The Congressional Record is a unique source of public documentation. It started in 1873, documenting nearly all the major and minor policies being discussed and debated.
“THE REAL WORLD OF PUBLIC EDUCATION FUNDING” mentioning the U.S. Dept of Labor was published in the House of Representatives section on pages H2202-H2209 on March 13, 1996.
The publication is reproduced in full below:
THE REAL WORLD OF PUBLIC EDUCATION FUNDING
The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of May 12, 1995, the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Goodling] is recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
Mr. GOODLING. Mr. Speaker, now let us move from fantasy land to the real world. I think that would be a good approach. I would have thought, after what I heard, that somehow or other the Federal Government was in charge of public education in this country, even though we only spend 6 percent of all the money that is spent, 6 percent.
Under our plan, incidentally, we spend $340.8 billion over the next 7 years on education. Compare that with the former majority that was just speaking. During their last 7 years, they spent $315.1 billion. All those cuts you heard about does not quite add up, does it? Because ours is an 8.1 percent increase.
Now, what is the problem? the problem is that we want to do something differently. I agree with the former chairman that I sat beside who would say to me on occasions, ``Bill, these programs are not working,'' and I would say, ``I know it, Mr. Chairman. Let's change them.''
The chairman would always say, ``We cannot do that because the money might not get to the right place.'' And I would say, ``Well, if it isn't doing any good getting there, what good does it do to get to it the right place?''
But all those years I sat there saying there were different ways to do this. We have to make changes. All the studies, I wish the last group would have unveiled all of their studies showing all of the accomplishments, because every study we have from the department, every study we have from an outside group would indicate, as a matter of fact, that we are doing more poorly today than we did 10 years ago, after we poured all of this money into these programs.
Let me also point out that when we talk about spending on education, spending on education in the States alone rose from $60 billion in 1983 to $115 billion in 1993. During the same period, local contributions to education grew from $55 billion to $120 billion. State and local governments have increased their spending over that 10-year period by 100 percent.
What results do we have from all of this spending? According to the national assessment of education progress, reading, average reading proficiency among 9-year-olds was about the same in 1992 as it was in 1971. Math average, mathematics proficiency among 9 to 13, was slightly higher in 1992 than 1973, but for 17-year-olds the same. Science. Science, we went backwards for 17-year-olds. It is lower.
So on and on you go, and all we are saying as a new majority is that we have scarce dollars. We know that. Therefore, we have to make sure they work well. For whom? Not the people that are employed in the businesses out there, the programs they are trying to protect, but for the children that we are trying to help.
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Now, here is a good example. We recently had a study done, and it took a long time to do this, because when I became chairman, I said, now, for once we are going to look at all the programs that are on the books and see how many are duplicating each other, how many are doing well, how many are doing poorly, how many should be eliminated.
The President said in his budget we should eliminate 41. We have discovered that there are 760 education programs, spending $120 billion spread out over 39 agencies downtown. You see, this was my argument when we created the Department of Education. I said I could be wholeheartedly in support of that if I thought all education and training programs were going to come under one roof so we really could get a handle on it and see what is being done and whether we are having any successes. I know that would not be the case, and here is a good example.
Now, some will tell you, oh, you have all sorts of programs in this. Yes, but they all come back to education and training, in many instances duplicating what somebody else is doing in another agency. We cannot continue to do that, because now you are talking about 1,760 programs, $120 billion spent, you have 50 States, D.C., and territories to spread it over. You have 14,000, almost 15,000 school districts, and you have over 80,000 schools. We have to get a handle on this so that we can provide quality education, and that is what it is all about.
We are not trying to attack public education. Most of us are products of public education and proud of it. What we are saying is we play a very small role on the Federal level and the local level, and the State wants it to remain that way. They do not want us to be involved in public education. But we play a small role, and in that small role we have to guarantee quality.
Access will not get these young people anywhere. So we need studies that are not individuals that benefited from chapter I or benefited from this, we need concrete stories that can tell us the magnificent successes I just heard about that we cannot find anyplace in any study that exists today.
I yield to the gentleman from California, who I noticed was taking prolific notes and will be tremendously educated by the fantasy land.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. The gentleman from New York [Mr. Owens] says what we are doing is barbaric. Everything we are talking about here in Washington in this political year, Mr. Speaker, is about power. It is the power to disburse money to get reelected, so you have got the power and you need a bureaucracy to sustain that.
What we are doing is removing the bureaucracy, combining programs that are efficient, and those that are not efficient, we are doing away with them.
Let me give you a classic example. And first I would say, though, that every nation scores above the United States in every category in education. In many cases, the Brits and Japanese score twice of what our students do in scores. We have less than 12 percent of our classrooms that have a single phone jack when we are talking about Net Day. This is 40 years of bureaucracy and Democratic-run House that has destroyed education.
We have some of the best school programs. And I taught in Hinsdale, we had Evanston and New Trere, you go right outside of Chicago, where you have 7\1/2\ miles of Federal housing, and the kids have no hope.
What we are trying to do is take and fund down to the local level where you have quality, where you have parental involvement, you have teacher involvement, where we can pay teachers what they really deserve and where we can upgrade the classrooms instead of dumping money into these programs.
They talk about title I. They talk about Head Start. Well, every study, including the Department of Education, little liberal, and the President's own administration and every study says that title I is not doing its job. It should take two students at the end, there is no difference, and we are putting billions of dollars. Did we kill it? No, we reduced it until we said, is there quality, is there a standard, and is it effective? And I do not think that is too much to ask.
Look at Goals 2000. There are 45 instances in Goals 2000 that say States will, one of those instances you have to set up a special board, every school, that board reports to the principal. The principal reports to the superintendent, the superintendent then has got to send it to Sacramento in California. Think about all of those schools doing that and the paperwork that has got to go through the State, and then think about all the schools in the United States and generating all that paperwork.
Guess what there is back here in Washington, DC? There is a big bureaucracy here that receives all of that paper and all of that information to see if they are in compliance.
What we are saying is let us send the money to the Governors and to the departments of education if the State Constitution says, and do a Goals 2000 on a State level. Do away with the rules and regulations. Do away with the paper, and you be the masters of the destiny of your education program in the State.
But I have heard the gentleman from New York [Mr. Owens] sit up here and say we do not trust the States, we are the only people in the world that can decide and make those decisions here in River City in Washington, DC. Why? Because they want to keep the power here.
We are saying that the power belongs with the people, it belongs with the students, it belongs with the teachers and the principals to master the destiny that we think is right.
My wife writes grants for Goals 2000. She works 5 nights a week. There are other schools that hire people to write grants for Goals 2000. Many of them never get a single grant, and in some cases I have documented where you have got people that are hired to write a Goals 2000 grant that the grant that they get in does not even pay for the grant writer. And in some cases, if it does, by the time you go through the administrative fees, paperwork, and extra people you have to have to force it, you get no money. Some of the big schools do not. We are saying that that is a waste, and it is a system that, yes, Goals 2000, on a State level, do it if it works in your State. Title I, if it works in your State, do it. There are programs.
And drug-free schools, we have a whole block grant for drug-free schools. I happen to think DARE works, and very, very effectively. That is taken care of in that block grant. And if DARE works in your State, do it. But we are not reducing education.
What is cutting education is the President's title I, for example, costs a billion dollars more just in administrative fees, capped at 10 percent. He wants all the direct lending programs GAO said it would cost $3 to $5 billion just to collect the dollars. We took those savings, the gentleman from California [Mr. McKeon], his committee, and spread it across and increased student loans by 50 percent, increased Pell grants, IDEA, we level funded for special education and the other programs. But, yes, we are consolidating some of those 760 programs, doing away with the ones that do not work and focusing the dollars down.
A vision, for 5 years I have been talking about let us get high-
technology and computers and fiber optics into the classrooms with only 12 percent, and the President jumps on the bandwagon. I am glad the President jumped on the bandwagon. It took 40 years of misrepresentation. Why? We have so many schools that are not up to speed. If we really want to educate our kids, we need the Federal Government to get involved in research and development, working with telecommunications, get AT&T, the Baby Bells, get the folks that can invest in our school systems an get our kids ready for the 21st century. You listen in the hearings, we have a large portion of the kids coming to our education programs do not even qualify for an entry-
level job because they cannot read, they cannot write, they cannot do the math, or they cannot speak the English language. That is not a legacy, Mr. Speaker, I want to leave with our kids.
I repute, and every single Member that spoke in the last hour is among the most liberal left of this House in every case, they will spend money on everything and drive us further into debt and deficit except for one area, and that is the field of the Department of Defense, and they will cut. But in every instance they are the left of the left, and they want to keep the power here in River City so they can get reelected and scare children and scare students, and I am not going to stand for it.
Mr. GOODLING. Mr. Speaker, I yield to another subcommittee chairman from California, the gentleman from California [Mr. McKeon].
Mr. McKEON. I appreciate the opportunity of being here with you tonight and participating in this special order.
You know, sometimes the best intentions can do the worst harm. When we attempt to help, we often simply burden. When we attempt to inspire, we may only discourage. With all the helping that the Federal Government has done in the last 30 to 40 years, you would think that the previous majority should have admitted that something was not working and that some of these programs maybe could have been eliminated. Perhaps we needed to explore other methods of giving our children the first-rate education that they really need and deserve.
You know, a few weeks ago Chairman Goodling held a hearing about what was working in public education. A few months earlier Mr. Hoekstra held a similar hearing in Chicago to highlight public and private schools in low-income areas that were successfully educating their students.
I personally have visited several schools in my district and elsewhere that are having a positive impact on children. The good news is there are many good things that are happening in education, and they are working quite well under the jurisdiction of local school boards and administrators and teachers and parents that really care and want to make things happen, and they are able to do that across this land. They do not have to wait until someone from Washington decides what is best for them and what program we decide they should participate in.
These hearings and site visits have all led to the same conclusions about what factors are behind that success; namely, success is not a matter of how many Federal programs the school participates in or how much money a school spends per student. Rather, the picture that is quickly developing from these hearings and site visits is that committed parents, strong local leadership, and an emphasis on basics is the recurring theme behind successful schooling.
The success stories that we have seen are about what local administrators, parents, and teachers are able to do together to make academic achievement a reality in their schools for their children.
This message, however, is not being heard in Washington. You know, we held a press conference a few days ago, and we had a pile of paperwork, you know, the chart there that you have of the 760 programs. This paperwork was only what was required for about a third of those programs. And yet it was a pile stacked this high.
The Clintons believe that it takes a village to raise a child. What we have found is it really takes a village to fill out the paperwork. Duplicative Federal programs begat State paperwork, State paperwork begat local paperwork, and local paperwork takes teachers away from their job of teaching our children.
I spent time on a school board, and I know how much work is done to write grants, how much work is done to fill out reports to send somewhere, and, hopefully, maybe somebody reads them. You never really knew. You just knew that you had to fill out the paperwork. The out-of-
control paperwork load required for these programs too often leaves out rural and poor school districts that do not have the sophisticated grant writers, so they simply do not apply for the programs.
There has been such a severe focus on an investment in bureaucracy surrounding education that we really have failed our children. It should be an assault to our sensibilities, with the massive increase in spending citizens have supported through their taxes over the years.
You know, it is interesting in this chart here, it shows, and I do not know if we can focus in on that down in the corner, it shows the taxpayers, and the money goes from the taxpayers to Washington, siphons through those 760 programs and then eventually some of its reaches the children.
When I first came here, I figured out that from California, just in rough numbers, we send over $2 billion a year to Washington, more than comes back to California, to benefit the children just by running it through this siphon here in Washington.
We saw we still have a great deal of work to do in identifying the breadth and depth of Federal intrusion here. This 760 that we have, I would add, is we know is not complete. We know we have to do more, but we are going to work on this until we complete this project.
You known, we do not currently know how much of each Federal dollar gets down to the local classroom after the large amounts are siphoned off here in Washington. We do know the cost is extremely high. Just one example, the cost of Boston University. According to their provost, the university spent 14 weeks and about 2,700 employees hours completing the paperwork required to complete funding for title IV. They were hampered by the use of separate definitions in 26 separate schedules required to complete their application.
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They were slowed by repeated corrections and clarifications requested by the department. In the end, after spending the equivalent of 1.5 personnel years compiling what turned out to be a 9-pound application, the university delivered its final product, this despite the fact that the form said this should take 3 hours to fill out. I do not know if anybody in Washington determined that and ever spent the time to figure it out.
Now, if you figure there are 6,500 institutions of higher education that participate in title IV across the country, each one responsible for their own 9-pound pile of paperwork, assuming similar burdens as experienced by Boston University, it would take 9,750 full-time employees to merely complete the applications submitted in title IV. That makes one wonder how many employees it takes to read, review, process, and file these forms here in Washington once they are submitted.
We talked to the Department of Education. They did not know how many employees they had.
Title IV is only the tip of the iceberg, only one of those 760 programs, compared with the enormity of the universe of Federal education spending.
As we continue to pursue this aggressive review, we fully expect those who benefit from the status quo to challenge us, as we see here tonight, in an attempt to defend the current state of education. It is inconceivable to me how anyone can defend this bureaucracy and say this is what is best for the children of this country.
Mr. Speaker, we welcome the debate. We hope at least to have an energetic dialogue that results in the best education system we can give our children and grandchildren. I thank the gentleman again for this opportunity to participate here tonight.
Mr. GOODLING. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman. The gentleman from Michigan [Mr. Hoekstra], our subcommittee chairman, who has been doing a lot of oversight work, is here to participate also.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the chairman for giving us this opportunity.
I have got good news, bad news, and some more good news. The good news is there are a lot of people around the country that recognize we have this difficulty, and on the chart up there we are focusing too much on the dollars spent. We are focusing too much on the Washington Bureaucracy and not spending enough time talking about students and teachers.
Christy Todd Whitman, the Governor of New Jersey, in her State of the State Address, identified the problem that my colleague from California was talking about: We must stop chasing dollars and start creating scholars.
We found that in the hearings that we have done in Chicago and Milwaukee and around the country, one goes into a successful school and says, ``What is making your school work? How come your kids are scoring better than the national average?'' They don't come back and say, ``It is this program, it is title I out of Washington that has really made the difference.'' They said, ``We have got even parents involved in the schools, and these are some of the toughest neighborhoods in Chicago. We have parents involved in the school. We have liberated teachers and principals to create special programs for special needs.'' You started talking to them about Washington programs, and they started talking about the bureaucracy.
Even Secretary of Labor Reich, I think one of the staunchest defenders of the status quo here in Washington, said we must stop throwing money at education and training programs that do not work.
There is a realization that focusing on the bureaucracy and dollars is not where we should be, and we need to start talking about what is going to help kids, parents, and help the kids become scholars.
In my role as chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on Economic and Educational Opportunities, I get the opportunity to identify some of the ancedotal things that we find. The gentleman from California [Mr. McKeon] identified the 9-pound document for title IV. I was going to multiply 9 pounds times 6,500, and it is in the tons of documents. That is why we need these big buildings.
Mr. Speaker, one of the other anecdotal things we found in the drug free schools, somebody had spent $1,000 preparing all of the paperwork and writing the applications and filling out the grant requests. By golly, we went out and helped them. They got a grant for $13.
Now, it is kind of like somewhere in this process.
Another example, and this does not directly relate to education, but this was in the Wall Street Journal today. A document roughly this size, nine pages, two-sided, actually this one is one-sided, it is nine pages, two-sided document, 1994, President's State of the Union speech. This is how Washington defines an emergency. It was 4 or 5 o'clock in the afternoon and the Labor Department said, ``We need to have these available to hand out before or after the President's State of the Union speech. It is so critical. We cannot do it in black and white. We better do it in color.''
They avoided all the Government regulations we have put in place about how to purchase and these things. We have a Government Printing Office. They went to Kinko's. I don't know if I can give advertisements, but it is in here, in the document. They went to Kinko's and said, ``Can you print this for us?'' Being the entrepreneurs they were, they said sure, but we are going to have two people working overnight to create these documents.
So they said, ``This is an emergency. This 9-page document is an emergency and has to be ready. It is called the Middle Class Bill of Rights. It has to be ready tomorrow morning.'' The Government Printing Office could have printed it in 24 hours. Kinko's could do it in 12.
Kinko's did it for the grand total of, 1,500 documents, they did it for the price of $21.33 apiece, $32,000. The Government Printing Office could have done it for $500.
Now, I am not sure who is educating who here, but when you take the average family income for the American family today and you define a 9-
page document as being an emergency, and you are willing to spend one family's entire income for the year to get that document out in 12 hours faster, I am not sure that we know best here in Washington.
The bottomline on this bill is we do have a great chairman of the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight, the gentleman from California [Mr. Thomas]. I am surrounded by Californians tonight. We had to approve that bill. He came back, and I have got to give him credit, he said, ``No, you went outside the rules. This does not meet my definition for an emergency. We are not going to pay it.'' The problem is right now Kinko's has not received their funding. But it was
$32,000, or $21 a document, versus 33 cents.
If I can have a couple of more minutes, because there was a lot of discussion about a program that, if I do not say it, my three colleagues will remind me very quickly that I voted for in 1993.
Mr. GOODLING. I will remind you.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. I am sure you will. I was warned about what might happen with this program. Many of my colleagues were correct. The reason I am bringing this up is because it returns $1.25 and $1.50, is what the speakers before us talked about.
Here is what was said about AmeriCorp that maybe helped me decide I should vote for it and give it a chance. In 1993, April 30, Bill Clinton said, ``We are going to set up a National Service Corporation that will run like a big venture capital outfit, not like a bureaucracy.''
President Bill Clinton, April 30, 1996:
The National Service Corporation Act will establish an innovative entrepreneurial Corporation for National Service to offer Americans educational awards in return for vital service to our country. The corporation is designed to cut waste, promote excellence in government, encourage locally driven initiatives, and create flexibility.
Here is what the new Chairman of the Corporation for National Service said in his confirmation hearings in October of 1995. ``At our corporation, we want to do what any business person would do, and that is make our product the best it can be.''
Sometimes we get critiqued for actually going and taking a look at these 760 programs. AmeriCorp is a good reason why we go and take a look.
There was a press conference today and some reforms were announced on AmeriCorp. But there was one reform not announced today that I am very, very disappointed and upset about. Later on this week, we have gotten some preliminary documents and the President of the Corporation for National Service, Harris, sent us a letter telling us what this document is going to be. It is a requirement the Corporation for National Service, a $500 million corporation, which would put it into the Fortune 500, it has to have its books audited. Fairly reasonable. Buck, you are a business guy.
Mr. McKEON. Good idea.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Good idea, let's audit the books. I bet you had that done, Mr. Goodling, when you were on the school board. You had your books audited. But this a Fortune 500 company.
So I called my stockbroker today, and I was going through a scenario with him, and I said, ``If you know of a Fortune 500 company traded on the New York Stock Exchange that had the auditors come in for their yearly audit,'' and, we are benchmarking against business excellence. Actually it is the business minimum. ``And the auditors came back and were going to announce publicly that the books and the financial systems were in such disarray that the auditors could not audit the books, what would happen?''
My stockbroker is trying to figure out what company this is. He says,
``Well, No. 1 is trading of that stock would be suspended immediately. When trading opened on it, the price of the stock would plummet, because shareholders, the brokers, the employees would have no idea of what the financial stability of that company would be. The CFO would be fired immediately. The rest of the executive team would be brought in front of the board of directors to explain how they got to this point and come up with a corrective action, not 60 days, not 90 days, but what are you going to do now?''
Well, what we are going to find later on this week is that for our
$500 million corporation, the Corporation for National Service, the books are unauditable for 1994, and we are going to find and discover that for 1995 the auditing company has basically said, ``We do not think it is appropriate to invest any money in even taking a look at the books, because from what we have seen, they have not changed their procedures and they are still running on the same outdated models of what they are using in 1994.''
Think about it. Finally, when by broker said, ``Who is it,'' I said,
``It is the Corporation for National Service.'' His response was ``Oh. That is government.''
It is expected. That is why we are going to go through those 760 programs. We have got a $500 million program where the books cannot be audited. That is not Washington's money, that is the parents' money who decided to send it or were told they had to send their money to Washington, and not use it at home for their family and their own kids' education. We are entrusted with that money, and we cannot even meet the minimum standards for what a corporation is. And this is Government at its best.
If this happened to a publicly held company, it would be the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Because it is Government, it is going to be a footnote on page 10, and it is going to be ``Oh, there they go again. This is what we expect.''
We have got to set a higher standard. We are going to go through those 760 programs, and we are going to see whether there are any more like this, and we are going to see whether they are effective, whether they are efficient, whether they are getting the kind of results we want, and whether they are even the Federal Government's role.
We will still have the debate about whether AmeriCorps is appropriate or not. When they are using $500 million like this, they should not get one more dollar until they come back in front of us and convince us they have put in place the changes that are necessary. I do not think they have a chief financial officer right now that has an accounting or finance background.
Mr. GOODLING. The tragedy is that when you talk about that system of federally financed volunteer programs, contrast that with what happened in my district recently, where the Brethren Nursing Home had a contract with a local high school where the students would come in and volunteer their time to give those seniors what the paid people would not give them, because they do not have time to give them, and the Department of Labor moved in and said, ``That is a $15,000 fine, and it is $13,000 back wages you must pay to these students who came to volunteer.''
So I called the secretary and said, ``Wait a minute. Your President got the Congress to pass a program for volunteers that costs $20,000 to
$30,000 to $35,000 for every volunteer. Here you are going to zap this nursing home because these kids volunteered to help seniors, read stories to them, push them in a wheelchair?''
Oh, he did not like that. I said, ``I don't like it either. Because on one hand it was stupid to pay volunteers, and then on the other hand, you zapped those who volunteer their time. Not only that, have are you going to determine then which was work and which was volunteer? Was pushing the wheelchair work, or was that a volunteer? Was reading the story to the senior citizen work, or was that a volunteer''
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It is just--well, I will refrain from saying what I really think it was, but nevertheless these are the inconsistencies. The important thing is to remember, when we talk about education, is that 6 percent, that is what we are involved in. Why are we involved in that? We were to deal with special population. Why were we to deal with special population? We were supposed to try to give them an even start. We were supposed to try to give them a quality program that would help them compete with youngsters who were not from disadvantaged homes.
Our problem was, right from the beginning, that a lot of people then decided, well, this is the most those students can do. In other words, in many instances we dumbed down. In many instances we did not require more. In many instances we did not demand enough.
The hearing we had recently where we were talking about good things happening in public education, and there are wonderful things happening all over this country in public education, but you noticed every person's testimony, when they talked about why it is working and why it is a good program, it all came back to: We demand excellence, and we insist. The one program, if you will remember, the parent had to sign up to participate daily in the classroom so that they were right there helping those children and learning a lot what it is you do to help children when you are at home.
I mean, these are the inconsistencies that we are faced with a limited amount of money, and so we have to improve.
IDEA was mentioned by that group.
Where do the mandates come from? Federal Government.
What did we tell them we would send them? Forty percent of the money.
What did we end up sending them? Eight percent of the money.
So I am very proud that last week in the bill that we sent, which I hope the President will sign, we increased funding for special education. Why did we increase funding for special education? Because we mandated the programs.
Second, why did we increase it? Because then the local government, the local school district, can take their money and spend it on all of the students rather than having to take their money to spend it on a program that we mandated.
So I am proud that we made that change, and I know that the gentleman from California [Mr. Cunningham], the chairman of the subcommittee, has some other thoughts on tonight's discussion to bring us back into the real world.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Mr. Speaker, this special order makes my heart soar like an eagle because you know you are able to talk about that I know the chairman was an educator, and I know the gentleman from California
[Mr. McKeon] owned a business, and I was a teacher, but not only in the high school, but the college level, and the dean of a college. And I have got children. And if the other side is trying to say that we are barbaric, that we are trying to destroy education, and I have got children in elementary and secondary education, and I want them to go onto college education, the last thing I am going to do is to bleed the public system that is going to help them. And the notice that they are giving to the American public, that we are cutting those programs, is upsetting to me.
And I would say that you mentioned we control only 6 percent of the spending, but what does that 6 percent do? It represents over 50 percent of the rules and regulations on the States in the school systems, over 75 percent of the paperwork, and it is inefficient. That is not a legacy that we need to continue, and we are trying again to get the dollars down to the local level so that we can have better quality, we can have parental involvement to work with the teachers and the administrators and let them make the decisions instead of someone like Major Owens, or Mr. Miller, or Duke Cunningham, or anybody else here in Washington, DC.
They talk about title I and Head Start and Goals 2000. Every study, including HHS, the Department of Education, the inspector general; here is the quotes: Over a 1-year period title I participants did not improve the relative standings in reading or math. The progress of title I participants on standardized tests, on criteria references tests, was no better than a nonparticipant. Two students, both parallel programs, one participating in Head Start or title I, no difference at the end.
When you got 760 programs, we only have 6 percent of the funding to spread those dollars so thinly, there is not enough money in the world to function. And they said more generally the relative performance of students in very high poverty schools, one with at least 75 percent of poor children, actually declines from the earlier to later grades.
But yet I do not think it is too much to ask that a Head Start or a title I program has standards, that we insist on quality, that we insist on results.
Mr. GOODLING. See, this goes back to the idea that I used to hear, year after year after year. They say, well, we need more money in the program because we are only covering a small number of the children. And I would say what are you covering them with because that is very, very important.
So we had a 180 percent increase in Head Start funding which translated into a 39 percent increase in participation. Now, if we have to increase funding 180 percent every time to get a 30 percent increase, there is not enough money in the world to ever get around to full participation.
So, you know, it was just the idea: more money, more money, more money. Nobody paid any attention about quality. Just more money.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. That is the liberals' and socialists' excuse to just keep dumping more money into a program, regardless if it is effective or not. And you know the other side would say that we are cutting.
First of all, for every dollar the government spends, it has got to take it away from somebody in the first place. It is not free money. We have the charge of making sure that those dollars are effectively spent, and when you look at our school systems, that where our systems across this country are last in most--below all nations in math, and reading, and writing, and science; I mean that is not a good system and we need to change it, and to effectively do that instead of just continually dumping money.
They say, well, you are cutting. We are not cutting. What we are doing is focusing the dollars in the most effective means and letting local districts control it, and what we are cutting, whether you are talking about any other program outside of even education, is we are cutting the precious bureaucracy that they can control, and that is what their whole thing is about right now. You are cutting. What we are doing is cutting their ability to spend money so that they can get reelected. We are cutting their ability to spend money so they can get reelected so they got the power here in Washington, DC. And that power represents even a bigger bureaucracy, 760 programs all the way down the line.
That is wrong. Forty years has brought us to that point.
Talk to anybody, Republican or Democrat in your district. They feel something is wrong with the system. And what is wrong is we are not managing the Government, whether it is the Department of Defense, the Department of Education. Government is not and does not have the ability to manage money and get effective results. People do that work directly with the program, and I want to personally thank the chairman.
And all of this results in a $5 trillion debt. Think what we could do with, you know, $365 billion. We pay nearly a billion dollars a day on just the interest. What we could not do for education. And when we talk about the deficit, every one of those Members I checked did not vote for a balanced budget. Why? Because it takes their power to spend money away.
Mr. GOODLING. I yield to the gentleman from California [Mr. McKeon].
Mr. McKEON. Mr. Speaker, as my colleagues know, Mr. Cunningham just made a good point on the debt. Our country is a little over 200 years old, and the first 200 years, the debt increased very, very slowly, until, at the end of 200 years, we had a debt in 1980 of about a trillion dollars. And then it started accelerating because spending accelerated, taxes were cut, revenue increased, but spending went up even greater. And so from 1980 to 1982 that debt increased from $1 trillion to $4 trillion. And then in the last 2\1/2\ years, 3 years, it has gone up even faster, now to $5 trillion. So it does not take a rocket scientist to figure if the curve is like this, and then it goes like this, what we can look forward to.
When we are talking about education, we are talking about children, and I have 6 children, I have 11 grandchildren, and one more on the way, that I know of. And you know I think that many times they, the other side, paints us as not caring. Well, if I did not care, I would not be here, and if I did not care about those children and grandchildren and nieces and nephews that I have, I would not be here.
Mr. Speaker, I think it is important that we get a handle on our fiscal responsibility. Maybe these 760 programs would be good, and maybe they should all be funded fully, and if we had the money, maybe that is something that we should do.
I personally think that is probably not the case, and I think we are on the right track in trying to look at these programs, especially when we find out that they are also showing very poor fiscal responsibility. But we do not have the kind of money. When we are in that kind of debt, to pass that $187,000 onto that new granddaughter that I just had born does not make very good sense to me, and that is what she is going to have to pay in her lifetime just to serve interest on the debt, if we do not get this taken care of.
You know, we used to spend--hardworking people, the people that settled this country, the pioneers that moved across the plains to establish this country, did not look to the Government to help them, You know, if their wagon wheel broke, they did not send a telegram or a Pony Express rider to Washington to ask somebody to come out and fix their wagon wheel. You know, they took care of themselves.
And when the President said the other night in the State of the Union something about the effect that people--it was terrible that they should have to depend on themselves. You know, I think some way we missed the boat.
Mr. Speaker, I think we should also mention tonight a little bit about student loans. You know, there has been a lot of talk about how we killed student loans, and I have some real concerns that there are young people out there that maybe will not even go to school this year because they will believe some of the rhetoric that they have heard emanating from Washington, that when the other side says that we have killed student loans they may think what is the use; you know, why even try? I think that we ought to set the record straight, that, if anything, we have increased student loans from $24 billion to $36 billion in the next 7 years, and every single student that goes to postsecondary education, that applies for a loan, can get a loan. Whether they are poor, whether they are wealthy, has nothing to do with it. The money is there, it is available, we increased that money, and every single student can get a student loan, and I think it is important for us to clarify that.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman would yield, the Secretary of Education has said that the forms are not available because the Government shutdown. Is that correct?
Mr. GOODLING. I think it was rather humorous. It was rather humorous. The forms are not available because they had 21 days of bad weather and shutdown. The forms had to be printed long before the shutdown and long before the bad weather if, as a matter of fact, they were going to meet their deadline. So you have all of these students and parents and schools up in arms because they did not have the free forms to fill out in order to apply for the loans.
Now these are the same people, keep in mind, who are also now going to manage direct lending. They could not seem to manage the lending that would be taken care of by the private sector if they just get the forms finished in time. But they are now also, and the President would have his way, they will manage 100 percent of all of the loan.
So you know this excuse when summer comes, I hope they forget about the bad weather as an excuse, and hopefully they will not have another shutdown so they cannot use that as an excuse, and they will really have to do the job.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman will yield, the Federal family education loans, I mean just printing the documents which were the things that were late, why it is not available, printing documents is not that tough. We talked a little bit about Americorps not meeting the minimum requirements to be auditable. FFEL, the Federal Family Education Loan Program where they cannot print the applications so that----
Mr. GOODLING. In time.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. In time, also just happens to be the largest funded program of those 760 programs. So for a program that is a half a billion dollars, we cannot keep the books. Whey you get to a program, the Federal family -- or Federal family education loans, $18 billion. I am not--you know, I do not think we have to audit those books. I would love to have an accounting firm take a look at those books.
{time} 1945
Mr. Speaker, if we cannot manage $500 million, these have to be a disaster. We have a clue. The books are probably bad, because they cannot even print the forms on time.
Mr. McKEON. That $18 billion, by the way, is just in 1 year.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will further yield, I just want to add a couple of things.
We really are talking about focusing on how do we make kids scholars, the quote from Christine Todd Whitman. You would think if we were focusing on making kids scholars we would go through those 760 programs and say, the problem is we just have too many programs focused on science, or too many focused on reading and math, and we ought to really just consolidate that. I will bet there are a lot of science programs there, a lot of reading, and a lot of math. That is what we want kids to excel in.
Seven hundred and sixty programs. The number of programs for arts promotion and education, and arts are important, are 39. What I did not know is that the arts are more important than science. We only have 28 programs promoting science. But it is good, science is twice as important as reading, because for reading, we only have 14 programs.
We know that reading is more important than math, because for math, out of 760 programs, we have all of 9 programs. So we have 28 for science, 14 for reading, 9 for math, 39 for the arts.
There is one other little program in there that you ought to know. I guess it is not Monday night, but for those who have the TV's that you get the menu, and if you figure out how to use it, you can also put closed captioning on. Out of those 760 programs, there is an option that is provided to you by the Department of Education for closed captioning of ``Baywatch.'' So when you turn on ``Baywatch'' on whatever night it is on, you can go through your menu, and you push the button that allows you to watch it with the closed captioning on. It will say at the bottom, at the beginning of the program, ``Brought to you by funding through the Department of Education.''
So the reading scores are not what they ought to be, math is not what it ought to be, science is not what it ought to be. I am not even sure, they may even classify that as a reading program. Tell your kid to go watch ``Baywatch'' and turn on the captioning, and read the words going along on the bottom of the page.
Mr. GOODLING. I want to point out how important the captioning is. But what a foolish way to spend money for captioning, when you could spend money to really help the people who need the captioning on programs that are meaningful and important to them, as far as their future life is concerned. I doubt whether ``Baywatch'' is one of those.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I would tend to agree with the gentleman.
Mr. GOODLING. I think what I would like to point out, Mr. Speaker, in my closing remarks is that I want the parents and the students who are high school seniors and college students to understand that there is a program out there called disinformation, disinforming the public. They are trying to scare you into the idea that somehow or other, because we are in the leadership at the present time, we are going to destroy your loans and we are going to destroy your grants. They know very well that we increase both the Pell grants and the student loans.
To those who are not going on to a 4-year institution, they would probably have you believe that somehow or other we are not concerned about that 75 percent who never complete a 4-year education. The opposite is true. That is why we worked so hard in the last couple of years to get the careers bill through the House of Representatives, through the Senate, so we can concentrate on that 75 percent who are going to have to have the best skills, the highest skills, the best work ethic, in order to have our country compete with the rest of the world, or otherwise there are no jobs for anybody.
For those who are in high school, all we ask from our Federal expenditures is quality. All we demand is excellence. To the preschoolers, all of us want to make sure that those who are from disadvantaged families, those who do not have the normal opportunities that your children and my children had to become reading ready, that we want to do what we can to make sure they are reading ready, but we do not do that simply by throwing money.
We do that by insisting that they are quality programs, so we do not find that, by the time the children get to third grade, they have lost any head start that they ever had. They will have quality programs that will help them compete with all students, no matter what background they may come from.
So, Mr. Speaker, it is important that the American public understand that there have been billions of dollars, I suppose, by this time spent on advertising to disinform the American public. All we are telling you is that we are here to make sure that all education programs are the very best programs that anybody can provide, and that every child will have an equal opportunity for those good programs.
It does not come just by simply throwing more money at 760 programs. It comes from making sure that, first of all, sufficient money gets to program that are working well, rather than spread it out all over these programs. Second, its means that we have a limited amount of money, and therefore must demand quality, must demand excellence. That is the only way we are going to make it in a very competitive world.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. If the gentleman will continue to yield, I will make my summation real quick, so I can give the time to my colleagues.
Mr. Speaker, I would say what is really cruel is to leave the system, in view that we have some very good schools across the country, but across the board, a system in which I think every American sees there is a lot wrong with that system, and to where the majority of our children who are applying for entry-level jobs do not even qualify for that entry-level job, because they cannot read, write, do the math, or speak English; that we have only been in the majority for 1 year. This is after 40 years of letting the Government manage and control even the 94 percent from the rules and regulations and paperwork.
Mr. Speaker, I do not think it is asking too much that they give us a chance to prove that we can ensure quality, we can ensure results, by focusing more dollars down not to the Washington bureaucrat, but to the teachers, the principals, the parents, and the children. And they should make those decisions on a local level. I think that concept is worth taking a look at. We are not killing education, but we are focusing those dollars down the maximum to local control.
Mr. McKEON. The gentleman from Pennsylvania mentioned the careers bill. I think it is important that people understand this is an effort that you started in the last Congress and could not even get a hearing on the bill. This year, with the change, we were able to take it and on a bipartisan way, take 128 Federal programs, like we are looking here tonight at 760. And while it is not into law yet and we are still working on it with the Senate, we have taken those 128 programs down to three block grants, made efficient use of the dollars, and we have.
We block grant that money out to the States and local communities where it will really be efficient, instead of having several cross programs working at odds with each other.
Mr. Speaker, I want to commend the gentleman for his leadership on that, and for the continued effort. I think it is important that people understand that we are doing some very positive things here that will bear some great results as time goes on.
What we need now is a President that will sign some of the bills that we have passed, so we can have true welfare reform, so we can have a balanced budget, so we can really get this country moving forward to get our fiscal house in order. I thank the gentleman very much.
Mr. GOODLING. We are here to support those teachers back there on the firing line, and we want to help them as they try to produce the quality that we need to order in be successful.
Mr. CUNNINGHAM. My wife is one of them.
Mr. HOEKSTRA. Just in closing, at the beginning of the year we got together and talked about what our vision was for our committee, where we wanted to drive the education agenda. We started out not with the bureaucracy, not with the dollars, not with the number of programs. We started out with the kids.
We said, we know what works in schools. We know what works in educating kids. We need to empower kids. We need to empower parents to get involved in their kids' education. We need to take a look at whether the bureaucracy and the 40 Federal programs and the $120 billion, whether all that influence out of Washington is empowering parents, enabling students, or whether it is getting in the way. Are the programs getting in the way between parents and the local school board, so the school board looks more to Washington than they do to parents?
We are focused on kids. We are focused on good education. We have the same goals in mind. We just have a different way of getting there.
Mr. GOODLING. Children is the name of the game as far as our program is concerned. We are here to make sure that anything we do will not hinder there getting a good education, but will enhance that possibility.
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