Congressional Record, Volume 147 Issue 96 (Wednesday, July 11, 2001)

[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

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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

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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

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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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