[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 1]
[Senate]
[Page 1081]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]


[[Page 1081]]

                          EDUCATION IN AMERICA

  Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I was sitting in the seat the Presiding 
Officer is occupying about an hour ago when


the junior Senator from New York regaled the Senate with his views on 
education in the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.
  He did me a great honor to denounce my proposal, Straight A's, rather 
specifically. But it did seem to me to be a strange and inverted world 
in which Straight A's, a proposal designed to empower education 
authorities such as parents, teachers, and superintendents--the very 
people who know our students by their first names--to say, somehow or 
another, this was an attack on local authority but that the issuance of 
thousands of pages of regulations, on hundreds of different individual 
categorical aid programs, at the Department of Education in Washington, 
DC, was somehow liberating.
  The Senator from New York criticized our present education system as 
a failure, a statement with which I do not agree. I believe there are 
many improvements necessary, but my own experience, in literally dozens 
of schools over the last 2 or 3 years, has shown a tremendous 
dedication to better teaching methods, to the education of our 
children, to innovation, changes that I want to encourage.
  In fact, if we look for something to criticize as a failure, we need 
look no further than the present Federal education system itself. Title 
I has now been in effect for 35 years. The difference in achievement 
between the kids it is designed to help and the less underprivileged 
children is as great as it was when the program began. Yet what we have 
from the Senator from New York and the Senator from Massachusetts is to 
have more of exactly what has failed and that perhaps what is really 
lacking is sufficient direction from Washington, DC.
  I do not claim to be an expert on what is needed for a higher and 
better education in the city of New York or in any other New York 
school district. However, I don't think the Senator from New York knows 
more about what the schools in my State need--I won't even say that I 
do--than the superintendents, principals, teachers, and parents of 
students in my own State.
  What we seek--and this will be the great debate that will take place 
in this body in less than a month--will be: Do we trust the people who 
have dedicated their lives and careers to educating our children, to 
make the fundamental decisions about what they need in 17,000 school 
districts across the country and hundreds of thousands of individual 
schools or do we believe they need total supervision and control in 
Washington, DC, in the bureaucracy in the U.S. Department of Education?
  We have increasingly followed that lateral line now for 35 years. It 
is a dead-end street. That is what has failed to work in connection 
with our education system.
  For the first time, with the minor exception of the Ed-Flex bill we 
passed last year, we seek to restore some of that authority to our 
local school districts, to our teachers, and to our parents. That is 
what Straight A's is all about.
  I suppose I should be honored to have my own program attacked 
specifically and by name because I think that means it is making very 
real progress. I know it is at home, whenever I go to a school or to a 
school administration building and discuss its ideas. Our teachers and 
our educators want more authority to make up their minds as to what 
their children need. Those needs are not the same in every school 
district. Not every school district has as its highest priority more 
teachers. Not every school district has as its highest priority more 
bricks and mortar. Not every school district has as its highest 
priority teacher education. Not every school district has as its 
highest priority more computers. But many school districts have any one 
of those as a highest priority, and many have some other. Each of them 
ought to be permitted, each of them ought to be encouraged, to make 
those decisions for the students.
  A final point. The Senator from New York attacked this proposal as 
lacking accountability. We certainly have accountability now. The way 
our schools account for the spending of money under hundreds of present 
school programs is by filling out forms and by being visited by 
auditors who make a precise determination as to whether $10 for one 
purpose has been used for some other purpose or not. It is a form of 
accountability that has required our school districts to spend more and 
more money on administrators and on filling out forms and less and less 
money on educating the students themselves.
  We substitute for that one ultimate form of accountability, 
accountability measured by whether or not our students are doing 
better, by whether or not our kids are getting a better education. No 
State may gain the benefit from the provisions of Straight A's unless 
that State agrees to a form of testing, of actual achievement of the 
students, and promising if it is given this flexibility, those student 
achievement standards will rise, scores will rise in the period under 
which they are working with Straight A's.
  It is neither more complicated nor more simple than that. The goal of 
educating our children is to see to it that they are prepared for the 
world in which they will live. We are now able more and more to measure 
how those goals are met. Do our students read better? Do they write 
better? Do they compute better? The accountability in Straight A's is 
measured by those standards, not by how well their administrators and 
teachers fill out forms and not how well they come out in an after-the-
fact audit.
  I have every confidence that as a part of the very important debate 
over education and the renewal of the Elementary and Secondary 
Education Act, we will debate Straight A's. I am convinced as this body 
finishes its work it will be a part of the most constructive and most 
successful renewal of our activity in the field of education that this 
Congress has accomplished in generations.

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