
still face. This bill--by using the concepts of increased funding, 
targeting, flexibility--and most importantly, accountability--
demonstrates how we can work with our State and local partners to make 
sure every child receives the highest quality education--a chance to 
live a successful productive life. I look forward to working with all 
of my colleagues on both sides of the aisle, as well as education 
groups in my State, as Congress debates ESEA in the coming months.
                                 ______