[Congressional Record Volume 147, Number 96 (Wednesday, July 11, 2001)]
[House]
[Pages H3945-H3951]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




      ROLE OF THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IN AGRICULTURE AND EDUCATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Kerns). 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, today we concluded the appropriations debate 
and passed an agricultural appropriations bill for $74.6 billion. I 
think that it passed with a minimum amount of discussion and 
controversy.
  I think we had an overwhelming vote from all the members. I voted for 
it myself, even though in the past I have been wary of agricultural 
bills that have large amounts of subsidies for farmers for crops that 
no longer need subsidies. But that is not a point that I want to expand 
on. I want to say that we have passed a bill for $74.6 billion, the 
Federal Government's involvement in agriculture, and the farmers of the 
United States are less than 2 percent of the population.
  We take good care of our farmers and they give us good return. We are 
the best fed Nation in the world, but we certainly take very good care 
of them. Any people among those farmers and

[[Page H3946]]

that particular group that continues to talk about not wanting the help 
of government or complaining about big government, telling government 
to get off their back, et cetera, it is hypocritical because the 
government is very much involved in producing the best agricultural 
system in the world. It is a monument to the achievement of government 
and education. The Morrell Act which created the land grant colleges in 
all of the States set off a process which created agricultural 
engineering and science, an approach to implementing new theories 
rapidly, the county agents, and a number of different innovations that 
still survive to this day. There are still committees in every county 
that relate to the Department of Agriculture.
  The system has been very productive. The system is, however, a system 
that we oversee as the Federal Government, and it is fed and kept alive 
by the Federal Government. Most people do not know it, but the 
department of government in Washington which has the second largest 
number of employees, second only to the Pentagon, is the Department of 
Agriculture, although we now have less than 2 percent of the population 
which are actually farmers, bodies who can be called farmers.
  Mr. Speaker, we take good care of agriculture and as a result, we get 
good return. There are 53 million children in the public schools of the 
Nation. That is far more than 2 percent of the population. If we want 
to put the same kind of investment into education, we would reap 
greater and greater returns, I assure my colleagues, on education. As I 
said before, the productivity of our agriculture system is directly 
related to the fact that we understood the role of education in 
agricultural production very early in the life of the Nation. Land 
grant colleges were not established to teach theology or philosophy. 
They were established to bring a new approach to teaching engineering, 
agriculture and biology in all kinds of things that were very practical 
and productive. So the great system for feeding America which feeds a 
large part of the world is based on a step taken by the United States 
government in the area of education. One of our monumental achievements 
in the area of education was the Morrell Act which established the land 
grant colleges in all of the States of the United States.
  The Morrell Act, of course, was inspired by Thomas Jefferson's genius 
when he created the University of Virginia, a State-based university. 
He took the first step and Morrell followed through, and every single 
State benefited from the same vision, an extension of the vision of 
Thomas Jefferson.
  We need the same kind of vision as we look at the 53 million children 
that are in our public schools. We need to understand that a large part 
of what we have been able to accomplish as a Nation is based on the 
fact that we have subscribed from the early days to the philosophy of 
universal education.
  The Federal Government has not played the first role, but the Federal 
Government certainly has never interfered with the States, and every 
State accepted the responsibility. It is the ethic of the American 
people which lead to the creation in the constitution of every State 
the responsibility for education.
  The Federal Government discovered in World War I and World War II 
that it had to go beyond that in terms of the development of its youth 
population, its scientists and technicians, and so it began to play a 
greater role in higher education in general. Now following the genius 
of Lyndon Johnson and the great society era where he established the 
first Federal support for elementary and secondary education, the 
Federal government has been a partner. We are weak partners. We do not 
have a major role in terms of funding. We actually only fund about 7 
percent of the total education budget for the Nation. It is the State 
and local governments that fund the rest of the education budget, but 
we are involved.

  We recognize the necessity for that involvement and I think every 
State education official and local education official, and certainly 
teachers and principals throughout the Nation, will indicate that since 
the Federal Government got involved to the present there have been 
improvements.
  The Federal Government's role in education has been a very positive 
role, a role that we can be proud of. I am here today to sort of remind 
us that we should not allow this lull in the attention being offered by 
the Federal Government, by the people here in the Congress and the 
White House to education, do not let this lull allow us to take for 
granted what is going to happen next in the area of education in terms 
of this year's legislative agenda.
  We have passed a bill here in the House of Representatives, Leave No 
Child Behind, the President's bill, and the bill has passed in the 
other body. It is now waiting deliberation by conference. I read in the 
paper that the other body has appointed its conferees, the people who 
will sit on the conference committee. We have not done that in the 
House, but I assume that we will do that fairly soon. It is likely this 
process will go beyond the August recess, and that the climax will take 
place in September when we return from the August recess.
  In the meantime, I want Members to still be aware of the fact that 
the last word has not been stated, it is not over yet by a long shot. 
We have a major dilemma. We have to confront a major dilemma with 
respect to the bills that have passed in the House of Representatives 
and the other body. The dilemma is this. We have authorized in both 
cases amounts of money to implement the Leave No Child Behind education 
program, amounts of money that are far greater than the amounts of 
money that have been reserved in the budget, the budget which has been 
passed in this House and in the other body, does not allow for the 
implementation of the most important provisions of the Leave No Child 
Behind legislation.
  For example, one very important piece, Title I, Title I has been the 
major instrument for granting and providing public assistance, Federal 
assistance to education agencies across the country. It is about $8 
billion. Title I in the Leave No Child Behind legislation is supposed 
to double in the next 5 years beginning with increments which will go 
into effect this year. So in this year's budget, there has to be the 
first increment for the movement of Title I forward. And in a 5-year 
period, it will reach $17.2 billion, according to the authorization. It 
is hypocritical to have all of the powers that be, the White House, 
both parties agreed on this, and then to have the authorization sitting 
there without an appropriation to back it up. There is no room in the 
budget at this point.

                              {time}  2145

  So it is going to have to be negotiated through some extraordinary 
effort. We are going to have to break the budget or greatly shift some 
items around in order to accommodate the authorized amount. We 
certainly want to make certain that the priorities are such that this 
authorized amount will be honored before some other items may be 
honored. In order to do this, we cannot leave it to the processes here 
in Washington. The same processes that have generated this movement 
forward, however small it may be, and I am not pleased with the fact 
that Leave No Child Behind is inadequate in so many ways. It is 
inadequate because it has no money, not a single penny, for school 
construction. The Leave No Child Behind legislation that passed the 
House of Representatives did not allow a single penny for school 
construction. There is some hope because the other body did place $175 
million in the budget for charter school construction.
  It is very interesting, in an era where the majority party has 
insisted that it would not move forward on any school construction 
appropriation because it is not the job and the duty of the Federal 
Government, they do not want to get involved, the same leadership of 
the same party put in $175 million for charter school construction. I 
am all in favor of leaving the $175 million in there for charter school 
construction, but I would like to see it expanded so that we can at 
least get back to the $1.2 billion that the previous administration had 
appropriated for emergency school construction across the board, not 
just charter schools but all schools that had need.
  So we have work to do. There are inadequacies and some of those 
inadequacies cannot be addressed in the appropriation process. They 
require new authorization. But some of the inadequacies can be 
addressed. The one that I have just given as an example can be

[[Page H3947]]

addressed. And since there is $175 million in the budget for charter 
school construction, then it is in order, it is certainly in order, to 
expand that school construction money to move it to encompass more than 
just charter schools, and I certainly will be intending to offer an 
amendment to that effect when the bill comes back to us. If you cannot 
offer an amendment, I certainly will seek through the conferencing 
process to have the conferees consider moving from $175 million just 
for charter schools to a larger amount which would deal with school 
construction emergencies across the board where they are needed.
  There are many other items that they can deal with also because they 
are in the authorization language and we can move in that respect. I 
think that the other body had a set of authorizing figures, the amounts 
for authorization, in a number of areas that are higher than the 
authorization figures in the House of Representatives bill. So there is 
hope there that in the conferencing process, we can move in the 
direction of the amounts of money that have been established by the 
other body and be able to deal with some of the inadequacies that are 
left.
  I think the important thing is the public must realize that the fact 
that education is on the agenda at all, the fact that it was one of the 
first items the new administration placed before the Congress is due to 
the commonsense pressure that is being applied from the bottom. It is 
the public opinion that keeps consistently stating to the elected 
officials that education has to be one of our priority items. It seems 
that we are always running away from it. Elected officials have not 
really engaged the education agenda the way they should. Considering 
the fact that for the last 5 years, it has been among the top item and 
for the last 2 years it has been number one on the agenda of the public 
opinion polls, we should have done more. We should have done more. But 
our engagement has been of a shadow boxing approach where we engage in 
it with rhetoric, there is a lot of talk about education, there is a 
lot of discussion, and then when the authorizing and the appropriation 
process takes place, there is minimum effort. In the Leave No Child 
Behind legislation, we do not have maximum effort, we have minimum 
effort. It is important for the public to remember that. Whatever we 
are going to conclude with this year is still far short of where we 
should be in terms of the Federal involvement in education.
  People say, ``Well, it's really a local and a State matter.'' Yes, it 
should primarily remain a local and State matter. In terms of support 
for education, financing of education, funding of education should 
remain primarily a State and local matter. But that does not mean that 
the Federal Government cannot be more involved than 7 percent. Seven 
percent leaves us a lot of room. Why do we not shoot for 25 percent? 
There are people who fear that greater Federal involvement will mean a 
loss of local control, a loss of State control of the schools. With 7 
percent involvement, and the local government and State government have 
93 percent of the funding, then certainly you cannot control anything. 
If you have 93 percent, if the other party has 93 percent, you cannot 
control it with 7 percent. Let us not kid ourselves. If we increase it, 
the Federal share, from 7 percent to 25 percent, we still are not in a 
position to control, and that is a bogeyman that should be shot down 
and forgotten. We should be moving toward more Federal funding in terms 
of a greater percentage of the bill for education should be paid by the 
Federal Government.

  All taxes, all revenue comes from the local area, anyhow. All 
politics is local, all revenue is local. The money we print in 
Washington is symbolic, it is symbolic of the taxes that are flowed in 
here from the States and the localities. So give it back to them in 
ways which promote the item that the American public has indicated is 
the number one item. They would like to see more Federal involvement in 
education. Let us keep the debate going, let us continue to talk in 
terms of what is needed, instead of merely settling for the parameters 
that have been established by the Leave No Child Behind legislation.
  I want to take the opportunity today to talk about two groups, two 
statements of vision that have come to my office very recently. One is 
a book that is written by Dwight Allen who is an education professor at 
Old Dominion University and William Cosby, Bill Cosby. Most people do 
not know that Bill Cosby has a Ph.D. in education and that he has 
always been interested in schools and in children. Cosby wrote several 
books on children and families that were best sellers some years ago. 
This book is a combination with an education professor friend of his. 
The title of the book is ``American Schools, the $100 Billion 
Challenge.'' The $100 billion does not refer to $100 billion over the 
next 10 years, Mr. Speaker, it refers to $100 billion per year that 
ought to be added to the Federal effort in education. It is interesting 
that they would think in those terms, when a second presentation by the 
Children's Defense Fund, the Act to Leave No Child Behind as a bill 
that has been introduced in the Senate, S. 940, and in the House as 
H.R. 1990. Senator Christopher Dodd of Connecticut is the sponsor in 
the Senate and the gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller), the 
highest ranking Democrat on the Committee on Education and the 
Workforce in the House is the sponsor. They are talking about $100 
billion, also. It is very interesting. What can we make of this and 
should I waste your time with utopian proposals for the Federal 
involvement in education? Frankly, I do not believe they are utopian.
  Because we operate within the parameters of political practicality, I 
have not offered an amendment to the effect of levels of funding as 
high as proposed in these two documents, but they make sense. Their 
proposals make sense. Their proposals talk about moving away from 
incremental, nickel-and-dime approaches to reform and let us do the 
things that are really necessary on a scale that is necessary to move 
us forward. What has America got to lose by having a greater Federal 
investment in education? And what does it have to gain? I think that 
the gains in investment in education are tremendously geometric. The 
gains are fantastic in terms of what you invest and the educated 
population that you get as a result, what they produce. What are we 
producing in America now? We are way ahead of the rest of the world. 
Agriculture is just an old-fashioned basic example. We got way ahead of 
the world by investing heavily in education in agriculture. We are way 
ahead of the world right now in terms of digitalization, 
computerization and anything involving science and the application of 
science. Our pharmaceutical industries, our medical. Why are we there? 
Because in addition to the Morrill Act which established the land grant 
colleges, on several occasions the Federal Government has acted with 
broad and thorough funding powers to boost education.
  The GI bill. When the men who fought in World War II came back, every 
single one of them was given the right to an education financed by the 
Federal Government, from A to Z. There are some who went to barber 
school, some who went to business school. Many went into our 
universities. Our universities had never had such an enrollment. 
Enrollment was doubled and tripled in many of our universities as a 
result of the GI bill, a Federal bill that paid the bill, paid the 
expenses for men, veterans, to become educated. What came out of that? 
Large numbers of men who would never have gone to college, who would 
never have become technicians or never have become scientists, they 
entered the workforce and entered our economy at a time when automation 
was taking place. The great jump forward, the great leap forward after 
World War II was automation in our plants. We had the technicians and 
the mechanics and the people to do that because of this tremendous 
investment that this Nation made in education.
  We have not looked back and really thoroughly examined what we have 
done. The institutional memory of the American citizens in terms of 
what we have done in education and what we have reaped as a result is 
not there automatically. You have to talk about it. But we got a great 
boost. The fact that we are ahead in computer science is not by 
accident. We filled our universities and the great expansion that took 
place in education following the GI bill, once the GI bill recipients 
were

[[Page H3948]]

out of college, every university that was publicly financed found its 
enrollment still going up, because through that experience, they 
expanded greatly, and they made it possible to have lower tuition and 
more and more young people could go to college and the age of the 
computer, digitalization, communications improvements, and all the 
kinds of things that we take for granted now were made possible by the 
crop of technicians and scientists who came forward through that 
process.

  It is likely that if we were to invest $100 billion in education 
every year for the next 10 years, we will reap 10 times that much 
incrementally, it will probably be geometric, to heights that we cannot 
conceive. Most people cannot conceive the need for that many educated 
people. They say that you do not need that many educated people. When I 
came out of college, there was a raging debate in certain places about 
do we need more people, more educated people? They will only take the 
jobs of those who now have the jobs. Do we need more teachers? There 
was a limited supply of teacher jobs. We would have a pressure on the 
professions that could not be met by educating all these new people.
  What has happened? We have gone through a process where now there is 
a tremendous shortage of teachers. Let us take teachers, because 
teachers outnumber lawyers. Teachers outnumber doctors. That is a 
profession that has large numbers of people involved, large numbers in 
school who come through the process and become teachers, and we used to 
take for granted, if you could not do anything else, you could teach 
and therefore you would always have a large number of people who on the 
way to some other profession would teach for a while first and then for 
various reasons teaching was a profession that we had no shortages. 
Women who were not allowed to get into corporations to the degree that 
they are today and many other professions had sort of walled them off, 
medicine, law, sort of hemmed women in, they kept them in teaching and 
nursing. All those barriers have fallen now and we have a tremendous 
shortage of teachers right now at this very moment and the shortage is 
increasing geometrically. It is increasing right now greatly.
  New York City had 4,000 teachers who resigned or retired over a 2-
year period 2 years ago. In this last year, they had 4,000 teachers in 
one year. They expect to have 6,000 retire next year. We are into a 
situation where they can see the number of people qualified in terms of 
years spent in the system and the other pressures will lead to a 
tremendous drain on the number of teachers.

                              {time}  2200

  There is a great shortage of teachers in New York City right now. We 
are not able to get trained, certified teachers to fill all of our 
classrooms, and many other big cities have the same problem.
  The other pressure, other than just not having the bodies that come 
out of the process of education, is that the surrounding suburbs, which 
usually are more wealthy sometimes in other States, in New Jersey or 
Pennsylvania, New York is surrounded by suburbs that can pay much 
higher salaries for teachers. So they have shortages in those areas and 
it speeds up, it escalates, the drain of teachers in New York City.
  I am told that one of the big problems we have with school 
construction is that school construction has now hit a problem because 
the construction industry certainly in the New York area has sort of 
over booked. They have more than they can handle because the 
construction industry has a great shortage of skilled personnel, 
carpenters, sheet metal workers. The people who make construction go 
are in short supply. So we have a skills problem in the area of 
construction.
  We have a problem recruiting policemen. There is a difficulty. There 
is a big debate. They have lowered the standard for policemen. Whenever 
you move in search of some skills that go beyond just a high school 
education, there are shortages developing in big metropolitan areas. I 
am certain that the experience in Los Angeles and Chicago and Detroit 
and some other areas is not going to be so different. There is 
unemployment at the lower levels where you have no skills and no 
education, but in the areas where the people are semi-professional or 
professional, the shortages have already shown up. So just to fill the 
shortages, just to fill nurses, nurses is another area which we are 
hearing more and more about every day. I have heard some 1-minute 
speeches on the floor of the Congress. I have seen items in the 
newspapers repeatedly about hospitals not having enough nurses and 
other medical personnel. So that is another area of skilled and 
professional people where you have a shortage.
  Just to fill those traditional positions, just to take care of the 
careers that we are all familiar with, you need more people who are 
educated. But when I talk about a great geometrical increase in the 
benefits that you get from having an educated population, I mean more 
than just replacement of the usual professionals, I am talking about 
professions that we have not even conceived yet that are just shaping 
up. The people in the area of genetics, a large numbers of people in 
the field of genetics, who were not there 10 years ago, it is an 
exploding field. People in biotechnology, on and on it goes in terms of 
the kinds of research that if you have the personnel, if you have the 
people who have the scientific know-how and have been trained, you can 
move much more rapidly to unearth new discoveries in science. Whether 
you are talking about discoveries in biotechnology and microbiology, in 
physics, all kinds of discoveries, telecommunications, can take place 
in direct proportion to the number of people who are educated. All of 
the forward motion in terms of technology and science can also move 
forward without the costs being so great. The greater the supply of 
professionals and technicians, the less the costs. We have some high 
cost scientists and some high cost scientific projects because there 
are too few scientists available.
  In the area of computer technology, it is kind of a recession, a 
correction, they say, in the dot com industry. Computer specialists 
were in high demand. Information technology personnel is in high demand 
and I am told this is only a blip on the screen, that pretty soon the 
demand for information technology personnel will be as great as it was 
before. So an investment in education pays off geometrically. If we 
spend a billion dollars more per year on education for the next 10 
years, it will give this society benefits which are worth far more than 
we invest. If you have to state everything in terms of dollar value, 
trillions and trillions of dollars would be realized because we would 
develop, we know that there are secrets out there waiting to be 
unlocked in biotechnology alone, that if you put more people to work 
there is a correlation between the ratio of people put to work and the 
benefits that you would achieve. The same thing is true in certain 
areas of digitalization, computerization and those areas. They reap 
benefits, what they call in economic terms productivity. American 
productivity has greatly increased, and one of the downsides of the 
great increase in productivity is that it puts out of work a lot of 
people who did mundane tasks but at the same time it creates a need for 
a different kind of employee and personnel with much more know-how.
  We want to have the personnel with the know-how available to take the 
jobs. So our investment in education has a dual effect of moving us 
forward to an era where more will be unlocked at a faster and faster 
pace, new technology, new medical benefits, new ways to decrease the 
energy employed to produce items and all other so-called seemingly 
unsolvable problems, problems that cannot be solved now, seemed they 
cannot be solved. You can solve them if you get more personnel, if you 
get more trained people. The training process, the education process 
from the first grade to graduate school and beyond graduate school, is 
such that you are only going to produce a certain number of geniuses, 
but you can rest assured if you put a certain number of people through 
that process there will be geniuses discovered. The world is not run by 
geniuses. Geniuses are regular people who serve with partners with 
them, other scientists and theoreticians, and the theoreticians and 
scientists have to have technicians to work with them. The technicians 
have to have mechanics. All up and down the line of the funnel you will

[[Page H3949]]

have developed people breaking out in their own capacity.

  If you give them the opportunity, they will develop to their fullest 
capacity, which means that everybody will be improved and everybody 
will be able to make a contribution that they could not make if they 
did not have the education.
  We should not hold back and hesitate as most of our political leaders 
are. The governors and the mayors and the people who are in charge 
continually become an obstacle in the forward movement of the 
appropriation of the adequate sums of money for education. They are the 
ones who prefer to talk about education without really improving 
education.
  We have a problem in New York City with the receipt of State aid over 
the years has been clearly unfair. They have not given the city pupils 
the same kind of support from the State that the other pupils have 
gotten outside of New York City. A court suit was mounted and a judge 
came to the conclusion that, yes, it is true. The State has not been 
appropriately financing the schools in the city and the State should 
take corrective action. The governor of the State has appealed that 
decision, and one of the things he said in his appeal is quite 
frightening. The firm that was hired by the State of New York, which is 
the firm that has been used in a lot of school segregation cases in the 
south, that firm has based its defense, its appeal on the following 
theory: That city students failed in school because of their poverty. 
No amount of money, whether to raise teachers' salaries, to build more 
schools or to install science labs, would make a difference. That is 
what the States attorneys are saying, that poverty is the cause of the 
failure of the school system; the inability of the children to learn is 
due to their poverty.
  Now, we know that there would be a revolution if the governor had 
dared to say due to their race, due to their ethnicity or due to their 
religion. That would be clearly discrimination. Clearly, he would get a 
reaction from right across the country about that kind of approach. But 
it is a hidden statement. Most of the poor children in New York City 
are minority children, either Hispanic or children of African descent 
and they are being told in this defense that the governor has put up 
that poverty is a problem.
  It is not the lack of funding. I do not want to go into that too far. 
I just want to point out that it is a frightening notion. If you move 
in that direction and do not challenge that kind of theory, the problem 
is that in 10 years you would end up with a clear statement by 
policymakers in the State that the State does not owe any children 
universal education because if they are too poor to learn then we 
should not invest the money trying to make them learn. The implications 
of assuming that poverty blocks learning, poverty dooms the school 
system, the implications are devastating and we hope to deal with that 
argument right away.
  I got something from one of my constituents about a new proposal 
about reparations. There is a young man that has caused a stir by 
putting out a pamphlet about reparations, makes a statement about 10 
reasons why reparations for blacks is a bad idea for blacks and it is a 
racist idea also. Reparations become suddenly not only a bad idea and 
something that we should not talk about but it is also a racist notion 
for any group to say we may be owed reparations. I can see 10 years 
from now if you let the governor go unchallenged with poor students, 
whether they are African American or Hispanic, being told it is a bad 
idea for you to demand a universal free education because, after all, 
we have tried and we could not educate you because you are poor.
  I do not want to go too deeply into the implications of that kind of 
argument. My point is that the governors and the mayors and the people 
who are blocking the way, and people in high places, of course, in the 
Federal level, blocking the way in terms of the appropriations of ample 
resources for education, they are refusing to respond to the public 
outcry for improvements by dealing with basics. Basically, you need 
whatever it takes to provide certain physical facilities that are safe, 
physical facilities that are conducive to education. You need to 
provide basic instructional assistance by having trained teachers, 
teachers who are certified and know what they are doing. You need to 
have decent equipment, decent supplies, decent sized laboratories. You 
need a library at every school. The basics are not there.
  Before we move to more theoretical kinds of considerations of 
accountability and testing and blaming the teachers, let us put the 
basics in place. The basics are not there, however. These people who 
talk about $100 billion per year are on track because instead of 
proposing utopian ideas, Dwight Allen and Bill Cosby are proposing 
ideas that make a lot of sense. Senator Christopher Dodd and the 
gentleman from California (Mr. George Miller) in the Act to Leave No 
Child Behind, S. 940, H.R. 1990, are making some sound proposals. I 
must point out that the Act to Leave No Child Behind is not just an 
education bill. This is about children. It goes beyond education, to 
health, environment, nutrition, housing. This is about a program for 
children. In terms of the dollar figures, they come out at the same 
point as the cost by proposals, but nothing proposed here is 
outlandish, outrageous, utopian. It is all very sound and very on 
target.

                              {time}  2215

  But we have lost sight of that. In the deliberation of the education 
bill, I offered a motion to instruct which was related to construction. 
Now, because of the atmosphere, we were tempted to compromise and to 
try to win votes by watering down the original amendment that I had 
made. We came all the way down from an amendment that I made which 
would have appropriated $10 billion a year over a 10 year period for 
school construction, to $1.2 billion, the amount equal to the amount 
appropriated by the outgoing Clinton Administration for school repairs, 
mostly emergency repairs.
  So even though the need clearly is up at the point where you need at 
least $10 billion a year just for school construction, and that is 
based on several studies that have been conducted by the General 
Accounting Office and conducted by the National Education Association 
showing that you needed about $320 billion. The National Education 
Association study, if you combined school construction and repair with 
new technology, you need $320 billion. New York State had the highest 
need of about $44 billion in order to bring the schools up to par to a 
level where they could serve the present population appropriately.
  So my estimates and my figures on school construction were not pulled 
out of the air. They were already a compromise. But on the floor here I 
offered a motion to instruct which was watered down to $1.2 billion per 
year. Of course, that failed. It got a party line vote, and we failed 
to pass it. But it was a far cry from the need.
  We have to do that. As people who are trying to compromise and get 
something done, we have to sacrifice our vision of what the need is. 
But I do not want the people out there who have had the common sense 
all these years to keep the pressure on elected officials to lose sight 
of what is needed. We do not need $1.2 billion for school construction, 
we need $10 billion a year for school construction. We need the kind of 
figures that are stated in this book, American Schools, the $100 
Billion Challenge.
  I am going to read a few examples from this $100 billion challenge 
which Bill Cosby and Professor Dwight Allen put forth. I am going to 
read these, as I said before, not as a politician, an elected official 
offering these as suggestions that I intend to put in legislation 
tomorrow, but as mind-stretching exercises.
  Let us stretch our minds and try to look at education from the point 
of view of these experts. They are both Ph.D.s in education, they are 
both very concerned about it, but they are outside looking into the 
governmental process, and some of the conclusions they come to would be 
very instructive. We did not hear from these people in hearings before 
we passed the Leave No Child Behind legislation. Nobody was interested 
in hearing these kinds of statements.
  But here is a vision that is worth consideration by all that really 
care about education. In the section $100 billion for teachers, a 
summary of the listing, they start out with $6 billion

[[Page H3950]]

regular in-service training on the Internet for all teachers.
  Now, we have pages and pages of discussion of teacher training and 
teacher improvement, but I do not think any one of our legislative 
proposals dealt with anything of this nature, certainly not with that 
kind of figure. I think our total amount for training of teachers is 
something close to $4 billion for all training, and in-service training 
and upkeep for teachers.
  Here, in this proposal, just to read a few examples, $6 billion for 
regular in-service training on the Internet for all teachers. 
Compensate every teacher in America $2,000 per year extra to spend 2 
hours a week on the Internet upgrading their knowledge of his or her 
subjects, their teaching methods and of the newest research. We all 
agree that lots of teachers are out-of-date in their knowledge of both 
content and method of teaching. Current methods are hit and miss and 
often not valued by teachers who receive such training. The Internet 
offers a dramatic new potential. Developing and presenting new content 
and methods in a systematic way for all teachers can now be routine and 
cost-effective in a way never before possible--$6 billion they propose 
to spend on regular in-service training on the Internet for all 
teachers in the Cosby-Allen proposals.
  Another area that they propose expenditures which I found to be 
interesting was the expenditure of $2 billion to train a corps of 
master teacher mentors. Provide a trained corps of clinical master 
teacher mentors for each teacher in training and for beginning 
teachers. There would be several concomitant benefits of paying mentor 
teachers $2,000 to $5,000 stipends each year. This is above their 
salary. First of all, well-trained mentors would provide better 
supervision and guidance for new teachers, and if the mentors are well 
paid, they will be encouraged to provide more and more and better 
assistance and they will stay in the school system, instead of moving 
on to higher paying jobs elsewhere.

  Another item, $5 billion, $5 billion, this is one I have never seen 
before, for a corps of $100,000 classroom teachers. Listen closely, $5 
billion for a core of $100,000 classroom teachers. Pay 5 percent of all 
teachers, pay 5 percent of all teachers, an added $50,000 per year to 
attract and hold a share of the brightest college and university 
graduates as master teachers.
  In other words, you get master teachers who would be making up to 
$100,000 a year. Pay 5 percent of all teachers $100,000 a year. We need 
to break the mold of a single salary schedule for all teachers. Just as 
the dream of a NBA million dollar contract does energize sandlot and 
school basketball all over the Nation, realistic aspiration of $100,000 
stipends per year for even a small percentage of teachers would 
energize applicants at all levels and increase the recruitment pool. We 
are a Nation that responds to financial incentives.
  Another item, $10 billion, $10 billion, for teaching assistance and 
other support staff for teachers. Now, I would wholeheartedly endorse 
this one as being practical, being necessary, and we ought to write it 
into our legislation right away. Teaching assistance and other support 
staff for all teachers.
  Build the concept of a teacher and his or her staff with clerical and 
technical support in the classroom, including teaching assistants and 
interns. Teachers are now required to do it all. Teachers are self-
contained in their classrooms. Sporadically they may have teaching 
assistants or some volunteer support. If we are to make the most 
efficient use of our most valuable resource in education, well-trained 
teachers, we must begin to provide them the support that is routine for 
all other professionals.
  I think we ought to stress that. Real professionals, every other 
professional, whether you are talking about lawyers or doctors or 
engineers, they have staff; they have staff assistants, they have 
people at various levels of support. Teachers deserve the same kind of 
support, and you would actually have a more efficient and more 
effective classroom, a more effective use of your highest price 
personnel, if you were to have each teacher being seen as part of a 
unit, where they are the head of the unit, directing the unit, but they 
are not weighted down with a lot of tasks that are not professional, 
not productive and do not involve learning. So I would wholeheartedly 
endorse that proposal as being a very practical one and one we should 
have moved on long ago.
  We talk a lot technology in the classroom and about the use of 
technology in the classroom, computers in the classroom. I do not think 
teachers should have to learn how to make computers do new things in 
terms of their curriculum and opening the eyes of youngsters with more 
creative approaches to teaching. They should not have to do all that 
and also learn how to fix the machine when it breaks.
  When computers are on the blink, they should not have to be the ones 
to fix them, the servicing of the computers, the servicing of any 
equipment. There is a whole array of things that teachers should not 
have to do, and if you had that built in a system, that taken care of 
by a unit, you would have more people staying in teaching instead of 
resigning and retiring as quickly as they can.
  Another item they have here in the Cosby-Allen proposals is a $1 
billion item, challenge grants for teacher initiatives for educational 
reform. Teachers should be encouraged to examine their own practices 
and to try new initiatives. A series of challenge grants should be 
established, with teachers from other states making a judgment about 
the priorities of which initiatives to fund.
  The whole debate on education and the production of the Leave No 
Child Behind Act in both Houses of the Congress, the people who were 
consulted least were the teachers. We talk a lot about what teachers 
should do, we have prescriptions in here for their training, we even 
talk about teacher preparation institutions, penalizing them if they do 
not graduate teachers who can pass the certification tests. We are 
deeply into education and the molding of teachers and the use of 
teachers, but very few teachers were consulted, I assure you, in this 
process.
  Because of the pressure of public opinion, we politicians, we elected 
officials, have gotten involved, but we have left out the most 
important ingredient, and that is the input, the advice and 
consultation of the teaching profession and the teachers themselves.
  So this $1 billion challenge grant would recognize that teachers have 
initiatives and teachers are sometimes the best teachers of other 
teachers. Teachers should be encouraged to examine their own practices 
and to try new initiatives.

  Another item, $6 billion for 6 years of pre-service training for 
teachers. Provide $10,000 per year for 6 years of universal teacher 
training for 100,000 teachers each year. There is a wide consensus that 
we need to attract a share of the brightest student to the profession 
of teaching. They propose 6 years of funding, an incentive to increase 
the time of training profession and to raise the standards of the 
teaching profession generally.
  There are all sorts of variations possible. For example, funding can 
be in the form of loans that include one year of funding forgiven for 
every year as a teacher. We have had those proposals offered in terms 
of forgiving loans, but we have not had any proposals that talked about 
$10,000 per year in order to allow students to get a 6 year education.
  Another item, $3 billion, one-year internship for teachers after 
professional training. These are items which coincide with some 
practical proposals that have been made in legislation already. $1 
billion for higher salaries for more teacher educators. Increasing 
salaries of $10,000 teacher educators by $25,000 to $75,000 per year. 
Again, the same principle, to attract the brightest graduates into 
teacher education.
  Another $1 billion is proposed for the development of teacher 
training materials. Then technology, $15 billion proposed for 
technology for all schools, the purchase, maintenance and replacement. 
And on and on it goes, into a budget which concludes with $100 billion 
per year for education, American schools.
  Again, I have been talking about a vision offered by Bill Cosby and 
Dwight Allen. Dwight Allen is a noted Professor of Education Reform at 
Old Dominion University, and Bill Cosby has a Ph.D. in education and 
has been interested in education for a number of years and has written 
several books on children and families.

[[Page H3951]]

  In conclusion, I have offered these two visions which are outside the 
usual discussion that takes place here on the Hill. It just so happens 
that they come at a time when there is a great need to keep the 
dialogue going.
  We cannot sit still and wait until the conference committee acts. We 
should not sit still and wait until the final negotiation takes place, 
probably at the end of September. We need to keep the pressure on. The 
public needs to remind each one of us in the Congress that they have 
made education a priority, and making education a priority, there is a 
need to have resources behind the rhetoric.
  The dilemma we face is that we have two bills that have passed, one 
in the other body and one here in the Congress, and both have 
authorization figures much higher than any provisions that have been 
made in the budget. We need to solve that dilemma in a positive way. We 
need to have the pressure applied from those who care about education 
to make the appropriations figure measure up to the authorization 
figures as a one first positive step.
  At least the Leave No Child Behind legislation should not be 
hypocritical, it should do what it says it is going to do in the 
authorization bill. That is the first step. The other steps require the 
kind of vision to go forward that is indicated in these two visions, 
one from the book written by Bill Cosby and Dwight Allen, and the other 
from the Leave No Child Behind legislation which deals with more than 
just education, and is sponsored really with the backing of the 
Children's Defense Fund.

                              {time}  2230

  We are going to hear more about this as we go toward September. The 
important thing is that we should understand that the door is not 
closed, and the final decision has not been made. There is room for an 
appropriation which measures up to the authorization and all of us 
should dedicate ourselves to the proposition that we will fight to have 
the appropriation measure up to the authorization for education.

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