[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 206 (Monday, December 18, 2017)]
[House]
[Pages H10152-H10154]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




  EXPRESSING SUPPORT FOR USE OF PUBLIC-PRIVATE PARTNERSHIPS TO BRING 
           COMPUTER SCIENCE EDUCATION TO MORE K-12 CLASSROOMS

  Mr. ESTES of Kansas. Mr. Speaker, I move to suspend the rules and 
agree to the concurrent resolution (H. Con. Res. 95) expressing support 
for the use of public-private partnerships to bring computer science 
education to more K-12 classrooms, as amended.
  The Clerk read the title of the concurrent resolution.
  The text of the concurrent resolution is as follows:

                            H. Con. Res. 95

       Whereas 9 in 10 parents want their child to study computer 
     science, but only 40 percent of schools teach computer 
     programming;
       Whereas low-income students and students from small towns 
     and rural communities are less likely to attend a school that 
     offers computer science programming;
       Whereas computing makes up two-thirds of all projected new 
     jobs in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics 
     fields;
       Whereas there are over 500,000 open computing jobs 
     nationwide and such job openings are projected to grow at 
     twice the rate of all other jobs;
       Whereas significant workforce shortages in computing 
     fields, particularly in cybersecurity, can pose significant 
     threats to our national security; and
       Whereas computing occupations are among the highest paying 
     jobs for new graduates: Now, therefore, be it
       Resolved by the House of Representatives (the Senate 
     concurring), That the Congress expresses support for the use 
     of public-private partnerships to bring computer science 
     education to more K-12 classrooms throughout the country.

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Pursuant to the rule, the gentleman from 
Kansas (Mr. Estes) and the gentleman from Connecticut (Mr. Courtney) 
each will control 20 minutes.
  The Chair recognizes the gentleman from Kansas.


                             General Leave

  Mr. ESTES of Kansas. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all 
Members may have 5 legislative days within which to revise and extend 
their remarks and to include extraneous material on H. Con. Res. 95.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Is there objection to the request of the 
gentleman from Kansas?
  There was no objection.
  Mr. ESTES of Kansas. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may 
consume.
  Mr. Speaker, I rise today in support of H. Con. Res. 95, expressing 
support for the use of public-private partnerships to bring computer 
science education to more K-12 classrooms.
  Mr. Speaker, science, technology, engineering, and math education, 
known collectively as STEM education, all play a critical role in how 
we educate and prepare the next generation of America's workforce.
  Many of our Nation's most successful business leaders and 
entrepreneurs place an emphasis on modern coding and computer skills. 
These skills are a result of a STEM education.
  As an engineer who worked for many years in the private sector, I 
would like to emphasize the need for more of our students to be 
equipped with backgrounds in STEM.
  The American economy and workforce have undergone a rapid 
transformation, thanks to the rise of technology, and its role in 
America's future is only going to increase.
  As advancement continues, it is critical that the country's students 
are equipped with the knowledge and tools they need to compete at the 
global level. These skills can be gained through the expansion of K-12 
STEM education.
  America has long been a pioneer of innovation in medicine, energy, 
agriculture, and other new technologies. We take pride in our ability 
to cultivate, innovate, and change the world for the better as new 
trends in every corner of the economy require a workforce equipped to 
meet those demands. However, if we do not adequately prepare our future 
scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists, other 
countries will outpace us. We cannot allow this.
  Of all the projected new jobs in science, technology, engineering, 
and mathematic fields, computing is estimated to make up two-thirds of 
those positions. At the present, there are over 500,000 unfilled 
computing jobs nationwide, and those numbers are projected to grow at 
twice the rate of other jobs.
  In my district in Kansas, we need students to learn STEM in order to 
fill new jobs in advanced manufacturing.
  When Congress passed landmark legislation earlier this year to 
strengthen career and technical education, or CTE, it sent a clear 
message to students and employers that Members of the House of 
Representatives recognize the growing skills gap in this country, and 
we are committed to improving alignment with in-demand jobs so that the 
6 million job openings nationwide may be filled with students equipped 
with the necessary tools to make our workforce even stronger.
  Congress has once again had the opportunity to help close the skills 
gap by launching more American students into fulfilling STEM careers. 
These careers are not only in high demand, but they are also high 
skilled and among the highest paying jobs for new graduates.
  Students who enter this field are not only helping to close the 
skills gap in our country, but they are setting themselves up for a 
lifetime of meaningful work and personal fulfillment. In fact, 9 in 10 
parents want their children to study computer science, but less than 
half--only 40 percent--of schools teach the subject. Low-income 
students and students hailing from small towns and rural communities 
are especially at a disadvantage. Their schools are much less likely to 
offer computer science courses than schools in urban areas and those 
that serve middle class students.
  A ZIP Code and economic data does not determine whether a child will 
need to excel in computer science, and it should not determine whether 
that child receives computer science education. We need coders and 
computer scientists from a wealth of backgrounds to build the most 
capable and robust workforce in the world.
  Encouraging public-private partnerships to bring computer science 
education to more K-12 classrooms nationwide is a commonsense solution 
to develop STEM education around the country.
  Mr. Speaker, I hope my colleagues will support this resolution to 
encourage efforts to provide more students access to these important 
skills so that they are prepared to join our Nation's workforce.
  Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
  Mr. COURTNEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume.
  Mr. Speaker, I rise in appreciation of the sentiment that is 
expressed in the resolution. However, I just feel that the content of 
this resolution, if it is examined closely, particularly in 
juxtaposition with the Every Student Succeeds Act, which was the K-12 
reauthorization signed into law almost exactly 2 years ago on December 
10, 2015, a bipartisanship measure--Congressman Kline, who was the 
Republican chairman of the House Education Committee, was at the White 
House with his counterparts from the Senate at the bill-signing 
ceremony--if people go back and read that, they will see that actually 
the road map and the pathway to achieve the goal of this resolution was 
actually laid out by folks from both sides of the aisle in terms of 
boosting authorized funding for K-12, particularly for low-income 
students, raising the authorizing for title I schools, which has been 
the workhorse of the Federal Government in terms of trying to help 
target resources for kids who come from distressed sectors and areas in 
terms of urban areas and rural areas, and also had many voluntary 
permissive authorizations for STEM.
  Now, if anything, this resolution understates the scope of the demand 
that is out there for computer science and for STEM skills. There is 
not a sector in the American economy, from agriculture, where the 
gentleman comes from in Kansas, farmers are out there using STEM skills 
every single day in terms of food production. It exists in 
manufacturing.

  I come from a district that is a shipbuilding district. We are in the 
process of boosting submarine production up in Groton, Connecticut. The 
metal trades workers are out there using computer

[[Page H10153]]

skills on the shop floors to make sure that that precision 
manufacturing happens accurately.
  Certainly, financial services up in Hartford, Connecticut, the home 
of insurance companies like Travelers and The Hartford, they just 
started a couple years ago the Insurance and Finance Academy, which is 
a magnet school that brings in Travelers, Smith Barney, and The 
Hartford to collaborate with the public school system to make sure that 
kids, particularly low-income kids, from Hartford, Connecticut, are 
getting the opportunity to learn about things like finance, banking--
giving them those skills--which are intrinsically connected to computer 
science.
  Mr. Speaker, the fact of the matter is that there is great appetite 
in the private sector for public-private partnerships. I would 
stipulate to that and again argue that, in fact, the resolution almost 
understates what is out there.
  What is missing is the public investment, which ESSA authorized, 
whether it was title I, whether it is funding to boost teaching skills 
in the STEM area. We try to give permissive authority to school 
districts to find math teachers, science teachers, computer science 
teachers, engineering folks and their curriculum, which every school 
district is crying out for. There isn't a Member in this body who isn't 
hearing about that back home.
  We want to solve that problem. A resolution like this is certainly 
not going to get in the way of that, but what we need to do is make 
sure we fund the authorizations that, on a bipartisanship basis, we 
passed in 2015.
  Unfortunately, if you look at the budget that came over from the 
White House back in May, the White House proposed a 13.5 percent cut to 
the Department of Education, elimination of all Federal funding for K-
12 teacher professional development, and afterschool programs, which I 
was up at one of them, the 21st Century Learning After School Program 
in Norwich, Connecticut, a distressed municipality. They had kids, 
after school, working on their computer skills, their math skills, 
their science skills to give them the chance to keep up with their 
grade level and to be school ready when they go into high school.

                              {time}  1700

  Again, the big one was the cut to title 1, which, as I said, is the 
workhorse making sure that low-income kids actually have funding levels 
that at least come somewhat close to their counterparts in more wealthy 
parts of the country in wealthy school districts. So, again, this 
resolution is not certainly going to be a negative, but it certainly 
misses the opportunity that we really should be focused on as Members 
of Congress for bolstering the public side of the public-private 
partnership.
  As I said, the private sector is speaking loud and clear that they 
are looking for these skills and actually stepping forward like 
companies like General Dynamics at the shipyard that I described in 
southeastern Connecticut or The Hartford and Travelers up in the 
capital city of the State of Connecticut.
  What we need to be doing is match them in terms of our commitment to 
make sure we are funding magnet school programs, again, title 1 
programs, that help the 90 percent of kids who are in public schools so 
that we actually are going to achieve the goal which this resolution 
sets forward.
  So, again, I certainly commend the sentiment of the sponsors of this, 
but it leaves out, really, what I think is the real question of the 
day, which is whether or not we are going to step up as a nation and 
truly fund public-private partnerships to boost computer science 
skills.
  Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
  Mr. ESTES of Kansas. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman 
from Tennessee (Mr. Fleischmann).
  Mr. FLEISCHMANN. Mr. Speaker, I rise today in strong support of H. 
Con. Res. 95, and I thank my colleagues on both sides of the aisle for 
their advocacy in this regard. We need a strong public-private 
partnership to address computer science education in this country.
  I want to talk about a school in my district, Howard High School. The 
great Reggie White went there. It is a school that I proudly adorned 
the hat when we played baseball. It is an inner city school. I went 
there this year, as I also did at Barger Elementary in Chattanooga--
inner city schools.
  The students have a great desire for computer science literacy. They 
actually taught me to code. I am basically computer science illiterate. 
I use pads and the like, and that is okay. But we know that the jobs of 
the future--no, the jobs of today--are not being filled due to a lack 
of skill. It is projected that, by 2020, we are going to have about 1 
million unfilled jobs that require computer science education. We are 
filling about 10 percent--only 10 percent of them.
  What does that mean? I am a champion of workforce development, and I 
know my colleagues on both sides of the aisle champion workforce 
development. What does that mean? That means that we will have jobs to 
fill that we can't fill. For national defense, we will need computer 
science literacy. This is something that we have got tremendous 
bipartisan support for.
  I can say this: as a proud appropriator--to my friend from the other 
side of the aisle--as a proud appropriator and a member of the Labor, 
Health and Human Services, and Education Subcommittee on 
Appropriations, I am committed to that funding. We actually have 
language this year in that bill.
  So let us all come together, I would say in not only a bipartisan and 
nonpartisan way, to support computer science literacy. The private 
sector is there, the public sector will step up, and America's children 
in K-12 will be the beneficiaries. It will truly make America a greater 
and stronger place.
  Mr. COURTNEY. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.
  Mr. ESTES of Kansas. Mr. Speaker, I yield 3 minutes to the gentleman 
from Virginia (Mr. Taylor).
  Mr. TAYLOR. Mr. Speaker, in Thomas Friedman's latest book, he gives 
this anecdote that I believe helps to define the world that we live in 
today. He says that in 1999, the world's strongest supercomputer was 
the size of a tennis court, and the power to power that supercomputer 
could power the equivalent of 800 homes. Fast forward to 2005 or 2006, 
and that same computing power was found in the Sony PlayStation.
  Think about that for a second. Each one of us has the same computing 
power of the world's strongest nation-state just 20 years ago. If we 
don't see how that affects business, national security, public policy, 
or education, then we are already behind.
  Throughout its history, America has faced struggles that define a 
generation. Economic depressions, world wars, dying industries, and new 
technologies have changed the way that we view and respond to the new 
period. For this digital native generation growing up now, and for the 
foreseeable future, the first challenge for them will be education.
  Now, education and lifelong learning are not only requirements in 
this changed world, they are the difference between failure or success, 
hopelessness or optimism, pessimism or ambition. Our children are and 
will grow up in a fast world, faster than ours, very different, and a 
blurring reality between the physical and virtual worlds. We need a 
revolution in the way that we educate our Nation.
  By 2020, there will be 1 million more computing jobs than graduates. 
This gap represents $500 billion that our children will never see 
because they were never taught, and that gap is only growing, and it is 
growing larger. Right now, only one out of four schools in America 
teaches computer science. Low-income and rural students have even less 
access.
  Now, you don't have to be able to view the future to see the writing 
on the wall. As the education gap widens, the American Dream shrinks. 
We as Members of Congress have a duty and responsibility to reject that 
path for our country and help and lead to chart a new course for our 
American future. Ninety percent of parents want computer science taught 
in their kids' schools. This resolution today calls for exactly that.
  I am grateful for the support of my colleagues on both sides of the 
aisle, Representatives Lipinski, Fleischmann, and Kilmer, as we stand 
together to help bring computer

[[Page H10154]]

science education to classrooms across America.

  Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote for and support this 
important measure, H. Con. Res. 95.
  Mr. COURTNEY. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time.
  Mr. Speaker, as I said earlier, this resolution is a sentiment that 
is hard to dispute or argue, but, unfortunately, it is just that, a 
resolution that really, beyond sort of expressing a goal, an 
aspirational goal, doesn't move the ball forward in terms of actually 
implementing what I think this resolution seeks to do, which is to make 
sure that school districts--every school district--particularly those 
with low-income kids from urban areas and rural parts of the country, 
have the resources which the Every Student Succeeds Act signed into law 
2 years ago and laid a pathway out for us to achieve, but, 
unfortunately, because of the funding levels that have not come close 
to the authorized levels, we are falling short.
  I couldn't agree more with the speakers, the proponents of this, that 
what is at stake here, really, I think, pervades almost every priority 
and every sector of our country's economy and our national policy.
  In 1958, when the Russians fired Sputnik, then-President Dwight 
Eisenhower stepped forward and advocated the National Defense Education 
Act because he recognized that, from a national security standpoint, 
having a national policy to make sure that there are adequate resources 
out there for our Nation was really central to our national defense. 
That triggered, again, a revolution in American education, whether at 
the higher education level or even at the elementary level; and 
following that lead in 1965, we passed the ESEA Act, which funded, for 
the first time, title 1 that gave resources to low-income districts.
  That commitment has deteriorated. It has deteriorated over the last 6 
years with budgets that have underfunded this program. If you really 
took title 1 in terms of the full measure of eligibility for low-income 
students and school districts, we are funding it at about half of what 
the real need is out there for those types of school districts.
  So, again, hopefully maybe this resolution will be an awakening for 
people in this Chamber, particularly as we are on the verge of taking 
up the 2018 budget, that funding education is as important to our 
economy and is as important to our national defense, frankly, as any 
other part of the Federal budget, because that gives us the tools to 
succeed as a nation, not just in 2018, but in many years forward.
  So, again, I certainly am friends with some of the sponsors of this 
resolution. I salute the sentiment that was offered when this was 
introduced just a week or so ago, but, frankly, it falls short of the 
true commitment that we need to make as a Congress to fund and give the 
resources to make sure that this aspirational goal is achieved.
  Mr. Speaker, I yield back the balance of my time.
  Mr. ESTES of Kansas. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the remainder of my 
time.
  Mr. Speaker, as a member of the Education and the Workforce 
Committee, we try to endeavor to look at how do we prepare students and 
young adults for their career and look at ways to prepare them not just 
from starting with an engineering degree or a technical degree at 
college, but actually making sure that in their K-12 education they are 
better prepared as well.
  As an engineer, I saw this firsthand how my education through high 
school and into college helped prepare me for the career that I had in 
the private sector before I went into the public service role. We see 
this continuously with the importance of having a trained workforce 
ready to work in our industries.
  In my district, Wichita is known as the Air Capital of the World, and 
the one thing that I hear over and over again from aerospace companies 
is there is a shortage of trained, skilled workforce ready to work.
  STEM education plays such a critical role in terms of how we educate 
and prepare the next generation of America's workforce, and so we need 
to encourage public and private partnerships in order to increase 
computer science education in K-12 classrooms. It is just a commonsense 
solution to try to increase STEM education in the United States.
  Mr. Speaker, I urge my colleagues to vote in favor of H. Con. Res. 
95, and I yield back the balance of my time.
  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Hultgren). The question is on the motion 
offered by the gentleman from Kansas (Mr. Estes) that the House suspend 
the rules and agree to the concurrent resolution, H. Con. Res. 95, as 
amended.
  The question was taken; and (two-thirds being in the affirmative) the 
rules were suspended and the concurrent resolution, as amended, was 
agreed to.
  A motion to reconsider was laid on the table.

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