[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 25 (Wednesday, February 28, 2001)]
[House]
[Pages H493-H499]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                              {time}  1600
                      REFORM EDUCATION IN AMERICA

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 3, 2001, the gentleman from New York (Mr. Owens) is recognized 
for 60 minutes.
  Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, in the President's address last night he 
reaffirmed the fact that education is one of his top priorities. It 
appears from the speech that the President made that the only priority 
which ranks above education is the tax cut that is being proposed.
  I salute the President for his selection and for his devotion and 
dedication to education as the number one priority. I think it is very 
important that he has taken note of the fact that this has been the 
priority of the American people for the last 4 years or 5 years.
  Education has ranked as either the number one priority or somewhere 
in the top two or three priorities for the last 5 years. So the 
President is acknowledging the fact that in a democracy, the directions 
really come from the bottom.
  He is not alone. The previous President chose to call himself the 
Education President, President Clinton. At one point he said he wanted 
to be the Education President. And he and the younger Mr. Bush are not 
the only ones.
  Father Bush, I think, first coined the phrase Education President. 
The father of the present President said he wanted to be the Education 
President.
  Before that, Ronald Reagan launched the movement to reform education 
in America with a report called A Nation At Risk, A Nation At Risk. We 
are now in our fourth President who has chosen to make education a 
number one priority. We should be making some tremendous progress in 
terms of the improvement of education in our Nation.
  I regretfully report, however, that this is not the case. Despite the 
fact that lip service has been paid to the reform of education in 
America by the last four Presidents, the progress has been fairly slow. 
The flaw is in the lack of resources.
  When A Nation At Risk was issued as a report by President Ronald 
Reagan, President Reagan offered no program with any dollars. He 
offered strictly jawboning, lectures about how important it was to 
improve education.
  President George Bush, following President Reagan, did offer a 
program, but it was a very sparse program in terms of dollars. There 
were a lot of words and a lot of lectures again, but very little was 
offered in terms of resources.
  President Clinton offered a dramatic blueprint for the reform of 
education. President Clinton did build on some of the activities of 
President Bush, Father Bush. Father Bush had launched the governors 
campaign to improve education. There was a huge governors conference 
and the governors came together, and they set forth goals to be 
achieved.
  There was a step-by-step progression forward, which President Clinton 
as a governor, Governor Clinton of Arkansas, had been involved in, and 
President Clinton did build on what President Bush had started. 
President Clinton also added some dollars to the master plan.
  I think, relatively speaking, if you compare the record of President 
Clinton on education to the record of his predecessor, Father Bush, to 
the record of Ronald Reagan, President Clinton had a very outstanding 
record in terms of resources committed as well as the necessary job 
owning.
  But even the Clinton administration did not dare, for whatever 
reason, which I do not care to go into today, set forth a bold 
blueprint and the resources to match it, which would deal with the 
problem in a constructive way. Why? Why is it? Repeatedly there is a 
sense within America that ordinary people, the public opinion polls 
keep showing that there is a gut reaction, a gut feeling that nothing 
is more important than education. There is a feeling that we are not 
doing enough to improve education in America.
  Why is that? The gut reaction and the common sense feeling does not 
translate into really bold action. We have had bold action within the 
last 5 years. We have had bold action in terms of a transportation 
plan.
  One of the boldest initiatives taken in the domestic front was the 
bill which authorized $218 billion over a period of 6 years for 
transportation projects, road building, bridges, et cetera, et cetera. 
So we did some big spending on a domestic issue.
  We have been spending large amounts of money, of course, on defense. 
And continually under all of these Presidents, the defense budget has 
done very well. But in the domestic arena, we moved in a very bold way 
to fund a transportation act which provided $218 billion over a 6-year 
period. That is the kind of action that I always dreamed of, and I 
think it was necessary.
  I maintain it still is necessary if we are really going to come to 
grips with what has to happen in the area of education.
  Education suffers from a lack of resources, and that is the primary 
problem. We cannot escape that. No amount of jawboning and no amount of 
theorizing, no amount of testing will escape the fact that there is a 
definite lack of resources.

  Let me just set the stage and establish some parameters which are 
both local and national. At the local level, in New York City, we have 
just received the results of a 7-year court case. A ruling has been 
made after a 7-year trial by a Supreme Court judge

[[Page H494]]

that New York State has systematically been short-changing New York 
City in education funding over the years. The order of the judge is 
that New York State must take steps immediately to provide greater 
resources to New York City.
  It is at the local level. The Nation's largest city, 1.2 million 
children, about 1,100 schools, more than 60,000 teachers. It is at the 
local level, but I think it has good, strong implications for the 
entire Nation.
  The lack of resources is pinpointed by Judge Leland DeGrasse's 
decision, which declared that New York City schools have been grossly 
neglected and underfunded.
  I maintain at this point that despite all the rhetoric and discussion 
about education at the national level through the last four Presidents, 
the problem in America is that the schools of America are grossly 
underfunded. Now, many of the Members of Congress and many members in 
government are high places, live in neighborhoods where their schools 
are doing all right, but I am talking about across the Nation as a 
whole.
  There are too many schools that need considerable resources that they 
are not receiving. They need the resources in the areas of physical 
infrastructure. They need resources in other areas.
  Mr. Speaker, in fact, I think that this applies to all of America, 
Justice Leland DeGrasse's decision in the case of New York City versus 
the State reads as follows, I am just going to read a section from his 
conclusion, this court has held, I am quoting from Justice DeGrasse's 
decisions, this court has held that a sound basic education mandated by 
the education article consists of the foundational skills that students 
need to become productive citizens capable of civic engagement and 
sustaining competitive employment.
  In order to ensure that public schools offer a sound basic education, 
the State must take steps to ensure at least the following resources, 
which as described in the body of this opinion, for the most part, 
currently are not given to New York City's public school students.
  The following resources are not provided for New York City's 
students. This is the finding of a judge after 7 years of trial.
  Number one, sufficient numbers of qualified teachers, principals and 
other personnel; number three, appropriate class sizes; number three, 
adequate and accessible school buildings with sufficient space to 
ensure appropriate class size and implementation of a sound curriculum; 
number four, sufficient and up-to-date books, supplies, libraries, 
educational technology and laboratories; number five, suitable 
curricula, including an expanded platform of programs to help at-risk 
students by giving them more time on tests; number six, adequate 
resources for students for extraordinary needs; number seven, a safe, 
orderly environment.
  Education discussions become extremely complicated. People think that 
there is a morass out there, and there is no way out of this endless 
discussion of what it takes to reform education in America.
  Here we have a judge that has listed the simple elements, the 
components of what is needed to establish a sound basic education 
system. Those are the terms that he uses repeatedly.
  I think in America we can, first of all, expect from every 
jurisdiction, every school district in America, every State, every 
jurisdiction should seek to establish a sound basic education. That is 
a terminology used in the State constitution. Not all States may use 
that term, but basically when States talk about the right 
responsibility for providing an education, it basically means the same 
thing, a sound basic education.
  Let me go back for a moment and repeat his definition of a sound 
basic education. That is an education that allows students to become 
productive citizens, productive citizens. How does he define a 
productive citizen? A productive citizen is a citizen capable of civic 
engagement and sustaining competitive employment. It sounds too simple 
to be true. But this is what it boils down to.
  We need to produce students who are capable of civic engagement and 
sustaining competitive employment. Both of those are rather 
complicated. Not complicated, it is easy to understand the concept to 
fulfill that concept. I do not want to oversimplify it.
  To be capable of civic engagement; what does that mean? Surely it 
means that students produced by our system ought to be able to evaluate 
the pronouncements of officials seeking election and be able to vote in 
intelligent ways in election. It surely means that they ought to be 
evaluate the system that we have structured to provide for the election 
of our officials and be able to come up with system that is are fair 
and just.
  Civic engagement means more than the old civic books which talk about 
how a bill becomes law in Congress. I have those little booklets I give 
to the kids on how a bill becomes law in Congress, very similar to how 
a bill becomes law in the State legislature.
  Those little steps of the introduction and the action in the 
committee and the action on the floor and all of that is elementary and 
very inadequate in terms of telling students about what is necessary to 
have appropriate civic engagement.
  How do we get elected? We have elections. We have primaries that 
elect people in the parties. We have elections between the major 
parties on Election Day. We all go to the polls. The polls are fair. 
They are policed by policemen and monitors. Both sides can have people 
who are judging whether or not the election is being conducted fairly, 
and it all appears to be a wonderful exercise that we can all applaud.
  Students are not told about the fact that in all the counties of 
America you have different systems for electing. They are not told 
about the fact that machines have to be purchased because of varying 
circumstances. Some machines are very old and do not function very 
well. They are not told about the fact that from one county to another, 
you may have different ballots and some ballots are more difficult than 
others.
  Human beings who are political entities, Republicans and Democrats, 
make up the ballots. And once you have the election and you have to 
have a count, there are human, subjective judgments that enter in, and 
you may have to have court cases, and, finally, the case may get to the 
Supreme Court that voting in our democracy is not as simple as it may 
be.
  Mr. Speaker, to have students educated in a way which makes them 
capable of civic engagement, we have to do more in that area, and 
understand that it is not as simple as it has been made to appear over 
the last 100 years in our civic textbooks.
  In the area of sustaining competitive employment, things are very 
complicated. There was a time when sustaining competitive employment 
meant all you had to do was to know how to read a few signs and follow 
instructions and follow a few written instructions, but mostly oral 
instructions, and the straw boss, or the foreman, in the plant would 
tell you which widget you have to put on which line as it moved and how 
many boxes you have to pick up. For a long time, the young people 
coming out of our schools were absorbed by the manufactured industries.

                              {time}  1615

  Most of them, for many years, did not even complete high school, and 
it was not necessary in order for them to obtain competitive 
employment. Sustaining competitive employment 30 years ago was very 
different than sustaining competitive employment now.
  So sustaining competitive employment now, if the State is responsible 
for making it possible for students to sustain competitive employment, 
then the State must provide the kinds of tools and equipment that are 
in a present working environment.
  The computer is dominant in the present working environment, whether 
one is talking about an assembly line in a factory or inside an office 
where the production of data and the distribution of data, the 
retrieval of data is the only concern. The computer science digital 
devices, they have all taken over.
  If one has schools that do not have educational technology that is 
sufficient, computer labs, then one is not providing sustaining 
competitive employment.
  So a decision like this challenges the system. When a judge says one 
must produce students who can become citizens capable of civic 
engagement and

[[Page H495]]

sustaining competitive employment, one is laying down a formidable 
challenge to the education system of today.
  A challenge in America today I think is how do we meet the challenges 
of our complex modern world. What kind of education system do we 
produce. We are a very powerful, smug, fat, comfortable empire at this 
point. Rome was just a village compared to the United States of 
America. Nothing has ever existed like the United States of America. 
Never have so many been so comfortable. Never have so many had benefits 
provided for them. Never have so many enjoyed the fruits of 
productivity in the area of technology and science and the fruits of 
productivity in agriculture.
  America is great partially because of the fact that there is a common 
sense out there which says education is important. Something in the air 
that Thomas Jefferson breathed made Thomas Jefferson decide I will go 
and establish the University of Virginia. The University of Virginia 
later became the model for all of the land grant colleges. We have 
every State of the Union that produce something similar to the 
University of Virginia. We are better in terms of the land grant 
colleges helped by the United States Government.
  The Federal Government established the Morrel Act. The Morrel Act 
provided the funding for land grant colleges. Land grant colleges 
define themselves in much the way the judge is defining basic education 
here, not in terms of Latin and philosophy and Greek, but whatever is 
necessary to allow citizens to become productive.
  So agriculture, engineering and topics that usually were not taught 
in higher education institutions were the primary curricula of the land 
grant colleges.
  So the land grant colleges were a part of the American instinct to 
push for more education, and our laws which made every State take on 
the responsibility for education. There is nothing about a 
responsibility to provide education in the United States Federal 
Constitution. But every State has something in their State Constitution 
which takes on the responsibility for the provision of education. Very 
American.
  Later on, after World War II was ended, that same instinct, the same 
drive from the bottom to assert that education is number one priority 
led to the creation of the Bill of Rights for the G.I. bill, which 
allowed every returning American soldier to get the funding for an 
education from high school equivalency diplomas and high school 
diplomas, all the way up to college, college degrees.
  Our universities and colleges were filled up with G.I.s going to 
school. They were later able to take on the revolution of technology.
  Automation came along, and a number of new developments came along 
after World War II that we were able to sufficiently master because we 
were producing out of our universities and colleges a broad base of 
very highly trained people who could take that on.
  So in America, we have had that push and that drive for education 
before. The question is now are we too smug, are we too petty, are we 
too driven to penny pinch that we cannot conceive of anything as great 
as the G.I. bill which said every soldier can go to school. If one 
wants to be a barber, one can get money to get trained as a barber. If 
one wants to be a mechanic, one gets money to be trained as a mechanic. 
If one wants to be a doctor of philosophy, one can get the money. The 
government will pay for one to become a doctor of philosophy.
  We do not have that kind of spirit which says that, in order to earn 
a living in the future, every student is going to have to be exposed to 
computers and have some kind of basic computer literacy; reading, 
writing, arithmetic, and computer literacy. If one is going to have 
computer literacy, then education is going to cost more than it costs 
before.
  Here we are with President Bush producing a plan which says he will 
leave no child behind. I have read the President's outline. I have a 
copy right here. ``The bipartisan education reform will be the 
cornerstone of my administration,'' by George W. Bush. It is an 
impressive outline of what he intends to do.
  The President has not yet introduced a bill. The Republicans who are 
on the Committee on Education and the Workforce, I serve on the 
Committee on Education and the Workforce where this bill would have to 
be, this function, most of it will have to come through our committee. 
The President has introduced no bill yet. But his outline is 
interesting.
  I would applaud President Bush in his outline for emphasizing at the 
very beginning the fact that we need to focus most of our resources 
that are available on the schools that need the most, on the failing 
schools, on the schools which have the most at-risk students, the most 
disadvantaged students. I would applaud that. It seems that that is 
common sense, one might say.
  Why should one applaud the President for immediately proposing that 
our primary first dollars be focused intentionally on the schools that 
are in the greatest need? Why would not that be understood by everybody 
who is interested in improving education in America? It is not a self-
evident fact. It is not endorsed by all the members of the President's 
party.
  The great battle between the Democrats on the Committee on Education 
and the Workforce and the Republicans on the Committee on Education and 
the Workforce both in the House of Representatives and, I think, in the 
other body the same problem has arisen, is that the Republicans on the 
committee want to take the limited dollars that we have available in 
title I and other education programs and spread them out further. They 
want to have flexibility. They want to have block grants.
  So the President's first statements, which call for intensifying and 
focusing more of the dollars on the schools in greatest need runs 
contrary to the position that the members of his own party have taken 
in the House of Representatives.
  Let me recapitulate, Mr. Speaker. I really am talking about the 
education imperative. I am agreeing with the President of the United 
States that we ought to have education as one of our number one 
priorities. I think it should be the number one priority ahead of the 
tax cut even.
  I think that the President's proposals deserve careful analysis, and 
I would start by applauding the first parts of his proposal which call 
for focusing on failing schools, disadvantaged students. Our resources 
should go there first. That seems to be a self-evident conclusion, but 
it is not.
  The Republicans in the House of Representatives on the Committee on 
Education and the Workforce and some Democrats in the House have not 
seen fit to make that kind of dedicated proposition, support that kind 
of dedicated proposition.
  In fact, when I talk about school construction and the fact that the 
first dollars for school construction ought to go to the areas which 
still have coal burning furnaces in their schools, or asbestos, 
overcrowding so great that the schools cannot provide lunch for the 
youngsters except on a three-cycle program where they start feeding the 
first cycle at 10 o'clock in the morning because of the overcrowding. 
They force students to eat lunch at 10 o'clock in the morning. They 
have just had breakfast already, so why should they be forced to eat 
lunch? I said we should give the priority to those areas. Most of those 
kinds of schools and situations are in the inner cities.
  I have had Democratic colleagues who talk about, no, we do not want 
any construction bill which does not give equal treatment to all 
districts, you know. So I have a bill which calls for funding all 
school districts according to the number of school-age pupils.
  All districts feel that they have a need. Some may need money for 
computerization and improving the safety facilities around the school. 
Some may need money for remodeling the auditorium, the gymnasium. 
Others may need money for life and death matters like getting rid of a 
coal-burning furnace which is jeopardizing the health and safety of the 
children or getting rid of asbestos. Others may need money to build new 
schools because of the fact that the overcrowding is strangling the 
whole process of education.
  So President Bush, I will unite with him, and I hope that my 
Democratic colleagues in the House of Representatives, in general, 
beginning with those

[[Page H496]]

on the Committee on Education and the Workforce, will unite with the 
President on the proposition that resources ought to be better focused.
  Whatever we have to offer ought to be focused on the schools that are 
failing and the areas which have students with greatest need. Title I 
was conceived that way. The Federal Government became a partner in 
education to help with poverty areas whereas districts were too poor to 
educate youngsters.
  Lyndon Johnson fashioned the Elementary and Secondary Education Act 
and title I as a primary provision of that act which funnels funds into 
districts according to the number of children who qualify for free 
lunches. Free lunches are provided by the United States Department of 
Agriculture. If one is eligible for those free lunches, that is the 
definition of the level of poverty that one must have in order to 
qualify for title I funds.
  So we have a yardstick, a barometer for measuring where the problem 
is. The correlation between poverty and lack of achievement is well 
established.
  The number one cause of poor school performance is poverty. Now, let 
me not be misquoted that all poor children are in a position where they 
cannot perform; that there are no schools in poor neighborhoods where 
children do not perform very well. There are numerous exceptions. The 
poverty does not fix the children into a pattern where it is impossible 
for them to perform well.
  One of the best schools in my district, PS-161 on Crown Street, I was 
surprised to find out that 90 percent of the children, more than 90 
percent of the children in that school qualified for free lunches, 
which means that they come from poor homes. Yet, that school performed 
as a second or third best sixth grade reading class in the whole State 
of New York.
  The State of New York, of course, is very variant. The State of New 
York has very rich communities, very rich school districts. I think the 
school district in New York State that spends the most money per pupil 
spends $24,000 per pupil. $24,000 per pupil is spent in the richest 
district. In New York City, we are spending between $6,000 and $7,000 
per pupil.
  Nevertheless, there are children performing in some of these poor 
schools who can outperform schools in richer school districts. So it 
does not lock them in, but generally, generally poverty and low 
performance go together. The correlation has been proven over and over 
again.
  So I congratulate President Bush on saying we should focus the money. 
I will unite with President Bush in a bipartisan cooperation. I call on 
all my colleagues to unite with President Bush to push for the 
concentration and the focus of Federal resources in the areas that need 
money, that need resources most.

                              {time}  1630

  Let us not have competitive grants in education anymore. Any 
additional money, and we need far more money, should not be funding 
that is put out there and then a proposal must be submitted and those 
who submit proposals will have to compete. They will have a peer review 
process, and the best written proposal will get the money. What we find 
is that the districts in America who have the best proposal writers are 
walking off with the available funding.
  After-school centers, for example, 21st century learning centers they 
call them, they provide after-school money, Saturday tutoring, summer 
school money, very exemplary programs. I do not think anybody in the 
Congress, Republican or Democrat, who would say these programs do not 
work. If we are able to get after-school centers to provide that extra 
tutoring and Saturday tutoring, the things that go into those programs, 
then children can succeed, and we have seen the progress that students 
make. But the funding of the Federal Government for the 21st century 
learning centers does not even reach one quarter of those in need at 
this point, and those that are reached are not the most needy because 
it was a competitive grant and proposals had to be submitted and what 
we find is the best proposal writers are prevailing.
  All future grants in education should be given out on the basis of 
need. In other words, we can target the areas where the need is 
greatest by following the formula for free lunches. The school 
districts which have the largest numbers of pupils who receive free 
lunches are the poorest districts. We should not have them compete with 
other districts for after-school learning centers. We should say there 
is where the need is and additional funding goes to meet this need.
  Community technology centers. Community technology centers were 
proposed by the Congressional Black Caucus. We called them storefront 
computer centers because what we wanted to do was to have a situation 
where the deficiency in the homes of poor children would be compensated 
for by having the availability of computers in places where members of 
the family as well as the students could go to practice. They need 
access to a computer. Among other things, they need access to a 
computer in order to be able to master computer literacy. So a computer 
storefront center concept was a response of the Clinton administration 
to a request made by the Congressional Black Caucus.
  I applaud the Clinton administration for their response. I applaud 
the Republican majority for agreeing to the funding. But the computer 
storefront centers in the bureaucratic process and the bureaucratic 
approach became computer technology centers. Already we had ratcheted 
them up to another level beyond the simple storefront centers that we 
talked about. The very title that came out for the RFP, the request for 
proposals, went out to everybody for computer technology centers. 
Already the proposal was more complicated than a simple gathering of 
computers at a storefront place, with some personnel to keep it open 
late at night and on Saturdays. It became something more difficult.
  The proposal writers went to work all over America. Now, there are 
some school systems and some schools themselves that have excellent 
proposal writers. If there is a proposal, with guidelines, regardless 
of the circumstances on the ground, they will produce a magnificent 
proposal. And when the peer review readers get that proposal, they will 
mark it 100. It has no relationship with the actual need.
  Those who are most in need usually do not have excellent proposal 
writers. Those schools have teachers and personnel who have moved on, 
and the schools that have the least experienced personnel, the ones 
least likely to have good proposal writers, or the districts who are 
struggling to meet the needs of putting people in the classroom every 
day, they cannot afford to hire somebody who becomes a specialist in 
proposal writing.
  So what is happening in the Clinton administration, where we had 
funding for some good programs, all the way from Gear Up, community 
technology centers, and the Safe Schools and Drugs Act, there were a 
number of different programs that have been funded on the basis of 
competitive submissions and that process has led to the pupils and the 
schools and the district of greatest need not having received those 
programs.
  So one thing the President can do, and we will certainly cooperate 
with him, is to have a provision which requires that programs that are 
deemed to be necessary to help improve the performance of disadvantaged 
and at-risk students are programs that should be targeted to those 
areas without a competitive bidding process.
  We have many other programs that do get a distribution of their funds 
based on need or formula. We could have a formula which says if there 
are certain numbers of students which receive the free lunches or who 
are eligible for Title I funding, then that helps to drive and 
determine where the need is and that is where we should place the 
programs that we deem are necessary to improve education. So I agree 
with that point that the President starts with, and we certainly hope 
we can make that work in concrete terms.

  One of the problems we will be up against is that the members of the 
committee who are Republican have a Republican position in the House in 
general that is going in the other direction. They do not want to 
target the money into the poorest districts. They want to have block 
grants. The block grant goes to the State and the State governor 
determines where the money goes. The Federal Government is out of it. 
That is disaster, in our opinion.

[[Page H497]]

  Block grants have flexibility. We can have a grant which is for a 
specific program, like Title I; but the flexibility is so great until 
they can skim off money for administration, they could use some of it 
to improve the parking lot in a richer district. All kinds of things 
can happen when we grant flexibility to the States. It can go in the 
direction which is opposite where the President has chosen for it to 
go.
  Second point. President Bush says we will concentrate resources, and 
after we concentrate resources we will test. As a result of the testing 
process, we will make judgments. After 2 years, any school that is 
still failing will be required to allow its students to choose a public 
alternative. Public school choice will be mandated after 2 years. After 
3 years, any school that is still failing will be closed down and 
declared ineligible for Federal funding and will be privatized. The 
schools would have an option. They can give the students vouchers and 
send them off to private schools, or they can become charter schools, 
or they can become contracted to profit-making contractors who would 
run the schools. Three years.
  I agree that we should focus on failing schools. I do not agree that 
3-years-and-a-school-is-out is an appropriate process. Three strikes 
and you are out. Three years and you are out. I think that two problems 
exist there. Three years is not enough time. We do not transform 
institutions in 3 years. We do not solve problems involving human 
beings that fast in 3 years. That is a pretty harsh judgment to make: 
either improve, come up to standard in 3 years, or we close it down.
  We do not say that to any other set of institutions. We would have 
closed down the CIA and the FBI if we judged that harshly: either 
improve or perform. The CIA did not see the Soviet Union collapsing. 
Half of its resources were devoted to the Soviet Union, and they did 
not see the economy of the Soviet Union collapsing until I think the 
networks announced it to them. The CIA allowed Aldrich Ames, the person 
who was in charge of counterespionage, to sit there for years and 
destroy their effectiveness in terms of counterespionage. But we have 
not cut the CIA budget. We have not done anything to an institution 
that had a gross failure.
  We have had gross failures. The FBI now has grossly failed in the 
area of their own counterespionage operation. Nobody has dared to say 
we should get rid of the FBI because of the fact that the chief of 
counterintelligence was himself the mole and directing the operation 
for so many years, 15 years. We do not judge institutions anywhere else 
in our democracy so harshly.
  Why do we say to a school in a neighborhood struggling to educate its 
youngsters that they must either improve or we take all the Federal 
money away in 3 years? They have 3 years. So I think we ought to have 
some flexibility.
  We will work with the President on that area, and maybe we can have 
some flexibility, between 5 and 7 years, some kind of barometers of 
progress where school improvement at a certain rate we can assume is 
going to keep going and not harshly move in to take over after 3 years. 
The problem with the 3-year mandate is that there are many of us who 
suspect that it is a setup for failure; that by mandating 3 years, we 
set the school up to become privatized, with the real objective to 
privatize the schools of America.

  It is no secret that the members of the majority party want to go to 
vouchers, although not for their own school districts. When I question 
members of the majority party who advocate vouchers for poor districts, 
vouchers for the inner city, they do not want vouchers. They do not go 
to their own constituency and their own neighborhoods and say we are in 
favor of vouchers, because most of their neighborhoods where their 
children go to school have good schools. They have good public schools. 
Our goal is to have public schools as good as the ones that the 
majority of the Members of Congress have in their neighborhoods. Public 
schools.
  However, the push for vouchers cannot be resisted. The push for 
privatization cannot be resisted. The President now and the majority 
party in the House of Representatives, the majority party in the 
Senate, all are pushing for privatization. So what better situation to 
allow for a massive privatization of the schools in America than that 
to set up the schools for failure and say that they must succeed in 3 
years or they must be privatized; they will be out of business?
  The other part of that is in 3 years what kind of resources does the 
President propose to provide? In 3 years, what kind of funding will the 
Federal Government provide for these schools? How will we increase what 
exists already? The President proposed in his speech last night that 
education would be the area of domestic programming to get the largest 
increase in his budget. He proposes to increase education funding by 10 
percent. That is 10 percent over what exists now.
  We have actually had a rate of funding over the last 4 years greater 
than that. The increases in funding for education have been greater 
than 10 percent per year over the last 4 years. So the President would 
slow down the process, not increase it. He has made education the 
number one priority in terms of rhetoric, but in his first discussion 
of dollars he is slowing down the commitment to the provision of the 
necessary resources for the improvement of education.
  Here is the rub: I went to the White House as part of the 
Congressional Black Caucus meeting with the President and I spoke on 
education. I said, ``Mr. President, there are some good features in 
your plan. We would like to have a dialogue with you about it, but 
there are no figures, no dollars.'' At that time he had no dollar 
figures. He only came up with those last week, and last night he 
reaffirmed the fact that he is going to increase education by 10 
percent.

                              {time}  1645

  In the Congressional Black Caucus, we had a resolution passed like 2 
years ago when they first began to talk about a surplus and we said 
that whatever the surplus is, let us devote 10 percent of the surplus, 
the present education budget, let us add onto that each year 10 percent 
of the surplus. If the surplus does not pan out to be as high as they 
thought it would be, it is 10 percent of whatever it is. The 
projections for the surplus at that time were $200 billion, what it is 
roughly now, around $200 billion, the same figure. That meant 10 
percent for education would be $20 billion; $20 billion per year added 
to the education budget.
  Does that seem like an exorbitant amount? No. What you can do is in 
this time of most fortunate times of prosperity, deal with the capital 
expenditures. You do not have to increase the operating budgets of any 
schools. The aid would not be such that you would make the schools 
dependent. Spend for school construction. Spend for school computers, 
equipment, the capital expenditures. Now let us have every district be 
freed of the need to expend for capital items and especially let us set 
free those districts that need decent schools, buildings, safe 
buildings, buildings conducive to learning. Especially let us get the 
schools wired for computers and let us put computers in the schools. 
All of those things do not require that the Federal Government get 
involved in discussions of curriculum in the local school, discipline, 
administration. You do not have to get involved in local school 
matters. As the President said, the money came from the people. It is 
their money. Anyhow, we are not benevolently passing back money that 
does not belong to the people. Give it back to the people in the area 
of highest priority in terms of capital expenditures for education and 
get out. You are not required to stay in after you give help for school 
buildings. There is nothing to keep you there interfering with the way 
the schools are run. If you give money for computers, there is nothing 
to require you to stay there and interfere with the way the schools are 
run.
  A $20 billion increase in education per year over the next 10 years 
would create the kind of education system in America that would carry 
us forward into the 21st and 22nd century and make us completely 
inviolable, because it is education. Our greatness, our superiority in 
the military sector, in the industrial sector, commercial sector, in 
the cultural sector is dependent on a very highly educated population, 
a base of education which has people at every level educated. That must 
continue. If we fail to take this opportunity, if we are petty now and 
small-minded, have no vision and can only

[[Page H498]]

 see an increase of 10 percent of the current budget, rather than 10 
percent of the surplus, then we are going to lose a golden opportunity 
to guarantee that what happened to the Roman Empire will never happen 
to the American empire.
  Our empire is far more shaky than you think it is. We are alone in 
the world of 5 or 6 billion people and we have less than 300 million 
people who enjoy a very high standard of living. We have allies in 
industrialized areas. If you put us altogether, maybe we have a billion 
people who enjoy a very high standard of living, but what about the 
other 5 billion? Do you think you are really going to be able to exist 
unless we take our superior education, our productivity, our 
inventiveness, our ingenuity and keep spreading the prosperity of it, 
the benefits of prosperity and the benefits of inventiveness and the 
benefits of technology throughout the entire world. We have to have an 
educated population to do this. Everybody must be seen as a potential 
resource in the effort to keep America great in this area.
  We are showing strains at every level. There is a great shortage of 
teachers. Thousands and thousands of teachers are needed right now and 
they are not available in certain areas. The projection is that it will 
be hundreds of thousands of teachers needed in the next 5 to 10 years 
and they will not be there. We have shortages in other areas. 
Policemen. In the area of government service, the quality of people, 
there is a problem. In the quality of people in the military, there is 
a problem. We had an aircraft carrier launched a couple of years ago, a 
new aircraft carrier launched and they were short 300 people. They 
could not get 300 people to fill the necessary positions on the ship 
because the ship was such a high technology, the aircraft carrier had 
such high technology devices until they needed a very well educated 
population. They could not find the people. Those shortages in the 
military continue to exist. Ever more complicated weapons are invented 
and we are not matching that with a massive education program to be 
able to pull from the bottom what we need in terms of education.
  The caliber of people in high places obviously is a problem. I do not 
think 20 years ago we would have had a captain or an admiral or anybody 
in charge of a ship in the Middle East who would be so careless as to 
allow his ship to be put in a position where a man in a fishing boat 
could bring a bomb and blow a hole in the ship and the lives of 12 to 
15 sailors were lost. That bomb incident in the Middle East, I do not 
think we would have had a person in charge of a ship who was that dumb, 
who was that unqualified. I do not think we would have had the 
submarine accident that happened in Japan, that you would have people 
in charge of a ship who were as dumb as the people or as careless, 
unqualified as the people in that submarine who let that happen. From 
all the facts that I hear, the human error, the sloppiness is part of a 
pattern. The sloppiness in the CIA that produced Aldrich Ames, the 
sloppiness in the FBI that produced Mr. Hanssen, the sloppiness, the 
erosion of quality in the Navy that produces these accidents. It is all 
over. We have glitches in every level of our society because the 
complexities of operating things are so great until you need not just 
people at the very top who are excellent people but you need them all 
the way down the line.
  The man who put the oil in the airplane is the one I worry about when 
I get on the plane. Him and the mechanic who tightened the bolts on the 
little screws that had to be tightened, all those details are what 
makes a plane go. I do not worry about the pilot because we spend more 
money to train pilots than we do on anybody else, any other category of 
worker in the Nation. The pilots are well trained. But I worry about 
all those other people we are dependent upon. Education in America has 
to produce the high quality at every level. We have to get rid of our 
pettiness and go forward. We have to understand that this is no place 
to exercise some of our weaknesses, to let some of our weaknesses rise 
to the top.
  The Education Committee that I serve on is also called the Workforce 
Committee, Education and the Workforce. It used to be called the 
Education and Labor Committee. It is very antilabor, so much that they 
changed the name. They got rid of the word ``labor.'' But nevertheless 
all the functions related to working people in America must come from 
the same committee. We have a hostile atmosphere there toward working 
families. We have a move on now to roll back the standards in 
ergonomics, to change the way labor unions can provide money in 
political campaigns. There is an attack on working families through 
labor unions. That is where the people who are going to make our 
society run have to come from. They have to come from working 
families. Middle-class families are going to continue to produce 
doctors and lawyers and people in the higher professions, the business 
graduates. We need more computer scientists, we need people to operate 
the ships. We need whole categories of people that must be producing. 
The only place they can come from are working families. The attacks 
that are being made on labor are ridiculous because of the fact that we 
are undermining a segment of the population, working families, that is 
critical.

  In the area of minorities, we are still making critical mistakes in 
the area of minority education and the way we deal with minorities. We 
do not understand that the youngest population that we have are among 
the African Americans and the Hispanics. They have the youngest people. 
These are the people who are now at school age, who are going to be the 
workforce of tomorrow when many of the other folks in the majority 
population have begun to retire. The way we treat minor and children of 
minority families is critical.
  I want to end with one last statement on a recent development within 
our Education and Workforce Committee. We are going forward in the 
committee with the assignments for the new 107th Congress. This button 
I have on relates to a problem that has arisen in the reconfiguration 
of our committee subcommittees, the subcommittees laid out by the 
majority. The majority Republicans decide. We hoped that they would 
have done this in consultation with Democrats, but the pattern nowadays 
is that they do not consult with the minority, the Democrats are never 
consulted on these things, so they came with a proposal for a 
Subcommittee on 21st Century Competitiveness. I think the Subcommittee 
on 21st Century Competitiveness is very much in order, very much in 
line with where we have to go. I am here saying that education is the 
hope of America, that the only way our society is going to survive is 
by focusing intensely on our education system and guaranteeing maximum 
education for all. I think that the change of a name of a committee 
that used to be the Higher Education Committee to the Subcommittee on 
21st Century Competitiveness is appropriate. We were excited about 
that. But in the process of doing that and creating other committees, 
they took out of the Subcommittee on 21st Century Competitiveness all 
of the higher education titles related to minority schools. The 
historically black colleges and universities, title 3(B), the Hispanic 
serving institutions and the tribal colleges, all serving minorities, 
they were taken out of the Subcommittee on 21st Century 
Competitiveness. They were put into another committee which is called 
Committee for Select Education. In Select Education, you have the 
problems of juvenile delinquency prevention, child abuse prevention and 
a number of social programs and problems that are very important. We 
would like to see them dealt with. But why do you take out of the 
Committee on Competitiveness the minority colleges, the minority 
colleges, which have a great role to play in making America competitive 
in the 21st century? Where are we going to get the computer scientists 
from?
  We have title 1(B) now, H1B, I think, which brings in foreigners to 
take positions in the computer science industry, in the information 
technology industry. We should have more and better computer programs 
in these historically black colleges and universities and in the 
Hispanic serving institutions and the tribal colleges. When we discuss 
21st century competitiveness, we do not want to have a situation where 
the historically black colleges and the Hispanic serving institutions, 
the tribal colleges are not on the table, they are not being discussed. 
They go into another committee.

[[Page H499]]

  In boxing, if you have a bout scheduled after the main event, you get 
very little attention. No matter how much effort the boxers put forth, 
after the main event nobody is interested. The main event is the 
Subcommittee on 21st Century Competitiveness. We would like to have the 
historically black colleges and universities there. We would like to 
have the Hispanic serving institutions there. We would like to have the 
tribal colleges there. All of the members of the Education Committee 
who are minorities, we happen to have on that committee four people who 
are African Americans, three people who are Hispanic Americans, two who 
are Asian Americans and one who is a Native American. We all pleaded 
with the Republican leaders of the committee to not do that because it 
appeared, one, to push the minorities out of the process of preparing 
for 21st century competitiveness, it appeared that way, and in reality 
we know from experience that when you separate out things, they are not 
treated equally. When they get more attention as an event that takes 
place after the main event, if they are not at the table when the 
funding is being discussed, when the appropriations are being 
discussed, they will not prevail.

  That is just one of the kinds of blunders that we must worry about as 
we go into the 107th Congress. There is no crisis on the horizon which 
raises our level of adrenalin. We do not feel any intermediate 
emergency. We are a pretty smug, comfortable people, the American 
Nation at this point. It is an opportunity. We should not relax.
  When President Bush talked about the angel in the whirlwind in his 
inaugural address, the angel in the whirlwind which always seemed to be 
there to guide America through crisis. If we stop and think, that has 
been the case. We have gone through numerous crises in this country. We 
have had leaders produced at just the right time, Thomas Jefferson, 
Abraham Lincoln, and Roosevelt whose decisiveness and vision and 
cleverness matched Adolf Hitler. Not only did he get us out of the 
Depression but he led the way to the defeat of fascism.
  We have had critical periods in our history and had to rise to the 
occasion. Usually they were very physical kinds of challenges. The 
challenge we face now is different and it requires some creativity and 
some vision in terms of here we are in the midst of a peacetime 
prosperity with resources that are unparalleled. Never before in the 
history of mankind has a Nation existed as rich and powerful as 
America. If all we can do now is to declare war on our working families 
and go after their labor unions and undermine the structure for 
providing jobs and higher wages, if all we can do is do negative things 
like classify minorities in a special way, if those are the things we 
do, we will destroy our opportunity to overcome the problems that the 
Roman Empire finally faced.
  We do not have to decline. This empire can go on and on forever, but 
it has to have a firm commitment and dedication to education. We must 
put the money and the resources behind our rhetoric.
  President Bush, I congratulate you on the rhetoric. Now we have to 
get the resources for education to make education our number one 
priority in reality.

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