[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 45 (Friday, March 30, 2001)]
[Senate]
[Pages S3218-S3220]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]

      By Mr. CARPER (for himself, Mr. Gregg, Mr. Frist, Mr. Lieberman, 
        Mr. Bayh, Mr. Breaux, Mr. Bingaman, Mr. Santorum, Mr. Biden, 
        Ms. Landrieu, Mr. Smith of Oregon, Mr. Ensign, Mr. DeWine, Mr. 
        Kerry, and Mr. Specter):
  S. 669. A bill to amend the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of

[[Page S3219]]

1965 to promote parental involvement and parental empowerment in public 
education through greater competition and choice, and for other 
purposes; to the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.
  Mr. CARPER. Mr. President, I am very pleased to join today with my 
distinguished colleague from New Hampshire and a broad, bipartisan 
group of cosponsors to introduce the Empowering Parents Act of 2001. 
Senator Judd Gregg has been a consistent champion of charter schools 
and a passionate advocate of competition and choice in public 
education. I cannot imagine a better colleague to partner with on my 
first legislative initiative in the U.S. Senate.
  Like the Senator from New Hampshire, I come from a small State. Also 
like my friend from New Hampshire, I was once the governor of my small 
State. I think it is appropriate, that Senator Gregg and I have seen 
fit to team up so early in my tenure here in the Senate. During the 
fall campaign, I was fond of saying that we need more people in 
Washington who think and act like Governors. My years in the National 
Governors' Association taught me that Governors tend to be results-
oriented and tend to have a healthy impatience for partisan bickering.
  We in this Chamber will always have our disagreements. Next week, for 
example, we are scheduled to begin debate on the budget and every 
expectation is that it will be a very partisan debate. That makes it 
all the more important, that we push forward in those areas where we're 
able to reach bipartisan agreement. The issue of vouchers is one on 
which we are unlikely to come to a consensus. Expanding the number of 
charter schools and broadening public school choice, however, is 
something that we can agree on, and we should.
  Charter schools and public school choice inject market forces into 
our schools. They empower parents to make choices to send their 
children to a variety of different schools. That means that schools 
which offer what students and parents want, be it foreign languages, 
more math and science, higher test scores, better discipline, those 
schools will be full. Schools which fail to listen to their customers, 
to parents and students, may see their student populations diminish 
until those schools change. At the same time, charter schools are 
public schools, held to high standards of public accountability. And 
unlike vouchers, public school choice preserves indeed, it helps to 
fulfill the promise of equal access upon which public education and the 
common school tradition have always been premised.
  In my State, we've enthusiastically embraced both the charter 
movement and public school choice. We introduced charter schools and 
statewide public school choice almost 5 years ago. A greater percentage 
of families exercise public school choice in Delaware today than in any 
other State in the Nation, and in the last year alone the number of 
Delaware students in charter schools has more than doubled. The 
evidence is that these reforms, together with high standards and broad-
based educator accountability, are working to raise student achievement 
and to narrow the achievement gap between students of different racial 
and ethnic backgrounds. Students tested last spring, at every grade 
level tested and in each of our counties, made significant progress 
when measured against their peers throughout the country, as well as 
against Delaware's own academic standards.

  Let me tell you briefly, about one of the schools in my State that is 
helping to accomplish both of these goals, raising student achievement 
and closing the achievement gap. In Delaware, we have close to 200 
public schools. Students in all of these schools take Delaware's State 
tests measuring what students know and can do in reading, writing, and 
math. We also measure our schools by the incidence of poverty, from 
highest to lowest. The school with the highest incidence of poverty in 
my State is the East Side Charter School in Wilmington, DE. The 
incidence of poverty there is over 80 percent. Its students are almost 
all minority. It is right in the center of the projects in Wilmington. 
In the first year after East Side Charter School opened its doors, 
almost none of its students met our State standards in math. Last 
spring, there was only one school in our State where every third grader 
who took our math test met or exceeded our standards. That school was 
the East Side Charter School.
  It's a remarkable story, and it has been possible because the East 
Side Charter School is a remarkable school. Kids can come early and 
stay late. They have a longer school year. They wear school uniforms. 
Parents have to sign something akin to a contract of mutual 
responsibility. Educators are given greater authority to innovate and 
initiate. With highly qualified and highly motivated teachers and with 
strong leadership from active citizens who want to make a positive 
difference for their community, the East Side Charter School has become 
a beacon of hope to parents and students in a neighborhood where you 
can no longer have a pizza or newspaper delivered to your door. It has 
provided parents in that community with an option for their children 
they might not otherwise have had.
  The legislation that Senator Gregg and I are introducing today aims 
to make similar options available in communities all across our 
country, particularly in low-income communities and communities with 
low-performing schools, just like Wilmington's East Side. It encourages 
States and local districts with low-performing schools to expand public 
school choice. It also eliminates many of the artificial barriers to 
charter school financing that have prevented the supply of new charter 
schools from keeping pace with the growing demand among parents and 
students.
  Language was inserted in the FY 2001 Labor-HHS appropriations bill 
giving students the right to transfer out of failing schools. Some 
similar provision will likely be included in any legislation we pass 
this year reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. 
Unfortunately, the right to transfer out of a failing school will not 
by itself translate into a meaningful array of alternatives for 
parents. Nor, as far as I am concerned, will a $1,500 voucher, though I 
know there is some disagreement on this point even among supporters of 
this bill. In some high poverty school districts, there are no higher 
performing schools for students to transfer into. In other districts, 
administrative barriers or capacity constraints could well limit the 
choice provided to parents to a single alternative, which may or may 
not be the school that parents believe best meets their child's needs. 
Moreover, at least in my State--and I don't pretend to know 
the circumstances in other States--you can't get your kid in to get an 
education at the private or parochial schools for $1,500.

  Unless we help to establish new charter schools in communities with 
low-performing schools, and unless we provide encouragement to the 
States and local school districts that serve these communities to 
create broad and meaningful choice at the intra-district level and 
ideally at the inter-district level, the right to ``choice out'' of a 
failing school will be little more than an empty promise. The 
Empowering Parents Act aims to keep the promise by helping to ensure 
that parents are empowered with real choices for their children within 
the public school system.
  The Empowering Parents Act does three things. First, it provides $200 
million in competitive grants to States and local districts with low-
performing schools for the purpose of expanding public school choice. 
This will help to make the right to public school choice that we intend 
to make part of title I a meaningful right for parents with children 
trapped in failing schools.
  Second, the Empowering Parents Act expands the credit enhancement 
demonstration for charter schools that passed last year and also 
exempts all interest on charter school loans from federal taxes. This 
will leverage private financing to help charter schools finance start-
up costs, as well as the costs associated with the acquisition and 
renovation of facilities, the most commonly cited barriers to the 
establishment of new charter schools.
  Third and finally, the Empowering Parents Act creates incentives for 
States to provide per pupil facilities funding programs for charter 
schools. According to a recent GAO report, ``Charter Schools; Limited 
Access to Facility Financing,'' the per pupil allocations that charter 
schools receive as

[[Page S3220]]

public schools to educate public school students are frequently just a 
fraction of the amount that is provided annually to traditional public 
schools for operating expenses and thus provide none of the funding 
that traditional public schools receive for facility costs. 
Additionally, GAO reports that school districts that are allowed to 
share local facility financing with charter schools often do not. The 
result is that charter schools are forced to literally take money out 
of the classroom, dipping into funds meant to pay teachers and purchase 
textbooks, just so they can secure a roof over their students' heads. 
The Empowering Parents Act would provide matching grants to states to 
encourage them to level the playing field between charters and 
traditional public schools with respect to facility financing.
  Mr. President, the call for competition and choice among accountable 
public schools can be heard all across America. Just 7 years ago, there 
was only one charter school in existence in the entire nation. Today, 
36 States and the District of Columbia have charter school laws, and 
there are over 350,000 students attending nearly 1,700 charter schools. 
As fast as the movement for charters and choice has grown, the reality 
is that the ideal of involved and empowered parents choosing a child's 
school from among a range of diverse but accountable public schools 
remains the exception rather than the rule in America. In fact, 7 out 
of 10 charter schools around the country have a waiting list of 
students they can't accommodate. The charters and choice movement is a 
grassroots movement, and thus, appropriately, most of action is taking 
place at the state and local level. There is an old saying, however, 
that you must lead, follow, or get out of the way. Charters and choice 
are sparking innovation in schools around the country, and there is a 
role for the Federal Government to play in spreading the synergy.

  A key role of the Federal Government in the area of education is to 
level the playing field for children that come from tough, 
disadvantaged backgrounds. We are committed in America to the principle 
that every child deserves a real chance to reach high standards of 
achievement. I have said often that we need to start our efforts to 
level the playing field by ensuring that every child enters 
kindergarten ready to learn, which means promoting early childhood 
education, beginning with full funding for Head Start. However, charter 
schools and public school choice should also play an integral part in 
our efforts to close the achievement gap, because whenever a child is 
left trapped in a failing school, it means that we have failed as a 
nation to fulfill the promise of equal opportunity for all and special 
privileges for none.
  Passing the Empowering Parents Act would represent a landmark federal 
commitment to parental involvement and parental empowerment in public 
education. It would send a clear message from coast to coast that we 
will no longer settle in America for a public education system that 
traps students in schools that fail to meet high standards. That's not 
a Democrat message. That's not a Republican message. That's a message 
of hope and opportunity, a message I believe Republicans and Democrats 
can embrace together.
  When Lynne Cheney visited Delaware in the heat of last fall's 
Presidential campaign to shine a national spotlight on the East Side 
Charter School, it was a great tribute to the tremendous 
accomplishments of the parents, teachers, and administrators who have 
poured their energy and creativity into that remarkable school. It was 
also a tribute, I believe, to our bipartisan spirit of cooperation in 
Delaware and to the progress that we can achieve when we work 
together--Republicans and Democrats, legislators and business leaders, 
parents and teachers. Our charters and choice legislation passed on 
consecutive days back in 1995. One bill was sponsored by a Republican, 
one by a Democrat. It was truly a bipartisan effort.
  That's the way we do things in Delaware. We work together. We get 
things done. It is this uncommon tradition of putting aside partisan 
differences and doing what is right for Delaware that has enabled our 
State to shine. And it is this same spirit of common-sense bipartisan 
that is needed in Washington if America is to embrace a new century 
strong and confident in our future.
  We will have plenty to fight about in this Chamber, this year and in 
the years to come. I suggest to my colleagues, let's take the 
opportunities we have to find common ground and to show the American 
people that we can work together to make a difference for communities 
and families across this country. As the broad bipartisan support for 
this legislation attests, the Empowering Parents Act provides us with 
an opportunity to govern in a positive, progressive, and bipartisan 
fashion. I ask my colleagues to join with Senator Gregg and myself to 
help pass the Empowering Parents Act, and thereby to register a win for 
bipartisanship and more importantly, a win for children trapped in 
schools that are failing to meet their potential or allow their 
students to reach their own potential.
  Mr. President, I yield the floor.
                                 ______