[Congressional Record Volume 155, Number 64 (Wednesday, April 29, 2009)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4837-S4840]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        PROMISE OF A BETTER LIFE

  Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, today we celebrate the first 100 days of 
our new President's administration. It has been somewhat less remarked 
upon, but this week also happens to mark my first 100 days in office.
  Together, we have done important work in these 100 days. We have 
taken decisive action to get our economy moving again. We have provided 
better access to health care for our children. We have made the 
workplace fairer for women.
  For me, these 100 days have provided a remarkable opportunity to 
listen to Coloradans. In dozens of townhall meetings, in each and every 
corner of the State, in cities and small towns, in good weather and 
bad, I have listened to thousands of Coloradans--young and old, 
Republicans, Democrats, and Independents, teachers, nurses, farmers, 
workers, ranchers, and small business owners, people from all walks of 
life with every conceivable point of view.
  I have been struck by how much--despite the trials we face at this 
moment in our history and despite whatever disagreements we might 
have--more than anything the people of Colorado long to build a better 
future for the next generation.
  America has always embraced the promise of a better life for our 
children.
  My family's story is no different. After their lives were shattered 
by World War II, my grandparents set their sights on Franklin 
Roosevelt's America as the one place they could rebuild their lives. 
And it was.
  My mother had even more opportunities than my grandparents dreamed, 
and she and my father were able to create a better life for me, my 
brother, and my sister. Since our founding, generation after 
generation, we have worked to form a more perfect union, always 
fulfilling the promise of a better life for those who come after us.
  Yet now that promise is in question.
  I am here today as the father of three young daughters of my own--
Caroline, Halina, and Anne. I think of them and worry that we are at 
risk of being the first generation of Americans to have less 
opportunity than we ourselves were given.
  Our economy is in turmoil; 5.1 million Americans have lost their jobs 
since the beginning of this crisis, and our unemployment rate is at 8.5 
percent and rising. Between 2000 and 2007, median family income in this 
country actually declined by over $300. At the same time, the cost of 
health care rose by nearly 80 percent and the cost of higher education 
by roughly 60 percent.
  The gulf between rich and poor has gotten wider. Americans are now 
less likely than people living in a number of other industrialized 
countries to improve their economic status in their lifetime. As many 
as 100 million Americans now live in families earning less in real 
terms than their parents did at the same age.

[[Page S4838]]

  This crisis stemmed from much more than foreclosed houses and credit 
swaps. It is a symptom of this generation's lack of attention to the 
legacy of our grandparents who built for the future. Now we must ask 
ourselves who we will be as a country when we emerge from this crisis. 
Will we answer the call of this time or will we fall back on the same 
tired arguments of the past?
  This time demands that we cast our eyes to the future, that we take a 
21st century approach to meet our 21st century challenges and seize our 
21st century opportunities. With President Obama's leadership and our 
resilient American spirit, we can emerge from this crisis stronger and 
truer to our creed than when we entered it.
  Each generation of Americans with hope for their children has 
courageously shed old ways of thinking and, on their behalf, reached 
out to new ideas. We are no different. We, too, must be willing to 
abandon our commitments to the weary forms of the past and attend to 
the future. That is our cause.
  We have to address critical structural issues stifling our economy 
and threatening our children's opportunities. We need to pursue 
comprehensive financial reform that will prevent the kind of 
recklessness that got us into this mess. We have a rising deficit, and 
we must bring discipline to our budgets, even as we invest in the 
future. We have a unique opportunity this year to drastically reform 
our health care system and control its skyrocketing costs, and we must 
seize it. It is time to invest in the new energy economy and break our 
dependence on foreign oil.

  If we are going to emerge from this economic crisis and succeed in 
the long run, we must fundamentally change public education in this 
country. Throughout our history, public schools have allowed America to 
make good on her promise to the next generation. Our schools propelled 
our children toward their parents' aspirations and prepared them to 
rise to the challenges of their times.
  If we are honest with ourselves, we see that our public schools too 
often become traps--traps that perpetuate a cycle of poverty and foster 
mediocrity. Our children--my girls and millions of others like them--
are attending schools that were built to prepare their grandparents for 
an economy that no longer exists. Our public education system, as 
designed, does not work well enough for all children in this country, 
and for our poorest children barely works at all.
  Across America, 1.2 million children drop out of high school each 
year. Globally, we rank 20th among industrialized nations for high 
school graduation rates. Forty years ago we were first. Seventy percent 
of our country's eighth graders can't read at grade level. On average, 
a 9-year-old from a low-income family is already 3 years behind their 
high income peers, has a 1-in-2 chance of graduating from high school, 
and a 1-in-10 chance of finishing college. Despite many efforts to 
close our stubborn achievement gap, a report released yesterday shows 
we have made almost no progress. How can we as Americans accept this 
reality, especially when none of us here would accept these odds for 
our own children? These are our children too.
  There are teachers throughout the country who have rejected the 
defeatism that too many of us have accepted for our schools. They have 
come in early and stayed late. They have visited their students' houses 
and bought school supplies out of their own pockets. They have expected 
more from their students than their students knew to expect from 
themselves. Yet too many of us have accepted the existing odds, 
considering them a natural consequence of poverty. At the same time, we 
have entered into tiresome debates--debates that take ideology 
seriously and the fates of our children lightly.
  Children's futures have been wasted while adults have endlessly 
debated techniques for assessing failing schools instead of changing or 
closing schools that are obviously failing on every dimension that can 
be assessed. We have debated modest and incremental reforms instead of 
doing the hard work of identifying successful school structures and 
human capital strategies and taking them to scale. We have been stuck 
debating whether teachers should be paid more based on merit, while 
roughly half of our teachers quit in the first 5 years of their career. 
A narrow, small politics has allowed us to duck ever making real 
choices about anything, and it has, failure after failure, shriveled 
our shared ambition for America's children. As long as we have these 
same conversations, today's 9-year-olds will see their younger brothers 
and sisters enter fourth grade with the same low odds of graduating 
from college they have, just as they saw their older brothers and 
sisters face the same odds, generation after generation.
  When I took over as the superintendent for Denver public schools, in 
a school district of 75,000 children, only 33 African-American students 
and 61 Latino students--fewer than four classrooms worth of kids--
scored proficient on the State's tenth grade math test, a test that 
measures a junior high school standard of proficiency in Europe. 
Spending time with our students and their families in Denver, I was 
struck not by their fragility but by their resilience. Their parents--
like many before them--had made tremendous sacrifices to provide their 
children with greater opportunity. The students I knew were willing to 
work harder and stay in school longer. We were selling them short.
  I joined the Denver public schools with kind of an abstract 
understanding that what was happening in our schools was unfair. My 
experience there left me with a profound sense of urgency to change 
what is unfair and fundamentally unjust.
  We can do better, and we will do better. In Denver we have made 
progress. From 2005 to 2008, Denver students scored higher in reading, 
math, writing, and science. We did not get there by doing things the 
same way as they had been done before. We closed failing schools and 
opened new ones. We implemented a groundbreaking teacher pay system 
that rewards teachers who improve their students' performance and 
provides incentives for teachers to go to the neediest schools. We 
accomplished this change by working with the union. It took a lot of 
effort. We had a lot of disagreements, but we made progress together 
because of a fundamental commitment by all of us to get the job done, 
not just score political points.
  With the leadership of our mayor and our city council, voters 
expanded our early childhood education. As a result, this year there 
are 1,500 more 4-year-olds in full day programs, a 300-percent 
increase. We increased full-day kindergarten by 25 percent, so that for 
the first time more than 95 percent of our 5-year-olds have the benefit 
of a full day of school. Research tells us there is no smarter 
investment we can make.
  In 2008, we launched a school performance framework that measures the 
progress of actual students year over year throughout their career, 
rather than meaningless measurement of one year's class against the 
next year's class.
  We still have work to do in Denver. There is still a long way to go 
before these reforms materially change the odds for our students, but 
we are moving in the right direction. In other districts we will see 
similar success if we support reform efforts that work.
  Our job in the Senate should be to help the administration spur 
innovation and identify and expand what works. I look forward to 
working with our Education Secretary, Arne Duncan, my colleagues here--
and I notice our former Education Secretary, the Senator from 
Tennessee, is here today, and I am glad that he is here--my colleagues 
here, as well as parents, teachers, students, and community members in 
Colorado to support innovative solutions to the problems plaguing our 
schools.
  Our commitment to our children and grandchildren requires that we 
hold ourselves to a higher standard than we have in the past. This is 
not a time to spend new money on old programs or to timidly attempt 
changes that have already failed too many of our children. Now is the 
time to reimagine our schools as magnets for talent, centers for 
communities, and incubators of innovation. Only then can we ensure that 
our students are getting the 21st century skills that will equip them 
for the new economy.
  We must do the same for our teachers. As President Obama said 
yesterday:


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       In a global economy where the greatest job qualification 
     isn't what you can do but what you know, our teachers are the 
     key to our Nation's success; to whether America will lead the 
     world in the discoveries and the innovations and economic 
     prosperity of this new century.

  Study after study has shown that nothing makes a greater difference 
to student learning than great teaching. We need to support effective 
teachers and make sure they stay in the classroom. That means creating 
school environments where teachers and students want to spend time, and 
it means restructuring our schools and our school calendar so that 
teachers have time to plan together and learn from each other. Also, we 
need to pay teachers in ways that reward their success and provide 
incentives for them to stay in the profession. More fundamentally, we 
need to recognize that our system of hiring, compensation, and training 
designed deep in the last century, is utterly inadequate for 21st 
century labor market realities. In 1960, a gallon of gas cost 30 cents. 
Elvis and the Everly Brothers were at the top of the charts. A first-
year lawyer earned about the same as a first-year teacher, and women 
had basically two professional choices: becoming a nurse or going into 
the classroom. In 2009, as nation after nation moves past us in 
educational achievement, we are kidding ourselves if we think a teacher 
recruitment and retention plan that came in when the Hula Hoop went 
out--and effectively subsidized our schools by limiting women's 
opportunities--is a serious response to America's needs.

  We must invest in proven training that equips teachers with the 
content, knowledge, and classroom management skills to be successful in 
helping their students, and we need to ensure that we provide ongoing, 
high-quality professional development that actually helps them do a 
better job in the classroom; otherwise, we risk losing our best 
teachers.
  We need to expand alternative pipelines for teachers, to enhance the 
traditional pathways we already have. President Obama has called on the 
Nation to create a new army of teachers. We must recruit a diverse, 
excellent, and committed group of Americans to teach our children. The 
talent is all around us--in the veterans returning from Iraq and 
Afghanistan, the baby boomers who have spent their careers running 
successful businesses or working in manufacturing or medicine or law, 
and the college graduates looking to find a rewarding vocation--all of 
whom can inspire and challenge our students to become the engineers who 
will build green cities, the doctors who will cure cancer, and the 
entrepreneurs who will start businesses we can't yet even imagine. As 
we open the profession to allow talented and committed people to become 
teachers, we must have rigorous selection for every spot in front of a 
class, and replicate effective training for new teachers.
  As we work with States and districts to redesign our schools for the 
21st century, we should do so in conversation with business and labor 
to inform our efforts about what skills the market will require. 
Competitive workers must be problem solvers, not just test takers. They 
must be able to think critically and communicate effectively in 
multiple mediums. Students won't need to write cursive; they will need 
to know how to use technology to solve tough problems. They don't need 
only to memorize facts; they need to understand how to filter and use 
the information at their fingertips.
  We need updated standards that reflect these 21st century skills. We 
should invite States to embrace voluntary national standards, 
benchmarked against international norms that allow the public to see 
the progress students are actually making from year to year. We need an 
accurate measuring system so that we know when reforms are working and 
when students are achieving. We need to ensure that the tests we give 
kids ask them to deploy the knowledge and skills they have, rather than 
demonstrate their ability to take a test. And we must ensure that when 
we do give students tests, teachers get the results in time to use them 
to drive their instruction.
  But our tests shouldn't be the sole driver of our instruction. We 
should look beyond the narrow window of standardized test scores, to 
parent and community engagement and student retention rates. We should 
expand learning opportunities to start earlier, be broader in scope, 
and beckon everyone in the community.
  Our schools should become centers where communities gather for skills 
and services. Schools are uniquely positioned to deliver health and 
support services. Research shows a statistical link between nutrition 
and achievement for all students. We need to look at nutrition in 
schools not as something extra but as central to student success.
  Our schools should be on the cutting edge of using new technology for 
both teaching and learning. Technology can connect students to 
resources and teachers to each other. Effective use of technology can 
allow a teacher in a rural area to get feedback from a mentor 
elsewhere. We should be using technology to disseminate effective 
practices and share great lesson plans. We can look to technology to 
help train teachers in new ways by simulating classroom experiences and 
delivering real-time feedback on lesson plans.
  There is something wrong when students who enter the schoolhouse find 
they are moving backwards in time, leaving behind all the technology 
that in the rest of their day expands and enriches their lives.
  While we know we can't fix our schools by spending more money on the 
same inadequate programs, we must commit to funding what works in our 
schools. We now have the largest investment in public education in 
history with which to do it. The stimulus package and the budget are 
working in tandem to increase access to early childhood education. 
States and districts are competing with one another to build on their 
efforts to revamp standards and turn around failing schools. There are 
additional resources to reduce high school dropout rates and increase 
college graduation rates.
  If we continue to spark this kind of innovation, if we can allow 
ourselves to think big again about education, we can start to imagine 
school buildings as prototypes for energy efficiency and classrooms as 
job training centers for the new energy economy--preparing parents and 
students alike. School-based health care can advance from one nurse 
stretched between multiple schools to clinics that are leaders in 
efficient health care. School lunches can progress from packaged 
feedings in the cafeteria to live lessons on nutrition and wellness. In 
sum, our schools can become what they should be: the institutions that 
are preparing our children and their children to lead in the 21st 
century.
  Our cause is clear. It is time for policies that serve not the 
ideologies of adults but the needs of kids. I will be working in the 
coming months to develop legislation that will outline ways in which 
the Federal Government can better support our States and school 
districts in providing a public education that meets the challenges and 
possibilities of our times.
  I look forward to working with my colleagues on both sides of the 
aisle, as well as with parents, teachers, students, and community 
leaders across Colorado to ensure that we do our part to increase 
opportunity for our children. We will know we have succeeded when we 
see not only more students graduating high school but more of those 
graduates going on to complete college as well. We will not only see 
the achievement gap shrink, but we will see the United States once 
again lead the world in academic achievement.
  We are lucky. In our time, history is once again beginning to run in 
the direction of change. We have the chance to honor our grandparents' 
example and move forward together to create a better future for our 
children. If we do, those children and their children will say we rose 
to the moment, that we laid down our adult burdens and our differences 
to lift up our country and our children instead. Let them say that a 
spark flew in America in this new century that ignited a generation of 
educators, children, parents, and communities and gave them courage to 
abandon the status quo for a better future. Let our schools once again 
be the cradle of the American dream and act to fulfill the solemn 
promise of one generation to the next.
  Thank you, Mr. President. I yield the floor.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. The Senator from Tennessee is 
recognized.

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  Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for a 
couple of minutes to comment on Senator Bennet's speech.
  The ACTING PRESIDENT pro tempore. Without objection, it is so 
ordered.

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