[Congressional Record Volume 161, Number 105 (Wednesday, July 8, 2015)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4816-S4832]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
EVERY CHILD ACHIEVES ACT OF 2015--Continued
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Georgia.
Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the
distinguished Senator from the State of Ohio, Mr. Brown, be recognized
at the conclusion of my remarks.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Tragedy in South Carolina
Mr. ISAKSON. Mr. President, before I make my remarks, I would like to
commend the Presiding Officer and Senator Graham and the people of the
great State of South Carolina on the way they have handled the terrible
tragedy that took place in their State.
I know time and again we have all heard on the floor of the Senate
and in conversations we have had in private the amazing mercy and grace
shown by the families of the victims of the terrible tragedy that took
place, but equally as well the great way in which the elected officials
in the State of South Carolina, led by the Presiding Officer and
Senator Graham, have caused a terrible event to be a learning
experience for all of America and an example for the way in which
tragedy should be dealt with. I want the Presiding Officer to know how
much I personally appreciate it, but I know I speak on behalf of all of
the people of Georgia as well.
Mr. President, I will speak briefly about two subjects.
Mr. President, I am one of the two people left in the Congress who
had something to do with No Child Left Behind. The other one is John
Boehner, the Speaker of the House. I will never forget that night in
2001, in the basement of the Capitol, after the conference committee
finally came to an agreement on No Child Left Behind--us talking about
how proud we were of what we had done but more how we knew that if we
did not get it fixed by the end of the sixth year, it would go from
being a positive change in education to a negative.
It is now 13 years later. We have gone 7 years without a
reauthorization. What became a good goal of meeting adequate yearly
progress, setting standards for schools, and remediating schools that
were in trouble has become a bill where 80 percent of the school
systems in America have to ask for waivers to even operate. It is a
bill that no longer is doing what it was intended to do for the
education of our children.
I commend Senator Alexander and Senator Murray for the unbelievably
good work they have done to bring the new reform of the ESEA to the
floor of the Senate today. I participated in all the hearings, as did
the Presiding Officer. The Presiding Officer knows what I know: that we
brought about compromise and common sense. We created a bill that is
good for children, good for educators, and good for America.
First and foremost, it gets us out of the national school board
business, which is Chairman Alexander's favorite statement for the
Department of Education.
People forget that the U.S. Department of Education is not mentioned
anywhere in the Constitution of the United States. It is mentioned in
two places. One is in title I in the Civil Rights Act of the 1960s when
we provided funds for free and reduced-price lunches for poor students
to give them a leg up and second in 1978 when, in the Carter
administration, we passed what was known as Public Law 94-192, which
created special needs children benefits or what is known as the
Individuals with Disabilities Act. Those are the only two places in
statute that the Federal Government has a role. Senator Murray and
Senator Alexander have seen to it that we recognize that fact.
We enhance education where we are supposed to, but we turn it back
over to the States, where it belongs and where it should be.
Secondly, one of the big buzzwords in bad brand labels that have
taken place in education is Common Core. Common Core is a lot of things
to a lot of people, but most importantly for many people it is a
Federal mandate of standards, it is a homogenization of standards, and
it is a mandate the American people do not like.
This bill ensures there will be no Common Core mandate by the Federal
Government to the States and ensures local control of curriculum from
beginning to end.
[[Page S4817]]
Then, as I said a minute ago, to ensure that it gives local control,
it does away with the waiver business and puts all local school boards
and State boards of education in control of their education.
On the question of testing, it does away with federally mandated
tests and says to systems: You develop the test and the assessment
mechanism yourself. We just want you to have standards that are made
good for students to improve and grow their education. But we want to
make sure that every student has the access they can to be tested well
and improve. For example, we have done some creative things in this
bill, such as give assisted technology funding capability out of title
I to handicapped children in title I qualifications so they can use
assisted technology to take exams they otherwise could not take. A
student with cerebral palsy, Duchenne, or many other diseases does not
have the coordination ability to take a paper-and-pencil test; yet they
can be bright, they can be a genius. Because of technology that has
been developed in America, assisted technology can allow them to take
that exam given the disabilities they have. It is only appropriate we
authorize the use of title I funds to do that.
Most importantly, though, we keep the parent in control of their
child's life by giving them the permission to opt out of any State test
that is mandated where the State allows an opt out, which means the
parent is in control of the testing, the State is in control of the
assessment and the type of model that takes place, and the Federal
Government is saying to the local schools and State boards of
education: You take our children to the next level. We will assist you,
but we are not going to govern you, we are not going to ruin you.
I commend Senator Alexander and Senator Murray for bringing together
a bipartisan approach to education reform that works. I thank the
American Federation of Teachers, the national association of educators,
the National Association of School Superintendents, and the National
Governors Association. Every vested organization in education in the
United States of America has endorsed this bill. They have because they
know it is time for education to be enhanced and improved from the
local level up. They know the benefits that may have come from No Child
Left Behind have long since passed. We are now disaggregating, we are
now measuring, and we are doing all the things we should have been
doing all along. Let's take what is a good platform and make it even
better to ensure that every child learns, every child progresses, and
every child succeeds.
Military Cuts
Mr. President, I want to make note of the announcement today by the
Department of Defense on the dramatic cuts to our military--40,000
people over the next 2 years.
Mr. President, I am a pretty easygoing guy, but I am really angry. I
am really mad. I know it is ironic to me--and it is one of the reasons
I put a hold today on an appointment--but it is ironic, on the day we
all learn by reading the newspaper, not by being advised by the
Department of Defense, that we are going to lose 40,000 soldiers over
the next 2 years--Georgia is going to lose 4,350 soldiers over the next
2 years. Nobody did the courtesy of calling us. But on the day when
they did not call us, they also send up for confirmation a legislative
affairs official for the U.S. Department of Defense in the
administration.
I have a hold on that person for one simple reason: I want to meet
with them and to see to it that if they in fact do get in control of
congressional liaison and congressional affairs, they make sure we are
the first to find out, not the last to find out.
Our military is critically important to my State, as it is to the
Presiding Officer's State. It is important that we know what the
government's plans are, and it is important that we have a chance to
have a say. I know the President does not like to use the legislative
body very much. He would rather regulate and do Executive orders. But
when you talk about our military and you talk about the investment in
our military, every Member of this Senate, every Member of the House--
all of us ought to be together with all our oars in the water rowing in
the same direction, not in misdirection.
I want to make one note here. It is also ironic that last week the
President for the first time went to the Pentagon to talk about the
strategy in the Middle East, particularly with regard to ISIL. It took
18 months to go talk about a situation that has grown from being an
irritant to a crisis. When we left Iraq and left all the equipment that
we had there and left the Iraqis to fend for themselves, we created a
vacuum. And what happened? In came ISIL. And now they are in 16
countries in the Levant and in the Middle East right now. We created a
vacuum that they filled and are continuing to fill, and we are talking
about reducing our manpower over the next 2 years to a point that we no
longer can confront an enemy on two fronts; we are going to have a
tough time doing it on one.
A vulnerable and a weak American defense and military allow and
encourage people who might have nefarious goals and dreams to take
advantage of America's weakness. We should be very careful about
diminishing our resources and our military to levels that are not in
the best interest of the American people or their security.
I want to ask the administration to be sure to give us information in
advance rather than after the fact, to include us wherever possible in
the decision, and to see to it that the Congress is once again a
partner with the Commander in Chief and to see to it that we confront
our enemies and have the manpower and the troops to do it.
I, for one, have thought for a long time that we should be doing more
to confront ISIL in the Middle East. I think that is being borne out
every day. Hopefully the President is coming to that realization as
well. But whatever we do, we should not be telling the world we have
problems but we are going to cut some more.
It is time we made an investment in the security and peace of our
country and our military, and it is time we worked together--the
President and Congress alike--to do what is right for America, its
defense and its freedom and its liberty, which we just celebrated over
the past weekend on July the 4th.
Mr. President, I yield back the remainder of my time and defer to the
Senator from Ohio.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Ohio.
Mr. BROWN. Mr. President, I always appreciate the words of Senator
Isakson, who was the cochair of the Ethics Committee, where I served
with him, and now on the Veterans' Affairs Committee, and I appreciate
his work and Senator Blumenthal's work on one of the most important
committees in this Senate.
Mr. President, about a year and a half ago, on a cold January morning
in Cleveland, where I live, at a Martin Luther King breakfast, I heard
a speaker say: Your life expectancy is connected to your ZIP Code.
Think about that. Whether you grow up in Columbus or Canton or
Appalachia, whether you grow up in a city or a prosperous suburb or a
low-income suburb or a small town or a rural area, so often your ZIP
Code determines whether you have access to quality health care, to good
education, to good jobs, and to the social support necessary to
succeed. That is particularly true when it comes to education.
The quality of our children's education should not be determined by
their ZIP Code. Too often that is the case. Teachers and schools in far
too many cases lack the resources necessary to ensure students can grow
and succeed.
Achievement gaps persist between economically disadvantaged students
and their more advantaged peers. These gaps persist between Black
students and White students, Latino students and White students. They
persist between native and non-native English language speakers. They
persist between students with disabilities and those without.
These achievement gaps inevitably, predictably almost always lead to
opportunity gaps. We know education is the surest path to success--we
say that around here ad nauseam--regardless of where you come from.
That is why closing these gaps is vital to ensure children--all
children--have the opportunity to succeed.
These achievement gaps are not caused by failings in our students.
They are usually not caused by failings
[[Page S4818]]
with our teachers. They are the result of policies that leave schools
with massive resource gaps.
The U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights conducted a
comprehensive survey of schools across the Nation.
Some of the results they found were appalling. Black, Latino, Native
American, Native Alaskan students, as well as first-time English
learners attend schools with much higher concentrations of
inexperienced teachers. One in five high schools in this country lacks
a school counselor. Around 20 percent of high schools do not offer more
than one of the typical core courses for high school math and science,
such as algebra I and II, geometry, biology, and chemistry.
We cannot call our country ``the land of opportunity'' while we
fail--we, policymakers, communities, leaders, activists--while we fail
to provide too many of our children with well-equipped schools.
The bipartisan opportunity dashboard of core resources amendment will
help us close these gaps. It will strengthen transparency provisions in
the Every Child Achieves Act so parents and taxpayers know how schools
are performing on key measures of success--measures such as contact
with effective teachers, access to advanced coursework, and
availability of career and technical opportunities and counseling. It
will ensure that States hold schools accountable when inequities exist.
Reporting is an important and helpful tool but surely not enough. If
this new data shows persistent disparities, States and school districts
need to take action. This amendment requires States to develop a plan
to ensure that resources reach districts that are most in need. States
will have flexibility to design these plans in a way that works for
local communities. The amendment does not tell States how to address
inequities; it just requires States to identify those disparities and
work with communities to fix them in whatever way works for those
communities in that State.
We must move beyond simply using test scores when we assess our
schools. Tests are an important benchmark of success, but they are by
no means the only one. To succeed in life and in school, students need
access to dedicated literacy programs, to music and the arts, to
advanced classes, to college and career counseling. We need to measure
access to all of these opportunities, not only math and reading scores.
Improving access to core resources will not close the achievement gap
overnight, but it puts us on the right track.
Our amendment has the support of teachers and civil rights
organizations. I want to thank Senators Reed, Kirk, and Baldwin for
their bipartisan help and support in getting this amendment to this
place.
I urge my colleagues to adopt this amendment to ensure that all
children, regardless of their ZIP Code, have access to the core
resources needed for a quality education.
Unfortunately, instead of strengthening our public education system,
some of my colleagues want to, as we say around here, ``voucherize''
the public school system, privatize, spend resources elsewhere
primarily. We have seen how so many of our public schools serving
vulnerable populations are already in dire need of resources, yet
vouchers would divert more of these resources away from public schools,
reroute those resources to for-profit schools, in some cases, that
simply are not accountable to the public.
Vouchers do not provide a real choice for the majority of
students. They may cover some--but usually not all--of the tuition of
private schools, meaning the students who need help the most often get
little choice at all. Study after study shows that private school
vouchers don't improve student achievement. My State, by some rankings,
is the next to worst--next to last in the country--in the quality of
charter schools and the accountability of charter schools, in large
part because there is a huge network of for-profit charter private
schools in our State that simply have not served students that well.
That is why I urge my colleagues to vote against any proposal to
voucherize our schools. Instead, we need to strengthen our public
school system, which educates the vast majority of our children. That
is why schools across the country, especially those with high
concentrations of poverty, need more funding--not less. For 50 years,
the Federal Government has helped level the playing field for students
by directing funds to schools in areas that lack resources.
Unfortunately, some of my colleagues are trying to dismantle this
system by taking away funding from high-priority schools to more
affluent schools, a bit of a reverse Robin Hood.
They call this proposal portability. But no matter what you call it
and why you call it that, taking funding away from the schools that
need it most and sending it to the schools that need it least is wrong.
I will urge my colleagues to oppose this effort. In our country, all
students should have access to a high-quality education, regardless of
how much money their parents make, regardless of how much education
their parents have, regardless of what ZIP Code they live in. We must
invest Federal resources in schools and districts that need the most
and where they can make the most difference.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from South Dakota.
Mr. THUNE. Mr. President, I do want to compliment the HELP Committee
and Senator Alexander, who chairs that committee, for the great work
they have done in bringing the Every Child Achieves Act legislation to
the floor of the Senate. This is long overdue. Anybody who meets with
school administrators, teacher groups, parents or school boards
realizes that people for a long time have been looking for us to
reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and to make
reforms that are important and that will return control and power to
school districts, to parents, to teachers, and to administrators,
rather than having it here centralized in Washington, DC.
So I am pleased that we can have this debate. I am encouraged by the
discussion that has already been held and by the willingness of both
sides to work together to allow amendments to be considered. This is an
important issue--how we educate our children, equipping them, preparing
them for the challenges that will be ahead of them. There is no more
important task that we have. So to the degree that this legislation
makes it more possible for our kids to learn at the very fastest rate
possible, this is something that this Senate ought to be focused on.
I am hopeful that we will be able to get through the amendment
process and be able to move this bill across the floor of the Senate
and to the House, and hopefully, eventually, to the President's desk.
But I think it is also an example of what happens when you get people
who are willing to open the Senate process up and allow legislation to
be considered.
Republican-Led Senate
The Senate has now been under Republican control for a full 6 months.
Those months have been some of the most productive that the Senate has
seen in a long time. So far this year, the Republican-led Senate has
passed more than 45 bipartisan bills, 22 of which have been signed into
law by the President. Committees have been hard at work and have
reported out more than 150 bills for floor consideration by the full
Senate. In May, the Senate passed the first 10-year balanced budget
resolution in over a decade--over a decade.
One reason the Senate has been so productive is because the
Republican majority has been committed to ensuring that all Senators,
whatever their party, have the opportunity to have their voices heard.
Under Democratic leadership, not only Republicans but many rank-and-
file Democrats were shut out of the legislative process in the Senate.
As an example of that, the Democratic leadership allowed just 15
amendment rollcall votes in all of 2014--an entire year. That is barely
more than one amendment vote per month here in the Senate.
Republicans, by contrast, had allowed 15 amendment rollcall votes by
the time we had been in charge here for merely 3 weeks. In all,
Republicans have allowed more than 136 amendment rollcall votes so far
in 2015. That is not only more amendment rollcall votes than in all of
last year, but it is more amendment rollcall votes than the Senate took
in 2013 and 2014 combined. We still have 6 months to go in 2015.
[[Page S4819]]
Nuclear Agreement With Iran
Mr. President, one of the most important bipartisan bills the Senate
has passed this year is the Iran Nuclear Agreement Review Act. This
legislation, which was signed into law in May by the President, ensures
that the American people, through their representatives in Congress,
will have a voice in any final agreement with Iran. Specifically, the
law requires the President to submit any agreement with Iran to
Congress for review and prevents him from waiving sanctions on Iran
until the congressional review period is complete.
The bill also requires the President to evaluate Iran's compliance
every 90 days. I am particularly glad that this legislation is in place
because the negotiation process so far has given cause for deep
concern. The primary purpose of any deal with Iran is to prevent Iran
from acquiring a nuclear weapon. But the interim agreement the
President unveiled in April casts serious doubt on the administration's
determination to achieve that goal. The framework does not shut down a
single nuclear facility in Iran. It does not destroy any single
centrifuge in Iran. It does not stop research and development on Iran's
centrifuges. It allows Iran to keep a substantial part of its existing
stockpile of enriched uranium.
It is not surprising that Members of both parties are concerned about
this agreement. Again and again during the process, Secretary Kerry and
the President have seemed to forget that the goal of negotiations is
not a deal for its own sake but a deal that will actually stop Iran
from developing a nuclear weapon. Administration negotiators have
repeatedly sacrificed American priorities for the sake of getting an
agreement.
In the process, they have created a very real risk that the deal that
finally emerges will be too weak to achieve its goal. A Washington Post
editorial this week declared that any agreement with Iran that emerges
from the current talks ``will be, at best, an unsatisfying and risky
compromise.'' That is from the Washington Post. The editorial board
continues by saying:
Iran's emergence as a threshold nuclear power, with the
ability to produce a weapon quickly, will not be prevented;
it will be postponed by 10 to 15 years. In exchange, Tehran
will reap hundreds of billions of dollars in sanctions relief
it can use to revive its economy and fund the wars it is
waging around the Middle East.
Again, that is a quote from the editorial in the Washington Post from
yesterday. When Iran recently failed to comply with the provision of
the interim nuclear agreement currently in place, the Obama
administration, in the words of the Post editorial, ``chose to quietly
accept it'' and even ``rush to Iran's defense.''
Again that is the quote from the Washington Post editorial. This is
an example of what the Post aptly describes as ``a White House
proclivity to respond to questions about Iran's performance by
attacking those who raise them.''
Well that is a deeply troubling response on the part of the White
House, and it raises doubts about the President's commitment to
achieving an agreement that will shut down Iran's nuclear program. The
stakes could not be higher on this agreement. At issue is whether a
tyrannical, oppressive regime that backs terrorists, has killed
American soldiers, and has announced its intention of wiping Israel off
the map will get access to the most apocalyptic weapons known to man.
Even as negotiations continue, Iran continues to advance its nuclear
program. If Iran continues its research and development into more
advanced centrifuges, the breakout period--the time needed to produce
enough nuclear material for a bomb--could be weeks--weeks instead of
months or years. If we fail to prevent Iran from acquiring a nuclear
weapon, we will not only be facing a nuclear-armed Iran; we will be
facing a nuclear arms race in the Middle East. That is what is at
stake. Every Member of Congress obviously would like to see the
President successfully conclude a deal to prevent Iran from developing
a nuclear weapon. But the President needs to remember that a deal is
only acceptable if it achieves that goal. We have heard the President
say that he will walk away from a bad deal. But each time we reach a
deadline, that deadline is extended.
As negotiations continue, it is essential that negotiators push for a
strong final deal that includes rigorous inspection of Iranian sites
and full disclosure of all Iranian weapons research to date. If the
administration cannot secure a sufficiently strong deal, then it should
step back from the negotiation table and reimpose the sanctions that
were so successful in driving Iran to the table in the first place. No
deal is better than a bad deal that will strengthen Iran's position in
the Middle East and pave the way for the development of a nuclear
weapon.
For a deal to be acceptable to the American people, it must be
verifiable, it must be enforceable, and it must be accountable. It also
needs to promote stability and security in the Middle East and around
the world. Any deal that does not reach that threshold is a bad deal. I
hope the President will listen to the American people and reject any
agreement that falls short of that goal.
I yield the floor.
Mr. ALEXANDER. I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, today I am offering an amendment to the
Every Child Achieves Act that would allow $2,100 Federal scholarships
to follow 11 million low-income children to any public or private
accredited school of their parents' choice. This is a real answer to
inequality in America, giving more children more opportunity to attend
a better school.
The Scholarships for Kids Act will cost $24 billion a year, paid for
by redirecting 41 percent of the dollars now directly spent on Federal
K-through-12 education programs. Often those dollars are diverted to
wealthier schools. Scholarships for Kids would benefit only children of
families that fit the Federal definition of poverty, which is about
one-fifth of all school children--about 11 million a year.
Allowing Federal dollars to follow students has been a successful
strategy in American education for over 70 years. Last year, $31
billion in Federal Pell grants, and $100 billion in loans followed
students to public and private colleges. Since the GI bill began in
1944, these vouchers have helped create a marketplace of 6,000
autonomous higher education institutions, the best system of higher
education in the world.
Our elementary and secondary education system is not performing as if
it were the best in the world. U.S. 15-year-olds rank 28th in science
and 36th in math. I believe one reason for this is that while more than
93 percent of Federal dollars spent for a higher education follows
students to colleges of their choice, Federal dollars do not
automatically follow K-through-12th-grade students to schools of their
choice. Instead, that money is sent directly to schools. Local
government monopolies run most schools and tell most students which
schools to attend. There is little choice and no K-through-12
marketplace as there is in higher education.
Former Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin often wrote that
American creativity is flourished during ``fertile verges,'' times when
citizens became more self-aware and creative.
In his book ``Breakout,'' Newt Gingrich argues that society is on the
edge of such an era and cites computer handbook writer Tim O'Reilly's
suggestion for how the Internet could transform government. ``The best
way for government to operate,'' Mr. O'Reilly says, ``is to figure out
what kinds of things are enablers of society and make investments in
those things. The same way that Apple figured out, `if we turn the
iPhone into a platform, outside developers would bring hundreds of
thousands of applications to the table.' ''
Already, 19 States have begun a variety of innovative programs
supporting private school choice. Private organizations supplement
those efforts. Allowing $2,100 Federal scholarships to follow 11
million children would enable other school choice innovations in the
same way developers rushed to provide applications for the iPhone
platform.
[[Page S4820]]
Senator Tim Scott, the Presiding Officer today, has proposed the
CHOICE Act, allowing $11 billion other Federal dollars--dollars the
Federal Government now spends through the program for children with
disabilities--to follow those 6 million children to the schools their
parents believe provide the best services. A student who is both low
income and has a disability could benefit under both of the programs,
especially when taken together with Senator Scott's proposal,
Scholarships for Kids constitutes the most ambitious proposal ever to
use existing Federal dollars to enable States to expand school choice.
Under Scholarships for Kids, States would still govern pupil
assignment, deciding, for example, whether parents could choose private
schools. Schools chosen would have to be accredited. Federal civil
rights rules would apply. The proposal does not affect the school lunch
program. So Congress can assess the effectiveness of this new tool for
innovation, there is an independent evaluation after 5 years.
In the late 1960s, Ted Sizer, then Harvard University's education
dean, suggested a $5,000 scholarship in his Poor Children's Bill of
Rights. That is what he called it. In 1992, when I was the U.S.
Education Secretary, President George H.W. Bush proposed a GI Bill for
Kids, a half-billion-dollar Federal pilot program for States creating
school choice opportunities. Yet despite its success in higher
education, ``voucher'' remains a bad word among most of the K-through-
12 education establishment, and the idea hasn't spread rapidly.
Equal opportunity in America should mean that everyone has the same
starting line. There would be no better way to help children move up
from the back of the line than by allowing States to use Federal
dollars to create 11 million new opportunities to choose a better
school.
I thank the Presiding Officer, and I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order
for the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mrs. SHAHEEN. Mr. President, I am here to discuss the Every Child
Achieves Act. I think it is significant that for the first time in more
than a decade, the Senate is considering legislation to make
significant changes to our Nation's elementary and secondary education
system, and this conversation is long overdue.
As a former teacher, I appreciate the challenges our schools have,
and I am very much looking forward to the debate ahead. I want to
applaud Senators Alexander and Murray, the chair and ranking member of
the Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, for reaching a
compromise bill that passed out of their committee with strong
unanimous bipartisan support.
Today, I want to focus on some of the provisions included in this
bill that have to do with STEM education--science, technology,
engineering, and math. This is an issue I have been working on for a
number of years--really since I was Governor in the late 1990s in New
Hampshire. We know the most critical jobs needed to compete in the
global economy are in the STEM fields, but data consistently shows our
American students are falling further and further behind in these
subjects.
One of the other challenges is that we have an enormous gender gap in
employment in these fields. Forty-eight percent of the workforce in
this country are women. Yet only 24 percent of the jobs in STEM fields
are held by women.
I had the opportunity last night to cohost a screening in the Capitol
of an important new documentary called ``Code: Debugging the Gender
Gap.'' This documentary tells a very powerful story about the lack of
diversity in the technology industry, outlining the resulting cost to
our society, and it explores strategies that would solve the problem.
Last night we had more than 150 people in attendance at the
screening, which was cohosted by Representative Susan Davis from
California. The creators of the movie were there, and U.S. Chief
Technology Officer Megan Smith. What followed the documentary was even
more impressive, and that was a lengthy and very passionate discussion
about how much work we have to do on this front.
We need to give the next generation a stronger educational foundation
in these topics, and, most important, we need to get them engaged and
excited to be working in STEM fields. This effort is going to require
student engagement inside and outside the classroom. It is critical our
schools have the resources to offer STEM opportunities during the
schoolday. But of course as most of us remember from our childhood, it
is sometimes what happens outside the classroom that is even more
important than what happens inside the classroom if we are going to get
kids excited about learning.
Afterschool programs allow students opportunities for more
individualized instruction, for innovative experiences, and for
opportunities to build their leadership skills. Afterschool programs
can be especially successful in inspiring interest in groups that are
traditionally underrepresented in STEM fields, such as young women,
students of color, and students from low-income backgrounds.
So I especially appreciate Chairman Alexander and Ranking Member
Murray for working with me to include language from my Supporting
Afterschool STEM Act, which is in the underlying bill and allows
Federal grants to be used to support STEM-related afterschool
activities.
This language will expand student access to high-quality, afterschool
programs in STEM subjects. It will also promote mentorship
opportunities and the building of partnerships with researchers and
other professionals in these fields.
Again, one of the things we know about helping kids to stay in
school, getting them excited, is that if they have a mentor, if they
have someone who is really interested in what is going on in their
lives, who is supporting them, then they are much more likely to be
successful. These programs will give students firsthand experience to
see what careers in the STEM subjects can look like.
Now, the Every Child Achieves Act also includes language based on a
second STEM-related bill that I first introduced when I got to the
Senate back in 2009--the Innovation Inspiration School Grant Program.
This language would authorize Federal STEM education grants to support
the participation of low-income students in related competitive
extracurricular activities, such as robotics competition.
I am particularly excited about this because in New Hampshire,
inventor Dean Kamen--also the inventor of the insulin pump and the
Segway--founded a fantastic program called FIRST Robotics Competition.
It is now wildly successful. Nationwide, we have nearly 100,000 high
school students who compete. It is sort of an ``Einstein meets Michael
Jordan'' kind of competition. Students have just 6 weeks to work in a
team to design, construct, and program robots, and then they enter
their robots in regional and championship competitions.
It is great fun to attend these events because kids are so excited
about working with these robots and about the STEM subjects. They get
excited about engineering, about science, about math, and technology,
and you can see that in the students as they are building these robots.
They are excited about accomplishing their goals, about being creative.
When there are last-minute problems with the robots, they have to work
to adjust. But most of all, whether or not they win, you can see the
pride they feel for themselves, for their teammates that comes from
successfully accomplishing their task: building that robot and being
successful in the competition.
You can't replicate this kind of experience in a classroom. So I am
very pleased that support for programs such as FIRST are now included
in the bill we are considering on the Senate floor. These are
provisions that I think will take very important strides toward
inspiring future generations of scientists and engineers, of
mathematicians and experts dealing with technology.
Again, I thank Chairman Alexander and Ranking Member Murray for their
work on these issues and for producing
[[Page S4821]]
a bill we are now debating on the floor that has such strong bipartisan
support.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I want to thank the Senator from New
Hampshire for her remarks and thank her especially for her
contributions to the legislation and her persistent support for STEM
education. She has been a champion. As a former Governor, she is a
great help as we seek to remind ourselves that the path to real
accountability, higher standards, and better teaching really runs
through the States and local governments, where the creativity is and
where people are closer to the children.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Toomey). The Senator from Montana.
Mr. DAINES. Mr. President, I rise to speak about my amendment No.
2110.
As a fifth-generation Montanan and a product of Montana public
schools and because my wife is an elementary school teacher and I am
the father of four children, and one of my children has a degree in
elementary education as well, I truly understand how important a first-
rate education is to our kids' future.
As I meet with parents and educators across Montana, they frequently
share concerns about the one-size-fits-all student performance and
teacher qualification metrics that currently dictate Federal funding as
part of No Child Left Behind. While well-intended, many of these
metrics have proven difficult for schools--and particularly schools in
rural areas--to achieve. The Federal funding tied to these policies has
all too often forced States and school districts to adopt policies that
may not best fit the students' and communities' unique needs.
As the Senate debates the Every Child Achieves Act to reform our
Nation's education policies, one of my priorities will be fighting to
increase local control over academic standards and education policies
and working to push back against burdensome Federal regulations that
often place our schools in a straitjacket.
For example, the U.S. Department of Education has incentivized States
to adopt common core standards by offering exemptions from No Child
Left Behind regulations and making extra Federal education funds
accessible through programs such as Race to the Top to States that
adopt Common Core. Like many Montanans, I am deeply concerned that the
Federal Government's obvious efforts to back States into adopting such
programs is an inappropriate interference in educational policy
decisions that should be made by States, parents, teachers, and local
school boards because strengthening our education system is vitally
important to our country's future.
If we are serious about wanting to make future generations as
fortunate as ours, it is critical that we prepare our children to excel
in a globally competitive economy. Our children should receive a well-
rounded education that focuses on core subjects, such as reading,
writing, science, and math, as well as technical and vocational
disciplines and training in the arts.
A wealth of social data informs us that individuals who do not
receive a quality education are disproportionately prone to have low
incomes, suffer from poverty, and land in prison. It is clear that the
Federal Government's one-size-fits-none approach simply isn't working.
By increasing local control of our schools and lessening the
influence of Washington bureaucrats, we can provide States with the
flexibility needed to meet the unique needs of our students and the
unique needs of our States as well as our communities.
Just last year, the New York Times did an assessment of the ``health
and wealth'' of every county in the Nation--every county. We might
expect folks living in Silicon Valley to be doing fairly well or
perhaps see the suburbs of New York City thriving. What shocked me was
seeing that 6 of the Nation's top 10 wealthiest counties surround
Washington, DC. This sends a pretty clear message about where
Washington's priorities really are.
During the recession, while millions of Americans were struggling to
make ends meet amidst layoffs and economic instability, Washington, DC,
thrived. The Federal Government poured millions of dollars into new
Federal buildings, and salaries kept growing. The average Federal
bureaucrat in the Department of Education in Washington, DC, makes
$107,000 a year.
It is time we stopped building bureaucratic DC kingdoms and returned
those dollars to the classrooms. That is why I am asking for support of
the Academic Partnerships Lead Us to Success--or A-PLUS--amendment to
the Every Child Achieves Act. This measure will help expand local
control of our schools and return Federal education dollars to where
they belong--closer to the classroom. By shifting control back to the
States, individual and effective solutions can be created to address
the multitude of unique challenges facing schools across the country.
Through these laboratories of democracy, Americans can watch and learn
how students can benefit when innovative reforms are implemented at the
local level.
My amendment would give States greater flexibility in allocating
Federal education funding and ensuring academic achievement in their
schools. With A-PLUS, States would be freed from Washington's
unworkable teacher standards, States would be freed from Washington-
knows-best performance metrics, and States would be freed from
Washington's failed testing requirements. Should this amendment be
adopted, States would need to adhere to all civil rights laws. They
have to work toward advancing educational opportunities for
disadvantaged children as well, of course.
States would be held accountable by parents and teachers, though,
because a bright light would shine directly on the decisions made by
State capitals and local school districts. With freedom from Federal
mandates come more responsibility, more transparency, and more
accountability on the issues.
It would also reduce the administrative and compliance burdens on
State and local education agencies and ensure greater public
transparency in student academic achievement and the use of Federal
education funds.
Increasing educational opportunities in Montana and across the
country isn't going to happen through Federal mandates or these one-
size-fits-nobody regulations. We need to empower our States, our local
school boards, our teachers, and our parents to work together to
develop solutions that best fit our kids' unique needs. As a father of
four--and every parent knows this--I know that each one of my children
is very unique. And that is precisely what my A-PLUS amendment does.
Washington is the problem. We are ground zero. The problem is here in
Washington, DC, and we have the solutions in Montana and in our States
across the country.
The A-PLUS amendment goes a long way toward returning the
responsibility for our kids' education closer to home and reduces the
influence of the Federal Government over our classrooms.
I thank Senators Grassley, Cruz, Vitter, Johnson, Lee, Lankford,
Blunt, Crapo, Rubio, and Gardner for cosponsoring my A-PLUS amendment.
I ask my other Senate colleagues to join us in empowering our schools
to serve their students, not a bunch of DC bureaucrats, and to support
this important amendment.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Vermont.
Distribution of Wealth
Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, as someone who travels around this
country, I am always amazed by the huge disconnect that exists between
what we do here in Congress and what the American people want us to do.
The simple truth, as poll after poll has shown, is that Congress is way
out of touch as to where the American people are. Let me give a few
examples before I get to the thrust of my remarks.
Many of my Republican colleagues are still talking about cutting
Social Security--a disastrous idea--but according to a recent NBC News/
Wall Street Journal poll, by a 3-to-1 margin the American people want
us to expand Social Security benefits, not cut them. How out of touch
can one be?
About 2 weeks ago, the same poll told us that while there is
virtually no Republican in the Senate who is prepared to support
raising the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour, what the American people
want by a pretty solid majority
[[Page S4822]]
is not to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour but to raise the
minimum wage to $15 an hour--something that is occurring now in Los
Angeles, Seattle, and other places around the country.
Tragically, this Congress is way out of touch with the American
people on issue after issue, and it is high time we started to get our
act together and to respond to the needs--the pressing needs--of the
American people.
Between 1985 and 2013, there was a huge redistribution of wealth in
America. I know my Republican colleagues get very nervous when people
talk about wealth distribution. Well, guess what, over the last 30
years we have had a huge degree of distribution of wealth in America.
Unfortunately, that redistribution went in the wrong direction. That
redistribution, to the tune of trillions of dollars, went from the
pockets of the middle-class and working families of our country into
the hands of the top one-tenth of 1 percent. So if we want to
understand economics in the last 30 years, the middle class shrank and
one-tenth of 1 percent doubled the percentage of wealth they own.
Today the United States has more wealth and income inequality than
any other major industrialized country on Earth. The top one-tenth of 1
percent now owns 22 percent of all the wealth in this country, while
the bottom 90 percent owns 22.8 percent. In other words, the top one-
tenth of 1 percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent,
and the trend is toward more and more wealth and income inequality.
That is the economic reality we are looking at now.
But let me talk for a moment about another reality which saddens me
very much and which we cannot continue to ignore. We are the wealthiest
country in the history of the world. Yet we have the highest rate of
childhood poverty of any major industrialized nation on Earth, with
almost 20 percent of our kids living in poverty.
In recent years we have seen a proliferation of millionaires and
billionaires in this country. Yet over 50 percent of the children in
our public schools are so low-income that they are eligible for the
free or reduced-price School Lunch Program.
As a result of the collapse of the American middle class over the
last 40 years, men and women in this country are working longer and
longer hours in order to cobble together enough income to sustain their
families. Yet while over 85 percent of male workers are working more
than 40 hours a week and over 66 percent of working women are working
more than 40 hours a week, we have a dysfunctional childcare system
which denies millions of working families the ability to secure high-
quality and affordable childcare.
Last week I spoke to a woman who lives right here in Washington, DC,
and she told me that to get her 1-year-old child into quality daycare
here in the Nation's Capital, she and her husband are spending close to
$30,000 a year for one child. DC childcare is probably more expensive
than other parts of the country, but millions of parents are struggling
with childcare bills of $15,000, $20,000 or $25,000 a year when their
income is $30,000, $40,000 or $50,000 a year. If you have two young
kids, I don't know how you manage.
The truth of the matter is that while working families are
desperately trying to find quality childcare at an affordable cost, we
are turning our backs on those families. The result is that millions of
children in this country are not receiving the quality childcare or
early education they need when the psychologists tell us that ages 0 to
4 are the most important years of a human being's life in terms of
intellectual and emotional development.
What sense is it that we ignore the needs of millions of working
families and their children? What sense is it to tell working moms and
dads that they cannot get the quality and affordable childcare they
need? What sense is it to send many children into kindergarten and
first grade already far, far behind where they should be intellectually
because they had inadequate childcare?
This is not what a great country is supposed to be about. When we
talk about the future of America, we cannot be talking about turning
our backs on the children of this country. That is why we should be
doing in this country what nations all over the world have done, and
that is to invest in our kids and move toward a universal pre-K
education system for all of our children.
I am glad that the Elementary and Secondary Educating Act is on the
floor right now for debate. I want to thank Senator Murray and Senator
Alexander for their hard work on this important bill. In Vermont and
around this country--and I have had town meetings on this issue in
Vermont where hundreds of teachers, parents, and kids come out--they
understand that No Child Left Behind has failed, and what we are doing
now begins to address that failure and move us in a very different
direction.
When we talk about the needs of young people--something we very
rarely do--we should understand that it is not just that we have a
dysfunctional childcare and pre-K system which must be significantly
improved, it is not just that No Child Left Behind must be reformed,
and it is not just that a college education is now unaffordable for
millions of working-class and low-income families. All of those are
terribly important issues that we must address. But I hope very much
there is another issue that we will finally start to pay attention to.
This country, this Senate, and the House of Representatives must come
to grips with the fact that today in America we have a horrendous,
horrendous level of youth unemployment in this country. This is an
issue that gets virtually no discussion at all. This is an issue of
crisis proportions that we are not addressing. For the future of this
country, not to mention for the future lives of millions of our young
people, we cannot continue to sweep the issue of youth unemployment
under the rug.
Last month the Economic Policy Institute released a new study about
the level of youth unemployment in this country. What they found should
concern every Member of the Congress and, in fact, every person in our
country. The Economic Policy Institute analyzed census data on
unemployment among young people who are jobless--who have no jobs--
those who are working part time when they want to work full time, and
those who have given up looking for work altogether. This is what they
found. From April 2014 to March 2015--a 1-year period--the average real
unemployment rate for young, White high school graduates between the
ages of 17 and 20 was 33.8 percent. The jobless rate for Hispanics in
the same age group was 36.1 percent. Unbelievably, the average real
unemployment rate for Black high school graduates and those who dropped
out of high school was 51.3 percent.
I ask unanimous consent to have printed in the Record the EPI's
findings.
There being no objection, the material was ordered to be printed in
the Record, as follows:
[From the Working Economics Blog, Economic Policy Institute, June 8,
2015]
Young Black High School Grads Face Astonishing Underemployment
(By Alyssa Davis)
Last week, I wrote about how high school graduates will
face significant economic challenges when they graduate this
spring. High school graduates almost always experience higher
levels of unemployment and lower wages than their
counterparts with a college degree, and their labor market
difficulties were particularly exacerbated by the Great
Recession. Despite officially ending in June 2009, the
recession left millions unemployed for prolonged spells, with
recent workforce entrants such as young high school grads
being particularly vulnerable.
Underemployment is one of the major problems that young
workers currently face. Approximately 19.5 percent of young
high school graduates (those ages 17-20) are unemployed and
about 37.0 percent are underemployed. For young college
graduates (those ages 21-24) the unemployment rate is 7.2
percent and the underemployment rate is 14.9 percent. Our
measure of underemployment is the U-6 measure from the BLS,
which includes not only unemployed workers but also those who
are part-time for economic reasons and those who are
marginally attached to the labor force.
When we look at the underemployment data by race, we often
see an even worse situation. As shown in the charts below,
23.0 percent of young black college graduates are currently
underemployed, compared with 22.4 percent of young Hispanic
college grads and 12.9 percent of white college grads. And as
elevated as these rates are, the picture is bleakest for
young high school graduates, who are majority of young
workers.
51.3 percent of young black high school graduates are
underemployed, compared
[[Page S4823]]
with 36.1 percent of young Hispanic high school grads and
33.8 percent of white high school grads. This means a
significant share of young high school graduates in all
racial groups either want a job or have a job that does not
provide the hours they need. A majority of young black high
school graduates wish they could work more but can't because
of weak job opportunities.
While there has been real progress in healing the damage
inflicted on the labor market by the Great Recession, these
underemployment rates among young high school graduates
remain quite elevated relative to pre-recession levels. In
order to correct these high rates, we need to prioritize low
rates of unemployment and boost aggregate demand for workers.
Last week, Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative John
Conyers introduced the Employ Young Americans Now Act to help
young Americans find pathways to employment. This bill is a
necessary first step to putting young high school graduates
back to work and to put our economy on the road to full
employment.
Mr. SANDERS. Mr. President, today in our country over 5\1/2\ million
young people have either dropped out of high school or have graduated
high school and do not have jobs. It is no great secret to anyone that
without work, without education, and without hope people get into
trouble. They get into destructive activity or self-destructive
activity. The result of all of that is that, tragically, here in the
United States today we have more people in jail than any other country
on Earth. We have more people in jail than in the authoritarian
Communist country of China, with a population over three times our
population. Today the United States represents 4 percent of the world's
population. Yet we have 22 percent of the world's prisoners.
Incredibly, over 3 percent of our country's population is under some
form of correctional control. According to the NAACP, from 1980 to
2012, the number of people incarcerated in America quadrupled from
roughly 500,000 to over 2 million people.
A study published in the journal Crime & Delinquency found--this is
really quite unbelievable and quite tragic--that almost half of Black
males in the United States are arrested by the age of 23. If current
trends continue, one in four Black males born today can expect to spend
time in prison during his lifetime. This is an unspeakable tragedy. It
is something we cannot continue to ignore. But this crisis is not just
the destruction of human life. It is also very, very costly to the
taxpayers of our country. Locking people up in jail is a very expensive
proposition.
In America we now spend nearly $200 billion on public safety,
including $70 billion a year on correctional facilities. It is beyond
comprehension that we as a nation have not focused attention on the
fact that millions of young people are unable to find work and begin
their adult lives in a productive way. We cannot continue to turn our
backs on this national tragedy.
Let me be very clear. I think I speak for the vast majority of people
in this country and I hope the majority of Members in the Senate. It
makes a lot more sense for us to be investing in jobs and in education
than to be spending billions of dollars on jails and incarceration. We
have to start creating the situation where our kids can leave school
and lead productive lives and not have them arrested and incarcerated.
I have introduced legislation along with Representative John Conyers
in the House that would provide $5.5 billion in immediate funding to
States and cities throughout this country to employ 1 million young
Americans between the ages of 16 and 24 and to provide job training
opportunities to young adults.
Some people may say $5.5 billion is a lot of money. It is. But it is
a lot less expensive to provide jobs and education to our young people
than to lock them up and to destroy their lives.
As we debate ESEA--again, I want to thank Senator Murray and Senator
Alexander for their important work--I want this issue to be on the
table. I intend to offer an amendment that says that in this country we
are going to put our young people to work and we are going to get them
an education rather than lock them up.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, since our Nation's founding, the idea of
a strong public education for every child has been part of the fabric
of America. In the late 1770s, Thomas Jefferson introduced a bill in
Virginia that outlined his plan for public schooling. At the time he
wrote: ``By far the most important bill in our whole code is that for
the diffusion of knowledge among the people.''
Jefferson knew that educating children would strengthen our country.
That is still true today. Today a good education can provide a ticket
to the middle class. When all students have the chance to learn, we
strengthen our future workforce and our economy. But nearly everyone
today agrees that the current education law--No Child Left Behind--is
badly broken.
The bipartisan bill we are debating on the floor today--the Every
Child Achieves Act--is a strong step in the right direction to finally
fix that law, and it will help continue our Nation's tradition of
making sure all students have access to a quality public education.
Some of our colleagues on the other side of the aisle are interested
in voucherizing the public school system. Instead of investing in our
public school system, they want to send Federal resources to private
schools. That would be a major step backward. Vouchers undermine the
basic goals of public education by allowing funding that is designated
for our most at-risk students to be rerouted to private schools. I urge
my colleagues to oppose any attempt to use Federal education funds for
private school vouchers.
I strongly oppose vouchers for several reasons. For one, vouchers
divert much-needed resources away from our public schools and reroute
them to private and religious schools. Today public schools across our
country, and particularly those schools with high concentrations of
students in poverty, need more funding, not less. We can't afford to
send scarce Federal resources away from our public schools to benefit
private schools.
Secondly, vouchers would send Federal taxpayer dollars to private
schools that are in no way accountable to the public. Proposals to
create vouchers do not require private schools to adopt strong academic
standards or provide students with disabilities the same services they
have in public schools. Unlike public schools, private schools do not
need to serve all of our students. There is no guarantee that private
schools would make sure students have access to State-licensed
teachers, and they would not administer the same assessments as public
schools, which would diminish our accountability of Federal tax
dollars.
I can tell you, as a former school board member, when people in my
community were unhappy with how their taxpayer dollars were spent, they
would find me in the grocery store, at the school board meeting or call
me at home at night. But if Federal tax dollars go to private schools,
there is no elected official that a public citizen can call and say: I
don't like how you are spending our tax dollars, and I want you to look
at this.
Many of our colleagues today demand evidence and accountability in
other programs. I hope they do it in education as well. Some of my
colleagues on the other side of the aisle like to argue that vouchers
create options for students and families. Well, that might be true for
students of more affluent families, but vouchers don't provide a real
choice for the overwhelming majority of students. Vouchers might cover
some but usually not all of the tuition of a private school. In some
cases a voucher would make just a small dent in the full cost of a
private school. That would enable students from more affluent families
the ability to afford private schools because they personally have the
means to make up the difference. But students from low-income
backgrounds would still be priced out of that choice.
Vouchers only provide the illusion of choice to students from low-
income backgrounds, and it is those low-income students who ultimately
lose out when funds are siphoned away from the public schools that they
attend. Perhaps the most important reason I oppose private-school
vouchers is because they do not improve student achievement. Study
after study has shown that vouchers do not pay out for students or for
taxpayers.
In 2012 researchers compared students enrolled in Milwaukee's voucher
program compared with students in
[[Page S4824]]
Milwaukee's public schools. The researchers found little evidence that
the voucher program increased the achievement of participating
students.
The District of Columbia's voucher program has gone through four
congressionally mandated studies from the Department of Education. Each
of those studies concluded that the program did not significantly
improve reading or math achievement, and that program came at the cost
of funding that could have helped improve local public schools.
There are a number of reasons to oppose any amendment that redirects
Federal funds to private schools. Public schools already have to deal
with scarce Federal resources. This would exasperate the problem.
Private schools would not be accountable for the Federal taxpayer
dollars they get. Vouchers do very little to expand choices for low-
income families. Finally, as I said, studies have shown that vouchers
do not increase student achievement.
An amendment to allow public funds--taxpayer dollars--to flow to
private schools would be a step in the wrong direction. I strongly urge
our colleagues to oppose any amendment that works to voucherize any of
our Federal dollars.
I believe that real improvement in student achievement comes when our
teachers and school leaders have the resources they need to help our
students succeed. We have to work together to strengthen our public
school system, not dismantle it.
I hope we can continue our bipartisan work together--we have done
well--to help ensure all students have access to a quality public
education regardless of where they live or how they learn or how much
money they make. That should be our mission.
I thank the Presiding Officer, and I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Rhode Island.
Mr. REED. Mr. President, I come to the floor to speak about an
amendment that I am offering with Senator Kirk, Senator Brown, and
Senator Baldwin, which would establish an accountability mechanism for
student access to the core resources necessary for learning.
First, I wish to thank Senators Kirk, Brown, Baldwin, and others for
helping with this very important matter.
More than 60 years after the landmark decision of Brown v. Board of
Education, one of the greatest challenges still facing this Nation is
stemming the tide of rising inequality. We have seen the rich--in fact,
really the very rich--get richer while middle-class and low-income
families have lost ground. We see disparities in opportunities starting
at birth and growing over a lifetime. With more than one in five
school-age children living in families in poverty and roughly half of
our public school population eligible for free or reduced-priced
lunches because they come from low-income families, we cannot afford
nor should we tolerate a public education system that fails to provide
the resources and opportunities for the children who need them the
most.
When President Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education
Act into law 50 years ago, he described education as the ``only valid
passport from poverty.'' He noted:
From our very beginnings as a nation, we have felt a fierce
commitment to the ideal of education for everyone. It fixed
itself into our democratic creed.
I believe this amendment will help us stay true to that ideal. There
are other amendments we will consider that, frankly, will do just the
opposite, such as those that would divert scarce resources from public
schools to private schools through vouchers or so-called portability
amendments that Senator Murray so eloquently spoke about. Rather than
transferring resources away from our public education system, the
passport to opportunity in our country, we should be doing more to
ensure they have adequate resources. We have to do work to achieve real
equity in educational opportunity.
Survey data from the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights
showed troubling disparities, such as the fact that Black, Latino,
American Indian, Native Alaskan students, and English learners attend
schools with higher concentrations of inexperienced teachers. In fact,
nationwide one in five high schools lacks a school counselor, and
between 10 and 25 percent of high schools across the Nation do not
offer more than one of the core courses in the typical sequence of high
school math and science, such as algebra I and II, geometry, biology,
and chemistry. Their curricula are very limited, and, indeed, perhaps
inadequate.
The Education Law Center reports that a majority of States have
unfair funding systems with flat or regressive funding distribution.
For these reasons, I introduced the Core Opportunity Resources for
Equity and Excellence Act, or the CORE Act. Senators Brown and Baldwin
were my cosponsors. This bill would establish an accountability
mechanism for resource equity. This was the first education bill
introduced in this Congress, and we are very proud of that.
Holding our educational system accountable for both results and
resources is paramount. The No Child Left Behind Act looked at results,
outcomes, testing, and measurement. What it failed to grasp is that we
need resources also. We need the inputs. The Every Child Achieves Act,
the legislation we are discussing today, includes important
transparency on resource equity. I thank Senators Alexander and Murray
for that. It requires States to report on key measures of school
quality beyond student achievement on statewide assessments, including
student access to experienced and effective educators, access to
rigorous and advanced course work, availability of career and technical
educational opportunities, and safe and healthy school learning
environments. However, reporting alone will not ensure that students
get the resources they need and deserve. I commend the reporting. I
think it is a necessary but not quite sufficient measure.
I am pleased to offer this opportunity dashboard of core resources
amendment with Senators Kirk, Baldwin, and Brown. This amendment has
the support of dozens of national organizations.
Specifically, our amendment will require States to develop and report
on measures of access to critical education resources, identify
disparities in access for districts, schools, and student subgroups,
develop plans with school districts to address disparities in access to
critical educational resources, and include the opportunity dashboard
of core resources on the State report card so everyone will know where
the resources are, where they are going, and how we are making our
commitment to an equitable and excellent education for every American
child.
This amendment has bipartisan support, and, more importantly, broad
support in the communities across the Nation. I urge my colleagues to
support it when it comes to the floor for a vote.
With that, I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Illinois.
Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, this week the Senate is considering the
Elementary and Secondary Education Act. As we have heard from the
previous speakers, the issues that are involved in this decision really
go to the heart of America and its future.
Public education is the avenue to opportunity for most children in
America, and if that avenue is blocked or if it is inadequate, that
child will suffer, the family will suffer, and the Nation will suffer.
There is hardly a bigger, more important assignment that could come our
way than to consider elementary and secondary education.
We are fortunate that we have two good leaders on this issue--two of
the best in this Senate, Senator Lamar Alexander and Senator Patty
Murray. Senator Alexander is a Republican from Tennessee and a former
Secretary of Education. He takes this job and assignment very
seriously, and I have spoken to him many times about these issues. My
colleague, friend, and fellow leader on the Democratic side, Senator
Murray of Washington, and Senator Alexander have done an extraordinary
bipartisan job of bringing this measure to the floor. That is not to
say that I agree with every provision nor that any Senator does, but to
have this reported unanimously from committee by both political parties
with the political climate we have in Washington is nothing short of
amazing.
[[Page S4825]]
We find ourselves on the floor debating the specifics of the Every
Child Achieves Act. I am glad this bill maintains Impact Aid assistance
for districts such as North Chicago in my home State of Illinois, which
is a neighbor to the Great Lakes naval training station.
The bill also preserves the universally agreed upon triumph of No
Child Left Behind--to disaggregate data among subgroups of students.
I remember back in 2002, when we passed No Child Left Behind, I was
relatively new to the Senate, and I sat back there. Directly behind me
was a Senator from Minnesota named Paul Wellstone. To say that Senator
Paul Wellstone hated No Child Left Behind is an understatement. Every
time I got up and appeared to be supporting it, he would be behind me
whispering: Senator Durbin, this is a mistake. Don't you vote for this.
You will be sorry. Well, I voted for it.
As I reflect on it, many good things happened, but a lot of things
happened that we didn't expect to happen. We had testing, and I think
testing is an important part of metrics and measurement to see whether
the students are actually progressing. But some parts of the bill went
overboard by disqualifying schools and saying they were not up to the
job because their test scores didn't hit certain numbers. Teachers
would complain to me that they went through all of this education and
had experience in teaching, but now they were just teaching to the
test. They lost the thrill of being teachers and that diminished them
in their ability to help the children.
We also know what happened when it came to some of the other aspects
of this bill. Some of the States started dumbing down their State
standards so schools would pass the test. It wasn't a pretty sight. It
is time to rewrite this broken bill, and the bill that we have before
us attempts to do just that.
No Child Left Behind made important advances in how we ensure that
all children are being served by public education. As we debate the
Every Child Achieves Act this week, we must resist the urge to go too
far the other way. What happened with No Child Left Behind was a
political curiosity. Here was a new Republican President, George W.
Bush, appealing to a Democratic Congress to give the Federal Government
more control when it came to K-12 education. That was really a new
approach, and it is one that, frankly, surprised many of us. As a
result, No Child Left Behind went in directions and to degrees that
many of us did not expect. Now we are getting a pushback from those who
say it went too far. The pendulum is about to swing back in the other
direction. This bill allows States to develop their own State education
plan, set their own achievement goals, and hold themselves accountable.
Every Child Achieves does not require States to identify low-performing
schools or take meaningful actions to provide additional support when
the schools are consistently not serving their students. Without these
protections, students of color and low-income students could easily be
left behind. There are reasonable, commonsense improvements that should
be made to this bill to enhance accountability. We can have federally
required accountability and intervention without federally prescribed
accountability and intervention.
Let me also say a word about vouchers. The Senator from Washington
just spoke about vouchers. I asked her when No Child Left Behind was
written and she told me 2002, and I think it was somewhere around that
period when we passed the DC vouchers system. We are members of the
Senate Appropriations Committee. It was Senator DeWine of Ohio who
offered the DC voucher system as an amendment on an appropriations
bill. I offered three amendments to his proposal. He proposed that
Federal tax dollars be given to individual parents in DC to choose the
school they wish, even if it was a private or religious school--not
charter schools per se but so-called DC opportunity or voucher schools.
I offered three amendments in committee to his proposal.
Here is what they were: First amendment, every teacher in a DC
voucher school had to have a college degree. The amendment was
defeated. The Republican majority said, no, we don't want to limit the
creativity here of these new teachers in voucher schools. The second
amendment I offered said the students who attend the voucher schools
will take the same tests as the students attending DC Public Schools so
we can compare how they are doing. That amendment was also defeated by
the majority in the Appropriations Committee. They didn't want to be
held to the same standards of testing and achievement. The third one
was the most shocking. I said any building used for a DC voucher school
had to pass the fire safety code in the District of Columbia. That,
too, was defeated.
Years later, I sent staff out to take photos of some of the DC
voucher schools. It was depressing. Many of these schools were just
schools in name only. They weren't real schools. When we held a hearing
before the Appropriations Committee, they couldn't even explain what
standards they were teaching to. Is that the kind of system we want to
set up nationally and put our tax dollars towards? Is that where
families want to send their children? So I agree with Senator Murray.
Before we start talking about voucher schools, let's focus on our first
responsibility; that is, public education.
I also want to talk about an amendment that may be offered by Senator
Burr of North Carolina on Title I formulas. Title I is the single
largest source of Federal funding for elementary and secondary
education. It helps States and school districts address poverty and the
needs of low-income students. This was the inspiration for the Federal
Government to make a massive investment and commitment to education in
the 1960s, and the reason behind it was because we saw the gross
disparities in school districts from State to State and from district
to district. We believed then, as I believe now, that kids from poor
families don't have a fighting chance if they don't have the chance of
a good education. Title I was designed to send those dollars to help
those school districts educate those children.
Now, the amendment that is proposed by the Senator from North
Carolina, Mr. Burr, would devastate low-income students in my home
State of Illinois. It would reduce Illinois's title I share by an
estimated $180 million a year. That is a 28-percent reduction in
Federal assistance in my State of Illinois to help poor, low-income,
and minority students--a 28-percent reduction. Chicago public schools
alone would lose $68 million. I just have to say for the record, they
are struggling even today to meet their budget needs and their pension
requirements. This kind of cut would be devastating.
I think about the violence in the great city of Chicago and many
other cities as well. I think about the responsibility of the Chicago
public school system which educates almost 400,000 students. A $70
million cut to Chicago would mean that these kids in low-income
families would struggle and many would not succeed in achieving a good
education. Is that the best we can do? I think it is a mistake.
I have to serve notice on my colleagues. I don't know what procedural
tools are available to us, but when it comes to an amendment that takes
that kind of money away from critically important school districts in
my State, I am going to use every tool in the box to stop this from
coming to the floor and passing. There is just too much at stake. I
hope my colleagues will join me in this effort to stop this as well.
Finally, let me talk about an issue that is near and dear to all of
us and especially to the Presiding Officer--criminal background checks.
In the State of Illinois, if you want to be a teacher--before you can
even be a student teacher--you have to go through a criminal background
check. What does that consist of? Being fingerprinted and having your
fingerprints and personal information turned over to our State police
and the FBI. We take this very seriously in Illinois, and we are not
the only State. There are many States that do exactly the same thing.
We don't want anyone in the classroom, anyone in an unsupervised
situation with small children around, who is going to be a danger to
those children, period.
There are two proposals before us. One is being offered by the
Senator from Pennsylvania, and it is a criminal background approach
which I cannot support. The reason I cannot support it is because it
imposes new Federal
[[Page S4826]]
criminal background check standards in addition to what I just
described in Illinois. We already have fingerprinting and a criminal
background check that goes to the State registry of crime as well as
the FBI, which provides the basic information you need to know as to
whether this potential teacher has anything in their background that is
worrisome or would disqualify that teacher. It is already being done.
The amendment being offered by the Senator from Pennsylvania says now
we are going to make sure they go through a second check, a federally
mandated criminal background check, which sends the school districts in
Illinois to the same agencies I just described; in other words, a
second check which under Illinois law would be at the expense of the
school district--that goes to the State police, the FBI, and others.
Come on. Why would we waste our money--precious Federal money that we
need for education--in duplicating background checks? It makes no sense
whatsoever.
So I commend the Senator from Pennsylvania for being concerned about
this. There isn't a parent or grandparent alive who doesn't share his
concern, but let's not impose an additional Federal mandate on States
that are already doing a professional job. If States say we have a
background check in place that conforms to what the standards are in
Washington, why should they have to do it a second time?
Senator Whitehouse of Rhode Island makes that proposal. He has an
alternative amendment. He proposes that the State background checks
meet a list of Federal compliance requirements, while explicitly
ensuring that states would not need to duplicate background checks for
current employees who have already met these requirements and have been
cleared. I think that is better. That eliminates the duplication and
eliminates the wasted dollars on a second, unnecessary duplicative
background check.
I might add that the Senator from Pennsylvania and the Senator from
Rhode Island addressed the concern about mistakes. If there is a name
sent in by mistake and a potential teacher is disqualified and it turns
out the information is erroneous, there is a due process provision in
Senator Toomey's bill and one that I think is more complete in the bill
offered by Senator Whitehouse.
It wasn't that many years ago, our colleagues may remember, that our
colleague Senator Ted Kennedy ended up on a no-fly list. He kept
saying: Why am I on a no-fly list? It was a mistake. It was a
government mistake that identified him as a danger to the country.
Mistakes can be made. There needs to be a due process requirement in
here so those accused of something that they are not guilty of have a
chance to have their day to tell their story as best they can.
The bottom line is that this bill is one of the most important we
will consider. I thank the chairman and ranking member for the time
they put into this, and I thank them for their bipartisan efforts.
There will be some disagreements on the amendments before us, but I
think we are all in common agreement. If we don't get this right, many
of the other things we do don't mean much.
If we don't provide that avenue of opportunity to kids from lower-
income, impoverished families, they are not likely to enjoy life as
they might with a good education and realize the American dream. This
is our step in the right direction. I hope we can make it even stronger
as we consider amendments.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. ALEXANDER. I thank the Senator from Illinois for his remarks. I
was thinking, as he was talking about Senator Kennedy, whom we all
loved, I think the mistake was that he was on a Republican no-fly list.
That was the mistake. But he loved telling that story and enjoyed it
very much. It is nice to be reminded of him today because he was
chairman of this committee that is producing the fix for No Child Left
Behind.
He would make, in my view, the most outrageous liberal speeches from
the back of the Senate, and then he would come to the front of the
Senate and would work out a good bipartisan agreement and get a good
piece of legislation. He set a wonderful example for us, and it is nice
to be reminded of him.
Mr. President, Senator Murray and I have conferred, and I ask
unanimous consent that the time until 4:30 p.m. today be equally
divided between the two managers or their designees and that it be in
order to call up the following amendments: Hirono amendment No. 2109,
Tester amendment No. 2107, Alexander amendment No. 2139, Murray
amendment No. 2124, Bennet amendment No. 2115; further, that at 4:30
p.m. today, the Senate vote on the above amendments in the order
listed, with no second-degree amendments in order to any of the
amendments prior to the votes and that the Alexander amendment No. 2139
be subject to a 60-affirmative-vote threshold for adoption; and that
there be 2 minutes of debate equally divided between the votes.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Mr. ALEXANDER. For the information of all Senators, we expect a
rollcall vote on three of these amendments and that the rest will be
adopted by voice vote.
PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Nevada.
Mr. HELLER. Mr. President, I rise in support of amendment No. 2109,
just mentioned by the chairman, the Hirono-Heller amendment which
addresses Asian-Pacific and Pacific Islander student data.
In my home State of Nevada, as in many of my colleagues' home States,
the AAPI population is one of the fastest growing. I can give you an
example of that according to census data. Nevada's AAPI or Asian-
Pacific and Pacific Islander population grew by 116 percent between
2000 and 2010. Now, even though this AAPI group represents students who
come from a variety of different backgrounds--Chinese, Filipino,
Vietnamese, Korean--current law and the Every Child Achieves Act uses a
broad ``Asian-Pacific Islander'' category when reporting on student
achievement. Basically, if you are registering as a student, you have
one category--one bubble--called Asian-Pacific Islander, regardless of
whether you are Chinese, Filipino, Vietnamese, Korean. It doesn't
matter. It is a single bubble. As a result of this single bubble, this
student population as a whole seems to perform well, but the broad AAPI
category hides big achievement gaps between subgroups. The current
census data gives us this evidence.
According to the 2010 census, 72 percent of Asian Indian adults have
bachelor degrees or higher; whereas, only 26 percent of Vietnamese
adults do. Steps should be taken to help close these achievement gaps
and create an environment where all students can succeed. This is
critical to ensuring that our Nation's children are preparing to attend
college or enter the workforce. That is why the Hirono-Heller amendment
is so important.
Our amendment simply requires school districts with large populations
of AAPI students to show how these subgroups are performing. This
amendment would also apply in large school districts with over 1,000
AAPI students. This represents less than 3 percent of the school
districts nationwide. In fact, 11 States would not be affected at all
by the Hirono-Heller amendment. It is also important to note that this
amendment would only be used for public reporting purposes. It would
not require accountability measures or intervention at any level.
The bottom line is that having this kind of subgroup data available
equips parents and local officials with the necessary information to
determine how their students are doing and how to better support
students who need the most help. Isn't that what these school districts
are all about, which is to try to identify those students and to better
support students of those who need help.
As a father of four and grandparent of two, I think parents should
have access to this kind of data, to know how schools are serving these
children in these specific subgroups, so they can make the right choice
for their children. School choice advocates agree, charter school
advocates agree, and the truth is that school districts across the
Nation are already collecting and reporting this aggregated AAPI
student data. In fact, just this morning, I sat down with several
school superintendents from all across my home State who told me that
access to this type of
[[Page S4827]]
data would be extremely helpful in their districts.
Principals and teachers also understand the value of this subgroup
data and how it reveals groups of students who need assistance that
would otherwise be missed by looking at the broader AAPI category. That
is why this amendment is also supported by the National Association of
Elementary School Principals, it is why this amendment is supported by
the National Association of Secondary School Principals, and why it is
supported by the National Education Association. I am proud our
amendment is also supported by over 100 AAPI, Latino, and African-
American civil rights groups, educators, women's groups, and the
disability community.
These groups agree with Senator Hirono and me that AAPI subgroup
disaggregation is a top priority. I thank Senator Hirono for her
leadership on this issue and her dedication to serving the needs of all
of our communities. I would also like to thank Chairman Alexander and
ranking member Senator Murray for their efforts to not only put
together a bipartisan bill but also to move forward with an open
amendment process during this debate.
I encourage all of my colleagues to vote in support of the Hirono-
Heller amendment to ensure that parents have choice and that school
administrators alike are able to target students who need the most
help.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, over the weekend, we all cheered on the
women's national soccer team as they beat Japan 5 to 2 in the World
Cup. Their teamwork and the skills they displayed on the field were
years in the making. Many of the players on the women's national team
developed their skills and a love for soccer while attending their
public schools growing up.
In fact, before midfielder Carli Lloyd shattered records in the World
Cup finals on Saturday, she was the star of the Delran High School
soccer team in New Jersey. Unfortunately, not all young girls have the
same opportunities today as young boys do to participate in school
sports. In our Nation's schools, all girls should have equal
opportunities to pursue athletics, whether they just want to help their
high school team have a winning season or whether they dream of one day
playing in the World Cup final.
Today, I am offering an amendment to help close the opportunity gap
in sports between young men and women. Back in 1972, Congress passed
what is known as title IX. That is the law that bans discrimination in
education on the basis of gender. This law applies to all educational
opportunities that have had a huge impact on opening opportunities for
young women to play sports.
For the first time, schools were required to provide equal
opportunity to girls and boys to play organized sports, and they were
required to provide equal benefits and services, like coaches and
courts and playing fields. Title IX has truly changed our country for
the better. The number of women and girls whose lives it touches is
growing every single day. I have seen that firsthand in my own family.
When I went to school, the atmosphere was a lot different than it is
today. Back then, I could participate in just a very few sports, and it
was simply unheard of for women athletes to receive athletic
scholarships.
Now, 15 years later, it was amazing to watch my own daughter choose
to play soccer, learning to be a part of a team and cheering each other
on and learning how to be gracious in victory and in defeat. The
differences between my daughter's generation and my own could not be
more stark.
Today, more young women than ever are playing sports, but inequality
still exists and girls don't have the same opportunities to play sports
as boys. In fact, if you add up all of the missed opportunities across
the country, young women have 1.3 million fewer chances today to play
sports in high school compared to boys. That is according to the
National Federation of High School Associations. So the amendment I am
offering that we will be voting on shortly will help ensure that
schools simply report information about school sports in elementary,
middle, and high school.
I thank Senator Mikulski, who has been a champion for title IX, for
working with me on this amendment. Under our amendment, schools would
report on both access to girls organized sports and the funding for
girls sports. For the first time, schools would need to show the
public, show all of us, what they spend on travel expenses and
equipment and uniforms for both boys and girls sports teams. This
information will simply help us shine a light on the persistent
inequalities in sports between men and women.
Playing sports isn't just good for a single sports season, it has a
positive effect on and off the field. According to the National
Collegiate Athletic Association, when young women play sports, they are
more likely to have higher grades, and they are more likely to graduate
from high school than nonathletes. Research also shows that girls who
have opportunities to play sports have lower risk of obesity later in
life, lower incidence of depression, and more positive body image than
nonathletes.
Congress can help ensure that girls all over our country have the
chance not only to improve their athletic ability but also to develop
valuable skills like teamwork and discipline and self-confidence. Those
skills lead to success on and off the playing field.
I urge our colleagues to vote for this important amendment. Let's
give young women and girls equal opportunity in sports. So many girls
across the country spent this week dreaming of one day being one of
those women champions they saw on television last weekend. Let's make
sure they know Congress has their back.
I yield the floor.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Gardner). The Senator from Tennessee.
Amendment No. 2139 to Amendment No. 2089
(Purpose: To allow States to let Federal funds for the education of
disadvantaged children follow low-income children to the accredited or
otherwise State-approved public school, private school, or supplemental
educational services program they attend)
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask to set aside the pending
amendment in order to call up amendment No. 2139.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will report.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
The Senator from Tennessee [Mr. Alexander] proposes an
amendment numbered 2139 to amendment No. 2089.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the
reading of the amendment be dispensed with.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
(The amendment is printed in today's Record under ``Text of
Amendments.'')
Amendment Nos. 2109, 2107, 2124, and 2115 to Amendment No. 2089
Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to call up Hirono
amendment No. 2109, Tester amendment No. 2107, Murray amendment No.
2124, and Bennet amendment No. 2115, as provided for under the previous
order, and ask that they be reported by number.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, the clerk will report the
amendments by number.
The senior assistant legislative clerk read as follows:
The Senator from Washington [Mrs. Murray] proposes
amendments for other Senators numbered 2109, 2107, 2124, and
2115 to amendment No. 2089.
The amendments are as follows:
Amendment No. 2109 to Amendment No. 2089
(Purpose: To amend section 1111(b)(2)(B)(xi) to provide for additional
disaggregation for local educational agencies with a total of not less
than 1,000 Asian and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander students)
On page 43, between lines 5 and 6, insert the following:
``(VI) for local educational agencies with not less than
1,000 total Asian and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander
students, the same race response categories as the decennial
census of the population; and
AMENDMENT NO. 2107 to AMENDMENT NO. 2089
(Purpose: To restore sections of the Elementary and Secondary Education
Act of 1965)
On page 654, strike lines 7 through 10.
On page 683, lines 16 and 17, strike ``7132, as
redesignated by section 7001(2),'' and insert ``7135''.
On page 683, line 18, strike ``7132'' and insert ``7135''.
[[Page S4828]]
Amendment No. 2124 to Amendment No. 2089
(Purpose: To require schools to collect and report data on
interscholastic sports)
On page 82, between lines 23 and 24, insert the following:
``(xviii) In the case of each coeducational school in the
State that receives assistance under this part--
``(I) a listing of the school's interscholastic sports
teams that participated in athletic competition;
``(II) for each such team--
``(aa) the total number of male and female participants,
disaggregated by gender and race;
``(bb) the season in which the team competed, whether the
team participated in postseason competition, and the total
number of competitive events scheduled;
``(cc) the total expenditures from all sources, including
expenditures for travel, uniforms, facilities, and publicity
for competitions; and
``(dd) the total number of coaches, trainers, and medical
personnel, and for each such individual an identification of
such individual's employment status, and duties other than
providing coaching, training, or medical services; and
``(III) the average annual salary of the head coaches of
boys' interscholastic sports teams, across all offered
sports, and the average annual salary of the head coaches of
girls' interscholastic sports teams, across all offered
sports.
AMENDMENT NO. 2115 TO AMENDMENT NO. 2089
(Purpose: To provide for a study on increasing the effectiveness of
existing services and programs intended to benefit children)
At the end of part B of title X, insert the following:
SEC. ____. COMPTROLLER GENERAL STUDY ON INCREASING
EFFECTIVENESS OF EXISTING SERVICES AND PROGRAMS
INTENDED TO BENEFIT CHILDREN.
Not later than 2 years after the date of the enactment of
this Act, the Comptroller General shall provide to the
Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions of the
Senate and the Committee on Education and the Workforce of
the House of Representatives a report that includes--
(1) a description and assessment of the existing federally
funded services and programs across all agencies that have a
purpose or are intended to benefit or serve children,
including--
(A) the purposes, goals, and organizational and
administrative structure of such services and programs at the
Federal, State, and local level; and
(B) methods of delivery and implementation; and
(2) recommendations to increase the effectiveness,
coordination, and integration of such services and programs,
across agencies and levels of government, in order to
leverage existing resources and better and more
comprehensively serve children.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from New Jersey.
Mr. MENENDEZ. Mr. President, it is fitting and appropriate, although
it was not coordinated, that I follow on to the comments of the
distinguished Senator from Washington State, the ranking member of the
committee, as she was talking about the importance of the amendment
about young women and athletic opportunities for them on an equal
basis.
(The further remarks of Mr. Menendez are printed in today's Record
under Morning Business.)
Mr. MENENDEZ. I yield the floor.
I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Amendment No. 2094
Mr. TOOMEY. Mr. President, I rise to speak on amendment No. 2094,
which is based on legislation I have introduced with Senator Manchin
called the Protecting Students from Sexual and Violent Predators Act.
This has bipartisan support. This is a commonsense amendment that will
protect children from child molesters and predators infiltrating our
schools.
We all know the overwhelming majority of school employees would never
harm a child in any way, but we also know pedophiles know where the
children are. They are in the schools. So schools can be a magnet for
the very people we need to keep out of our schools. I have been
fighting this for some time now--over a year and a half--since the
legislation was first introduced. I am not going to stop fighting this.
There are a lot of good reasons to make this fight happen, to secure
the protections for our school kids from these predators. For me, the
reasons begin with the three children I have, who are 15, 14, and 5
years old. When I put one of my children on a school bus in the
morning, I have every right to believe I am sending my child to an
environment where they are as safe as they can possibly be, and so does
every other parent in Pennsylvania and every other parent across the
country. We in Congress have the obligation to make sure we are doing
all we can to make sure they will in fact be in the safest possible
environment. Sadly, we know that is just not always the case.
The motivation and the inspiration for this legislation that Senator
Manchin and I introduced is a horrendous story about a little boy named
Jeremy Bell, and that story begins, sadly, at a school in Delaware
County, PA, where one of the teachers was repeatedly molesting young
boys, raping one of the boys.
The administrators of the school figured out what was going on. They
reported it to authorities, but the authorities were never convinced
they had enough evidence to mount a strong case. They couldn't
confidently charge the predator. So the school decided they would
dismiss this teacher for sexually abusing his students, but shockingly,
appallingly, they gave him a letter of recommendation to make sure he
could become someone else's problem.
Well, given that he was a pedophile and a predator, he surely did
become someone else's problem. He went to West Virginia, became a
teacher--based in part on the recommendation he got--and rose, in fact,
to the level of being a school principal. Along the way, of course, he
continued to attack and abuse young boys, finally raping and killing
young Jeremy Bell.
Well, justice eventually caught up with that monster. He is serving
the rest of his life in jail, as he should, but it was too late for
Jeremy Bell.
The sad truth is this is not as isolated an incident as we would like
to think and as it should be. In fact, last year there were 459 arrests
of school employees for sexual misconduct with the kids they are
supposed to be taking care of. So far this year we are on track to have
even more arrests than last year. Keep in mind that these are the cases
where the evidence is so clear the prosecution is confident in making
an arrest and pressing charges. How many more cases are out there where
we just don't have enough certainty to actually make the arrest and
press the charges? There are many more.
So Senator Manchin and I decided we would introduce legislation that
would take an important step towards the goal of protecting our kids.
Our legislation has two big categories, two big features that together
would go a long way toward ensuring greater security for our kids.
One is a Federal standard for criminal background checks. Let me just
respond to the comments made by the Senator from Illinois just a few
minutes ago, suggesting that somehow my legislation requires a
duplicative background check. That is factually and simply incorrect.
There is no duplication. There is no redundancy. What we do in our
legislation is to establish a Federal standard and say that all of the
major criminal databases must be checked, but we don't ask anyone to
check it twice. I don't know how that idea occurred. The checks are a
sensible way to make sure nobody slips through the cracks.
We do require there be a periodic review, at the frequency
established by the States, so we make sure we are checking up on school
employees periodically. That is not a redundancy.
The second fundamental aspect of our legislation, after the criminal
background checks, is that we would prohibit the practice of knowingly
recommending for hire a predator, a violent abuser, a pedophile. This,
unfortunately, has its own name. This practice is called passing the
trash. That recommendation was exactly what allowed Jeremy Bell's
killer to get a job as a teacher so that he could prey on Jeremy Bell.
Our legislation would forbid that.
Both of these protections have broad bipartisan support. The House of
Representatives, by the way, unanimously passed a bill that is
virtually identical just in the last Congress. And just last fall the
House and Senate combined, by a combined vote of 523 to 1, adopted the
Child Care and Development Block Grant Act, which has the same
language. It has the same provisions to
[[Page S4829]]
protect children in childcare centers from these kinds of predators. I
fully support that protection for very young kids. I just fail to see
why we shouldn't provide the same level of security and protection for
slightly older kids. That is what this is about.
So in addition to the bipartisan support, our legislation has been
endorsed by many, many groups--child protection groups, law enforcement
groups, prosecutors, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the
Pennsylvania School Board Association. There is very broad support for
this because it makes sense.
Let me go a little bit more into detail about these two aspects.
First, there is the criminal background check. Let's be clear. Every
State does some kind of criminal background check on hiring for
schools. The problem is many are woefully inadequate. In some cases
they miss entire databases, and so they miss convictions.
For instance, some States check only their State database. They do
not check the Federal database so they do not know about the criminal
convicted two States over who moved into their State postconviction.
Another fact is that many States don't require background checks for
their contractors. In our legislation, if you are an adult who has
unsupervised contact with kids--whether you are a bus driver, a sports
coach or the janitor in the school--you have to have the background
check. Some States don't require that.
We establish a Federal standard so that we are protecting all kids
uniformly. So this whole background check component is what I consider
the first part of the bill.
The second part, which is really a distinct part but still every bit
as crucial, is this prohibition against passing the trash that I
alluded to earlier. This is a provision that would have perhaps
prevented the murder of Jeremy Bell. We simply say if a school wishes
to receive Federal funds, it has to ban this practice.
This is so appalling--the idea that someone would knowingly recommend
for hire a predator who is preying on children. It is so appalling that
it is hard to believe it happens, but the fact is it does. Sometimes it
happens across State lines, and there is nothing any State can do about
the laws of a different State. This absolutely calls for a Federal
solution.
For example, recently in Las Vegas, NV, a kindergarten teacher was
arrested for kidnapping a 16-year-old girl and infecting her with a
sexually transmitted disease. That same teacher, it turns out, had
molested six children--fourth and fifth graders--just several years
before in Los Angeles, CA. Now, the Los Angeles school district knew
about the allegations. In fact, not only did they know about the
allegations, but they were so concerned that when a lawsuit was filed
against them they recommended settling.
The Nevada school district specifically asked if there had been any
criminal concerns regarding the teacher who was a candidate for a job,
and the Los Angeles school district not only hid the truth but provided
three references for the teacher. I think that makes it abundantly
clear that this is a problem that transcends State lines. There is
nothing Nevada could have done about the dishonesty and the deceit of
the people in the Los Angeles school district who allowed this to
happen.
Let me sum this up. The Toomey-Manchin bill offers a simple
proposition. It says if a school district wants to use Federal tax
dollars, it has to make sure those dollars are not being used to pay
pedophiles' salaries.
I don't think that is an unreasonable demand. To do that, it says
there are two components. One is that you perform a criminal background
check that is rigorous enough to catch people who have criminal
backgrounds and a prohibition against passing the trash.
Now, we have run into opposition on this, as you know. In fact, there
was a letter signed by a number of organizations led by the National
Education Association, the Nation's largest teachers union group. The
basic thrust of the argument in the letter is that it is unfair to
exclude even a convicted admitted child abuser from being a
schoolteacher. Here is the quote from the letter: ``Individuals who
have been convicted of crimes and have completed their sentences should
not be unnecessarily subjected to additional punishment because of
these convictions.''
Under this logic, an admitted convicted child molester can finish
their prison term, walk out of a prison, go across the street to a
school and be hired to be a first grade teacher. That is ridiculous.
Our kids are not part of some social experiment to see how often
convicted child molesters will repeat their crimes. I am not going to
tolerate or risk trapping small children in a classroom with a
convicted child rapist. That is unbelievable.
We have a national sex offender registry for exactly this reason. As
a society, we understand these people commit these crimes serially.
Even after serving a prison sentence, very often they go right back to
their old ways. So I think it is perfectly acceptable--in fact, it is
incumbent upon us--to say that when someone has been convicted of this
type of crime they are disqualified from being left in unsupervised
contact with children.
The same letter from the National Education Association endorsed an
alternative amendment that has been proposed by Senator Whitehouse. He
has proposed an alternative to my amendment, and I find it troublesome
because, among other problems, the Whitehouse amendment actually would
weaken the protections in existing State laws.
There are 44 States that currently have a category of criminal
conviction which precludes a person from ever being hired to teach in a
school or to have unsupervised contact with kids. What Senator
Whitehouse would do in his legislation is to require every State to
give these individuals the legal right to challenge their being blocked
from being hired. That does not exist in 45 States right now.
So you have to ask yourself: What possible purpose could there be for
mandating that States create these minitrials, some little judicial
mechanism to challenge the notion that they should be precluded from a
job based on their prior conviction for child abuse? The only purpose
would be to get an exemption so they could be hired. Well, I am shocked
Senator Whitehouse would propose legislation that would weaken the
existing protections we have in 45 States, but that is what he does.
I would point out that in the case of the Child Care and Development
Block Grant Act--which passed 523 to 1 and was supported by every
Democrat in the House and the Senate, by the way, the one vote being
for unrelated reasons--that language that protected kids did not have
this mechanism of creating a quasi-judicial entity so that convicted
child abusers could nevertheless be hired. So if it wasn't a good idea
then, when we were passing legislation that pertains to daycares, it is
not a good idea now. So I hope we will oppose the Whitehouse amendment.
I just want to underscore that there is urgency to this problem. Last
year alone there were 459 teachers arrested for sexual abuse or
misbehavior with the children they are supposed to be taking care of.
We are on path so far, in the 6 months into this new calendar year, to
have far more arrests than we had last year. Every one of these stories
is not a statistic. Every one of these stories is a huge personal
tragedy--a shattered life, a stolen childhood, often a family torn
apart by grief and misery. How many more of these kinds of arrests are
we going to tolerate before we establish a better system for preventing
this from happening in the first place?
I think it is time for no more excuses. The House of Representatives
has already passed this legislation unanimously. All we need to do is
pass this amendment on this bill, and it will find its way to the
President's desk. It will be signed, and kids across America will be
more secure.
I urge my colleagues to support the Toomey-Manchin amendment--
Protecting Students from Sexual and Violent Predators Act.
I yield the floor.
Mr. ALEXANDER. I suggest the absence of a quorum.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
Ms. HIRONO. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for
the quorum call be rescinded.
[[Page S4830]]
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
Ms. HIRONO. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 1
minute on the Hirono-Heller amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator has the time.
Amendment No. 2109
Ms. HIRONO. Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to support the
Hirono-Heller amendment No. 2109.
The current AAPI--American Asian Pacific Islander--category hides
huge achievement gaps among subgroups, i.e., Chinese, Filipino,
Vietnamese, Japanese, et cetera. With better subgroup data, teachers,
parents, policymakers, and community organizations will know where they
can target support to the students who need the help most.
Our amendment only applies to districts with over 1,000 AAPI
students. We are not talking about 1,000 students but 1,000 AAPI
students, which means fewer than 3 percent of school districts
nationwide would be affected. That is about 400 out of over 16,000
school districts. Currently, Delaware, Maine, Mississippi, Montana, New
Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and
Wyoming have no districts that would be affected.
Our amendment is endorsed by over 100 groups, including teachers,
principals, school choice and charter school groups, not to mention a
coalition of AAPI, Latino, African American, women's, and disability
rights groups.
This is not an onerous requirement on school districts. They already
have the capacity to collect this kind of what we call disaggregated
data, which will enable all of our schools to help the kids who need
the help the most.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator's time has expired.
Ms. HIRONO. I urge my colleagues to support this amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I oppose the amendment. Instead of
lessening the national school board, this would make it more intrusive.
This amendment would say that instead of schools reporting the academic
results of five major racial groups, they would do it by country of
origin. There are 196 countries of origin. So if we apply the same
thinking to White, Hispanic, Black, Native American, we would have an
amazing mandate from Washington to States about this amount of data.
The Senator's argument should be made to a local school board, which
may do this if it wishes, or to a State board, which may make these
aggregations if it wishes, but this should not be a Washington mandate
to increase from 5 to 16 the number of countries mandated under Asian
American and Pacific Islander and to set a precedent for country-of-
origin reports for 196 countries.
I urge a ``no'' vote.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to amendment No.
2109.
Mr. ALEXANDER. I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The senior assistant legislative clerk called the roll.
Mr. CORNYN. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator
from Florida (Mr. Rubio).
Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Maine (Mr. King) and the
Senator from Michigan (Ms. Stabenow) are necessarily absent.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are there any other Senators in the Chamber
desiring to vote?
The result was announced--yeas 47, nays 50, as follows:
[Rollcall Vote No. 223 Leg.]
YEAS--47
Baldwin
Bennet
Blumenthal
Booker
Boxer
Brown
Cantwell
Cardin
Carper
Casey
Coons
Donnelly
Durbin
Feinstein
Franken
Gardner
Gillibrand
Heinrich
Heitkamp
Heller
Hirono
Kaine
Kirk
Klobuchar
Leahy
Manchin
Markey
McCaskill
Menendez
Merkley
Mikulski
Murphy
Murray
Nelson
Peters
Reed
Reid
Sanders
Schatz
Schumer
Shaheen
Tester
Udall
Warner
Warren
Whitehouse
Wyden
NAYS--50
Alexander
Ayotte
Barrasso
Blunt
Boozman
Burr
Capito
Cassidy
Coats
Cochran
Collins
Corker
Cornyn
Cotton
Crapo
Cruz
Daines
Enzi
Ernst
Fischer
Flake
Graham
Grassley
Hatch
Hoeven
Inhofe
Isakson
Johnson
Lankford
Lee
McCain
McConnell
Moran
Murkowski
Paul
Perdue
Portman
Risch
Roberts
Rounds
Sasse
Scott
Sessions
Shelby
Sullivan
Thune
Tillis
Toomey
Vitter
Wicker
NOT VOTING--3
King
Rubio
Stabenow
The amendment (No. 2109) was rejected.
Amendment No. 2107
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, there will now be 2
minutes equally divided prior to a vote on amendment No. 2107, offered
by the Senator from Washington, Mrs. Murray, for Mr. Tester.
The Senator from Montana.
Mr. TESTER. Mr. President, I urge my colleagues to support amendment
No. 2107 to restore four title VII grant programs that were removed
from the Every Child Achieves Act. These initiatives will help Native
American students who are too often forgotten in the debate about
improving education in America. Restoring these initiatives will help
students in Indian Country develop the tools they need to succeed.
The bottom line is that this authorizes programs that were removed
from ESEA. These programs help Native American kids succeed, and they
need all the help they can get. These programs have never been funded.
This is an authorization bill. If we put it in, these programs will
continue to be authorized and we can fight about funding later, but to
take them out of an authorization bill means these programs are dead,
and I think it would be a disservice to Indian Country.
I would appreciate a ``yes'' vote on amendment No. 2107.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, I urge a ``no'' vote. These programs
have not been funded for 20 years for a good reason. It is because the
money for these programs can come through other programs, such as the
Workforce Innovation Act.
This bipartisan bill consolidates 49 programs that were authorized or
funded through No Child Left Behind. This would take us in the
direction of more Federal programs, not fewer.
I urge a ``no'' vote so that we can reduce the amount of Federal
programs from Washington to the States, and let's use the existing
dollars that we have to help Indians, Native Americans, and Alaska's
native education programs. That is the most effective way to do it.
I urge a ``no'' vote.
I ask unanimous consent that the votes following the first vote in
this series--that means this vote and the next vote--be 10 minutes in
length.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there objection?
Without objection, it is so ordered.
The question is on agreeing to amendment No. 2107.
Mr. CORKER. I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The legislative clerk called the roll.
Mr. CORNYN. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator
from Florida (Mr. Rubio).
Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Maine (Mr. King) and the
Senator from Michigan (Ms. Stabenow) are necessarily absent.
The PRESIDING OFFICER (Mr. Lee). Are there any other Senators in the
Chamber desiring to vote?
The result was announced--yeas 56, nays 41, as follows:
[Rollcall Vote No. 224 Leg.]
YEAS--56
Baldwin
Barrasso
Bennet
Blumenthal
Booker
Boxer
Brown
Cantwell
Cardin
Carper
Casey
Coons
Crapo
Daines
Donnelly
Durbin
Enzi
Feinstein
Franken
Gardner
Gillibrand
Heinrich
Heitkamp
Heller
Hirono
Hoeven
Kaine
Klobuchar
Leahy
Markey
[[Page S4831]]
McCain
McCaskill
Menendez
Merkley
Mikulski
Moran
Murkowski
Murphy
Murray
Nelson
Peters
Reed
Reid
Risch
Sanders
Schatz
Schumer
Shaheen
Sullivan
Tester
Thune
Udall
Warner
Warren
Whitehouse
Wyden
NAYS--41
Alexander
Ayotte
Blunt
Boozman
Burr
Capito
Cassidy
Coats
Cochran
Collins
Corker
Cornyn
Cotton
Cruz
Ernst
Fischer
Flake
Graham
Grassley
Hatch
Inhofe
Isakson
Johnson
Kirk
Lankford
Lee
Manchin
McConnell
Paul
Perdue
Portman
Roberts
Rounds
Sasse
Scott
Sessions
Shelby
Tillis
Toomey
Vitter
Wicker
NOT VOTING--3
King
Rubio
Stabenow
The amendment (No. 2107) was agreed to.
Amendment No. 2139
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, there will now be 2
minutes of debate equally divided prior to a vote on amendment No.
2139, offered by the Senator from Tennessee, Mr. Alexander.
The Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, if you really want to solve inequality
in America by giving children an opportunity to attend a better school,
vote yes because that would give any State the opportunity to take 89
Federal programs, consolidate them into $2,100 scholarships, and give
one of those scholarships to every low-income child in the State--that
is 20 percent of the children--for that child to decide which school
they would attend. It might be public; it might be private. We would be
using the same policy that we used with colleges and universities. The
money follows the child to the school that the parent decides that
child should attend. This is not a mandate; this is an opportunity. The
schools would have to be accredited.
If you really want to create equality in America by giving every
child an opportunity to be at the same starting line, let the State
decide to give a $2,100 scholarship to follow a low-income child to the
school that the family decides the student should attend, public or
private.
I urge a ``yes'' vote.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
Mrs. MURRAY. Mr. President, this amendment would retreat on our
fundamental commitment to make sure that every child has access to a
quality education, and it would do it by consolidating almost every K-
12 education program we have and turning that funding into a public or
private school voucher. It would cut programs for STEM, for literacy,
for afterschool--priorities that are important to Members across the
aisle, and it would dismantle the important bipartisan work we have
done to fix this badly broken No Child Left Behind law in a way that
works for parents, teachers, and students. It ignores the research on
the impact of concentrated poverty on student achievement and allows
States to move Federal resources from our highest needs schools and
districts to more affluent ones and to unaccountable private schools.
I know my colleague from Tennessee understands this is a nonstarter
for me, and I really urge my colleagues to oppose this amendment.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The question is on agreeing to amendment No.
2139.
Mr. ALEXANDER. I ask for the yeas and nays.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Is there a sufficient second?
There appears to be a sufficient second.
The clerk will call the roll.
The bill clerk called the roll.
Mr. CORNYN. The following Senator is necessarily absent: the Senator
from Florida (Mr. Rubio).
Mr. DURBIN. I announce that the Senator from Maine (Mr. King) and the
Senator from Michigan (Ms. Stabenow) are necessarily absent.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Are there any other Senators in the Chamber
desiring to vote?
The result was announced--yeas 45, nays 52, as follows:
[Rollcall Vote No. 225 Leg.]
YEAS--45
Alexander
Barrasso
Blunt
Boozman
Burr
Cassidy
Coats
Cochran
Corker
Cornyn
Cotton
Crapo
Cruz
Daines
Enzi
Ernst
Flake
Gardner
Graham
Grassley
Hatch
Hoeven
Inhofe
Isakson
Johnson
Lankford
Lee
McCain
McConnell
Paul
Perdue
Portman
Risch
Roberts
Rounds
Sasse
Scott
Sessions
Shelby
Sullivan
Thune
Tillis
Toomey
Vitter
Wicker
NAYS--52
Ayotte
Baldwin
Bennet
Blumenthal
Booker
Boxer
Brown
Cantwell
Capito
Cardin
Carper
Casey
Collins
Coons
Donnelly
Durbin
Feinstein
Fischer
Franken
Gillibrand
Heinrich
Heitkamp
Heller
Hirono
Kaine
Kirk
Klobuchar
Leahy
Manchin
Markey
McCaskill
Menendez
Merkley
Mikulski
Moran
Murkowski
Murphy
Murray
Nelson
Peters
Reed
Reid
Sanders
Schatz
Schumer
Shaheen
Tester
Udall
Warner
Warren
Whitehouse
Wyden
NOT VOTING--3
King
Rubio
Stabenow
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order requiring 60 votes
for the adoption of this amendment, the amendment is rejected.
Vote on Amendment No. 2124
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, there will now be 2
minutes equally divided prior to a vote on amendment No. 2124, offered
by the Senator from Washington, Mrs. Murray.
The Senator from Washington.
Mrs. MURRAY. I yield back all time.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, all time is yielded back.
The question occurs on agreeing to the amendment.
The amendment (No. 2124) was agreed to.
Vote on Amendment No. 2115
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Under the previous order, there will now be 2
minutes equally divided prior to a vote on amendment No. 2115, offered
by the Senator from Washington, Mrs. Murray, for Mr. Bennet.
Mrs. MURRAY. I yield back all time.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
The question occurs on agreeing to the amendment.
The amendment (No. 2115) was agreed to.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Tennessee.
Mr. ALEXANDER. Mr. President, this has been a very good day. I
appreciate Senators coming to the floor. It has been interesting to
hear Senators' differing opinions on some issues, but there is a
consensus that runs through this debate, and it runs through the
Democratic side as well as the Republican side, which is that we have a
consensus about the need to fix No Child Left Behind and we have a
consensus about how to do it.
I thank the senior Democrat on the education committee, Senator
Murray, for her excellent work, and I thank the majority leader and the
Democratic leader, who have created an environment here where we can
get quite a bit done.
We have continued during the day to agree to a large number of
amendments. We have pretty well worked through some of the more
contentious amendments we have had to deal with. We expect to have more
amendments tomorrow morning before lunch, although it probably will be
later tonight, even in the morning, before we have an agreement on how
to do that. So we will continue to work toward that.
Let me see if the Senator from Washington has any comments she would
like to make.
The PRESIDING OFFICER. The Senator from Washington.
Mrs. MURRAY. Let me say to the Senator from Tennessee that his work
on this has been really great. We are working hard on both sides of the
aisle to get a bill to the President, and this is part of that process.
I concur with him that we are working through this, and our hope is to
get up some more amendments tomorrow morning. We should be able to
announce that later tonight or tomorrow morning.
Again, I thank the chairman of the committee.
[[Page S4832]]
____________________