T. Gorton

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Madam President, does the Senator from Illinois wish to make any remarks now or should we just go on to another subject?

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk and ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that reading of the amendment be dispensed with.

Mr. GORTON. The Senator from New Hampshire, in 30 seconds, is precisely correct. He summed up the entire debate. I yield 5 minutes, or such time as he may use, to the Senator from Arizona.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, if my colleague desires to speak and use some of her time before I actually offer my amendment, I will let her do so. I will seek recognition when she has completed her statement.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, the bill that is before us today, an appropriations bill for a wide range of subjects, including education, includes just four lines on this subject: $1,200,000,000 shall be for teacher assistance to local educational agencies only if specifically authorized by subsequent legislation. Now, the distinguished chairman of the subcommittee, the Senator from Pennsylvania, described this money in this fashion because the chairman of the HELP Committee, the committee in charge of education in this body, has conducted a long series of detailed hearings on education in the United States toward the goal of renewing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Sometime next month or, at the latest, in January or February, the committee chaired by Senator Jeffords will report that Elementary and Secondary Education Act to the floor for debate. I will be surprised if the debate on renewing our most fundamental educational bill does not last at least a week. But it is simply because these issues are so vitally important and so key to the future of educational quality, so key to the achievement of our students, so key to their performance in a 21st century world, that it is not a debate that should be conducted on an appropriations bill in a 3-hour period. I must, incidentally, say that this is 3 hours more than was devoted to the subject last year, when the first installment of this 100,000 teachers program was authorized. It was authorized as a part of that massive, overweight, end-of-session proposal that included at least half a dozen appropriations bills and hundreds of pages of authorizing language, the content of which most Members were entirely unaware when they voted on it. The amendment of my colleague from the State of Washington is, at the very least, premature. She presents issues that are significant and important. They do deserve debate. I think there is a considerably better way. The way we wrote it last year created some overwhelmingly significant problems. It created, first and foremost, in the State of Washington, our own State--and I suspect in every other State in the United States--a situation in which a very large number of school districts got too little money to hire a single teacher. Slightly over 50 percent, slightly over half, 154 of the school districts in Washington State, didn't get enough money out of this program to hire one teacher, already distorting the priorities set forth in the bill. Interestingly enough, I don't think this is a debate that ought to divide liberals from conservatives, much less those who believe in a Federal role in education from some, though I know of very few, who do not. In the course of the last year, after the passage of that bill, I have been working with some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle and with many on my own side of the aisle to come up with a set of ideas as to how we provide more trust in the people who have devoted their entire lives to education as teachers and principals and school board members and, for that matter, parents. We have heard from various of the academic organizations and think tanks, both on the liberal side of this spectrum and on the conservative side of the spectrum. Interestingly enough, a paper was recently published on this field, authored by Andrew Rotherham of the then Public Policy Institute, a very liberal think tank. Here is what he said in the section of his paper on the subject of teacher quality, class size, and student achievement: Now a part of Title VI of ESEA, President Clinton's $1.2 billion class-size reduction initiative, passed in 1998, illustrates Washington's obsession with means at the expense of results and also the triumph of symbolism over sound policy. The goal of raising student achievement is reasonable and essential. However, mandating localities do it by reducing class sizes precludes local decision-making and unnecessarily involves Washington in local affairs. That describes perfectly the proposal before us right now: Washington, DC, knows best. This criticism was written by a scholar at a liberal think tank on education. But, interestingly enough, that scholar has now left the Public Policy Institute and works as President Clinton's Special Assistant for Education Policy today. His study is on our side of this issue, not on the side of this issue presented by the previous amendment. I was disturbed by the way in which the bill came before us because essentially the bill says that if we don't pass authorizing legislation for this particular program, the schools lose the $1.2 billion. I believe, as does the committee that reported this bill, we should be providing our schools all across the United States with more means to provide quality education for their students. So I really think in the debate over my amendment that at least we ought to secure a unanimous vote, whatever the views of Members on the amendment by my colleague from the State of Washington, because the amendment that is now before you, which I have offered, simply says that if Congress does not authorize this program by June 30 of next year, the schools will get the money anyway for any valid educational purpose, and they will get it in exactly the same dollar amount in every single school district in the country that they would have gotten had the Murray amendment passed and had we authorized the program she proposes. But what is the big difference? The big difference is that in the Murray amendment we are telling every one of 17,000 school districts in the United States that we know better than they do what they need in order to provide education for their students. Somehow or another, an immense ray of wisdom has descended on 100 Members of this body who know more about the needs of a rural district in North Carolina, more about the needs of New York City, more about the needs of 256, I believe it is, school districts in my own State, more than the men and women who have been elected school board members in each one of those school districts, more than the superintendents they have hired to run their schools, and more than the principals who preside over each of their schools or the teachers in those schools or the parents in those districts. That is not a supportable proposition. That is not a supportable proposition. Obviously, the needs of school districts vary from place to place across the country. Obviously, there are thousands of school districts that already have ideally low class sizes and have other urgent needs for the improvement of the performance of their students. I am convinced that when we get to the debate over the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, we are going to make profound changes in an act that has had wonderful goals for decades and has largely failed to meet those goals. I am convinced that one of the principal reasons those goals have not been met to anything like the extent we would wish is the fact that we are telling all of the school districts how to spend the money on literally hundreds of different programs. I have a better idea, I am convinced, than even this amendment I proposed here today--the idea that we allow States to take a large number of these Federal programs and spend the money as they deem fit, with just one condition, that one condition being that the quality of education be improved as shown by testing students by their actual performance. Let me go back again to this critique by Mr. Rotherham: ``Illustrates Washington's obsession with means at the expense of results''--``means at the expense of results.'' In one amendment here today, we are saying to every school district in the United States: Here is what you have to do with respect to the structure of your schools. We are telling them nothing about what they have to do from the point of view of the performance of their students. But when we get to the debate on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, we will have that opportunity to go from a set of Federal programs for which the school district becomes eligible by filling out forms and meeting requirements set out here by the Congress of the United States or the U.S. Department of Education to one that says: Use your money to improve student performance, and if you do, if you keep on using it that way, you can keep on using it that way, but that is the only condition--provide a better education. As an interim step, my proposal says if we don't agree on some of the proposals here, we are still going to trust you, Mr. and Mrs. member of the school district boards, and all of the professional educators, all of the men and women, the hundreds of thousands, millions of men and women in the United States who are dedicating their entire careers to education to being able to do the job. Earlier this spring, when we came up with the proposition--that we passed last year without debating it--of a program that created a tremendous amount of awkwardness in half of our school districts because they couldn't hire a single teacher with the money, the associate executive director of the State school directors association in my State of Washington wrote this to us: At some point elected officials in Washington, DC, simply must trust local education officials to do what is in the best interests of the kids in their community. We all have their best interests at heart. Yesterday and this morning, all we heard from the other side of the aisle was that if we don't pass that previous amendment from my colleague, the 30,000 teachers who have been hired in the last year will all be fired and they will all be out on the street. We heard that from Member after Member on the other side. If we do it my way, each of these schools districts will have the same number of dollars. Are they going to hire teachers with it? Do we have so little confidence in the ability of our schools to set their own priorities that 30,000 teachers will be out on the street? If we did, it would be because it was the unanimous opinion of school districts across the country that this wasn't the right way to spend money on improving education. I expect that most of the money will continue to be spent on teachers--a very large amount. But it will be a little more in one district and a little less in another because each one of them will have different needs and different priorities. No. Between these two ideas this is a great gulf. Each of us, I guess, has a strong ego, and humility is not a virtue widely practiced in the Congress of the United States. However, it doesn't take a great deal of humility to say maybe the teachers in my State know more about education than I do; maybe our principals and superintendents know more about running their school districts than we do; maybe the elected school board members who run for just that office and are in the communities and are working with the parents know a little bit more about what their schools need in 17,000 different school districts across this country than do 100 Members of the Senate. Members who vote for that other amendment will be saying: We know what's best; you don't. We know what's best. Do it our way. It's the only way to do it. Those who take a different philosophical point of view will say: Let's provide our schools with the tools to do the job, but let's let them determine how to do the job. Beyond that, my own amendment ought to unite us. We certainly ought to assure the money goes to the schools, and then when we have that week-long or 2-week-long debate this winter and decide how much Federal control we are going to impose, whether we are going to begin to provide more trust, the money will be there; it will be guaranteed to each of the school districts. But we don't need to do it here and now in a relatively brief debate. We do not need to say we know better than they do what their students need. Guarantee the money for our schools through this amendment, guarantee our schools can set their priorities through their own professional educators, through their own parents, their own often amateur members of the school board, without our having to tell them how to spend every dollar. I believe we should vote in favor of this amendment and against the other.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, in the beginning of his remarks, the Senator from Massachusetts said the Senator from Missouri, not having read the Murray amendment, made a factual error. I regret to say the Senator from Massachusetts, obviously, has not read my amendment when he stated it allows 15 percent to be used for administration and not go to teachers. In fact, the distribution formula under the Gorton amendment is identical to the distribution formula under the Murray amendment.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the majority leader, Senator Lott, be added as a cosponsor of my amendment.

Mr. GORTON. I yield 10 minutes to the Senator from Alabama.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, it is remarkable how a relatively short amendment and even debate can be misconstrued. The amendment we have before us that will be voted on in about 30 minutes is less than 10 full lines long. Twice, the senior Senator from Massachusetts has said that it authorizes the States to take 15 percent of the money for administrative purposes, in spite of having been corrected after the first mistake. In fact, in clear English, it states that the distribution will be for school districts in exactly the same form as would be the distribution under Senator Murray's amendment. I don't believe Senator Murray's amendment allows 15 percent to be taken out by the States for administrative expenses. Neither does mine. That is one point that has been made on the other side during the course of the debate. Another--very recently by the junior Senator from New York, and by others--speaks of the tremendous waste and abuse in the use of this money for football teams and the like, which seems to be the inevitable consequence of trusting elected school board members to manage their own schools. A few years ago when we began this debate I made a remark that I repeat now. How is it that voters who are so wise as to choose us to represent them in the Senate will be so foolish and so stupid as to choose school board members in their own communities who will take any money we give them and throw it away on frivolous, noneducational purposes if we allow them to run their own schools? No one has answered that question. Yet this entire debate on the other side of the aisle has been taken up by Members who either implicitly or often explicitly, as is the case with New York, are willing to state that they know more not only about the schools in their own States but the schools in the other 49 States as well, and unless we tell every one of the 17,000 school districts in the United States of America precisely how to spend their money, they will waste that money. More than 90 percent of the money spent on schools in the United States is spent by States and local school districts. Unless the proposition is that all of that money is wasted, that our whole system is so dysfunctional that we should abolish school districts, abolish elected school board members and simply run all of our schools from Washington, DC, unless that is the argument, the proposition on the other side arguing against my amendment simply falls by its own weight. As I said earlier, I think the proposition proposed in the Murray amendment is clearly debatable. It wasn't debated last year. It was poked in a huge omnibus bill at the end of the session, unknown to most of the Members of both Houses of Congress. It has been debated for a total of 3 hours today. It needs to be debated against other competing ideas of at least equal and I think greater merit when we debate renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act sometime during the winter of next year. Perhaps by that time, with various ideas spread out, we can do a better job. The Murray amendment, in order to breach one of our rules, has had to be written in an awkward fashion. It is an authorization but it is an indirect authorization. It deserves much more serious consideration than we are giving it this afternoon. It deserves debate against much more serious and broad ranging ideas. It does seem to me, however Members vote on it--and Members who don't trust local school districts and think superintendents are incompetent, who believe that principals and teachers don't have the interests of the kids they are educating in mind, can certainly vote to tell them exactly how to spend this money by voting for the Murray amendment-- even those Members ought to vote for my amendment because mine simply says if we don't adopt the Murray amendment or don't adopt something similar to the Murray amendment between now and the 30th of June of next year, the school districts will get the money in any event, and it is only in that ``any event'' they will be able to use it for any educational purpose they deem appropriate for the improvement of their students. If both amendments are defeated, the schools may forfeit the money entirely. I trust Members on the other side will at least be objective enough to agree to the proposition that we ought to adopt my amendment unanimously and then determine whether or not this is the time, without any real debate, to say we have to have one more program added to the literally hundreds we already have on the statute books of the United States, all of which are for precise, single purposes, each of which implicitly or explicitly says we don't trust our professional educators and our parents to know how to set the priorities for their own schools. I firmly believe in the proposition we should provide that trust permanently through the amendment I offer. My amendment doesn't do that permanently; it only uses it as a backup. We will debate a more sophisticated version of it later this year or early next year. Between sides, there is a great gulf. That gulf is between those who believe people at home are professional educators, are elected school board members who do care about the kids they are teaching and do know what those kids need, and those who believe, unless we operate as a super school board, unless we adopt the assumption we know far more than they do about education, that education will not be provided.

Mr. GORTON. Yes.

Mr. GORTON. I ask for the yeas and nays.

Mr. GORTON. Are the yeas and nays ordered on my amendment?

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, the amendment that I have before you and which will be voted on in a few minutes is extraordinarily simple both to understand and in its undertaking. It says that the $1.2 billion the chairman of the subcommittee and his ranking member have generously put in this bill, subject to the authorization of a specific teachers program, will nonetheless be available to the school districts of the country if we do not come up with a specific authorization of that very specific and prescriptive program, one, the merits of which as against trusting school districts, I find somewhat dubious. It should be a slam-dunk vote for every Member of this body, and yet immediately after I last spoke on this issue, the senior Senator from Illinois said if we do not adopt the Murray amendment, 27,000, 29,000, 32,000 teachers who have been hired under the teachers program in the last year will all get pink slips. It is hard to think of a more bizarre argument. Under my amendment, every school district will get every dollar it has gotten in the present year that is used to hire teachers. The only rationale for firing a single one of those teachers would be that the teacher was unneeded but that the school district had the money, could not use it for any other purpose because of the wisdom of the Members of the Congress of the United States and felt that there was an infinitely more important use for that money. If that is the case, if thousands of teachers are going to be fired, it shows that the program was the wrong program in the first place and should never have been passed. If the teachers program is justified, the teachers will stay on the payroll whether Senator Murray's amendment is adopted or not as long as my amendment is adopted. They are on the horns of a dilemma: either they pass a foolish and unneeded program that would otherwise be rejected by every school district in the country, or they can reach their goals through my amendment, as well as through their own, and then debate at a later time under more thoughtful circumstances, as both the Senator from Pennsylvania and the Senator from Vermont pointed out, the whole idea of how much direction we must impose on our school districts when we deal with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act 2, 3, or 4 months from now. But the fundamental difference between these two approaches is very simple. Their approach is: The people who run our schools don't know what they are doing and will waste money and will do it wrong unless we tell them, down to the last detail, how to set their own priorities. Their belief is that parents and teachers and principals and superintendents--those three sets of professionals who have devoted their entire lives to the education of our kids--and elected school board members, who go through campaigns, the way we do, because they care about their schools, do not really care or are too stupid to know what their students need and that one set of rules, applicable to New York City and the most rural district in South Carolina, is the only way we can provide appropriately for the education of our children. That is an argument that is not only perverse; it is false and erroneous on its face. Let us admit that there may be people in the United States who know more about the education of their own children in their own communities than do 100 Senators. We should adopt the amendment that I have proposed. We should defeat the Murray amendment. We should have the debate on a broader scale at a later, more appropriate time, not in connection with an appropriations bill that urgently needs to be passed by tomorrow so we can actually get this money to the schools so they can educate our children and do a better job in the future even than they have done in the past. I guess I cannot yield back the remainder of our time. It is controlled by the Senator from Pennsylvania. Mrs. MURRAY addressed the Chair.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I yield such of the Republican time to myself as I may use. And for the information of the Senator from Nevada, I believe I may be the last speaker on this side, and I have been instructed, unless someone else on this side comes to speak later, when I have finished, to yield back the remainder of our time, and we will vote then, which probably means a vote before 5:30.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, yesterday in this Chamber, I was engaged in what I believe was a debate on a fantasy. The minority party spent a great deal of time debating two resolutions on education, one proposed by their side and one proposed by our side, with the resolution proposed by their side based on the proposition that Republican appropriations bills were going to reduce the amount of money spent on education from last year by some 17 percent. That resolution was long and detailed, and ``17-percent cut,'' ``17- percent reductions'' appeared all the way through it. I say this was a fantasy debate because by the time the debate began, every member of the Appropriations Committee knew that not only was education not being reduced in the Republican proposal but it was being rather significantly increased, in fact, being increased by some $500 million more than the amount for education recommended by President Clinton in his budget at the beginning of this year. So there was the exercise of a process of beating a dead horse for at least an hour on the other side of the aisle before we voted on our respective proposals. There was a significant second difference in that debate over education that was not a fantasy and was not beating a dead horse because the Democratic proposal was that we do more of the same thing that we have been doing the last 30 years with respect to our Federal involvement in education, without any particular or notable success, while we on our side were proposing not only that we focus more of our attention in dollars on education but that we begin to trust the parents and professional educators and principals and superintendents and elected school board members across the United States of America to make the decisions about the education of their children, which they have devoted their lives to doing, rather than making all of these decisions and saying that the same rules should apply to a rural district in North Carolina as apply to an urban district in Massachusetts. That is a real debate. It is a debate which I suspect we will be engaged in tomorrow when we take up the appropriations bill for Labor- Health and Human Services, and it is a debate in which we will be engaged in, in an even more spirited fashion, when we come up to the renewal of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. But in the course of the last hour, it seems to me, we have been engaged in another fantasy debate. The minority leader, and several of his members, have been on the floor making a number of statements that have very little relationship to the reality that is before us at the present time. They said, among other things, that they were cut out of the debate on a budget resolution. They were not. They voted against a budget resolution, not on the grounds of its spending policies but because they were vehemently opposed to any tax relief for the American people, tax relief which we desired to give to the American people. At one level, we won that debate. We passed significant tax relief for a wide section of the tax-paying people. It has been vetoed by the President. So at that level, at least, they ultimately won. That money will come to the Treasury of the United States and will stay in the Treasury of the United States. But they also said, now that they got their way, now that there was no 17-percent reduction in spending on education--always a fantasy--now that we are spending so much, we are raiding the Social Security trust fund. I am here to say these appropriations bills do not eat into the Social Security surplus. They do, in fact, eat into some of the non- Social Security surplus, not only for the year 2000 but probably for the year 2001 as well. But they are within the estimates of those non- Social Security surpluses in the years in which all of the moneys in these appropriations bills will, in fact, be spent. That criticism, that we are raiding the Social Security trust fund, while it has no statistical validity, would at least have a certain degree of moral caution attached to it had we, during the course of the last several weeks, in debating appropriations bills, heard from a single Member of the other side that we were spending too much. But we did not hear that at all. In fact, an hour or so ago, when the Appropriations Committee was approving this large bill for Labor and Education and Health, the only significant Democratic amendments were to spend more money, without any offsets whatsoever. So the cries that somehow or another we are breaking caps that that side did not want to break or that we are raiding the Social Security trust fund by spending too much money are in direct contradiction--as rhetoric--to the actions that, in fact, have taken place by the minority party, which consistently has said, if anything, not that we are spending too much money this year but that we are spending too little. I have no doubt that within a few days the President of the United States, backed by many Members on that side, will say; yes, we need to spend even more money. If the President vetoes some of these bills, his veto will likely be based on the fact that we are not spending enough. And, in fact, he will ask us to increase taxes, having vetoed the opportunity to provide some tax relief for the American people. Finally, we have heard complaints about the fact that we have not yet completed all of our work on appropriations bills. That is true; we have not. In fact, in the last 20 or 25 years, we have only done that on one occasion. If, however, within 2 days, we complete action on the 13th and last of these appropriations bills, at least the Senate will have passed its versions of all of these bills before the end of the fiscal year. I had to manage one of those bills, one of the smaller of the bills, the one dealing with the Department of the Interior and other similar agencies. While it was spasmodic and interrupted by debate on other matters, we began the debate on that bill in the first week of August and ended it last week. Why did it take so long? Because one single amendment literally was filibustered by a Member on the other side of the aisle--unsuccessfully, as it turned out--delaying the passage of that bill by a good 2 weeks, and making it certain that--just physically--we cannot settle our differences with the House, modest though they are, in time to send such bill to the President of the United States by the day after tomorrow. Nor has this Senator noticed that Members of the other party were not consulted or did not participate in the drafting of all of these appropriations bills. The overwhelming bulk of them in this body-- perhaps not in the House of Representatives--were drafted in a collegial and bipartisan fashion by the Appropriations Committee and were supported by most of the members of both parties in almost every single instance. Three or 4 hours ago, we passed a final conference report on the energy and water appropriations bill by a vote of 96 to 3. Mr. President, does that sound like a partisan exercise in the deliberations in which one of the parties was excluded? The Senate version of the Interior bill passed last week, if memory serves me correctly, by a vote of something like 87 to 10. I pride myself, as the chairman of that appropriations subcommittee, in consulting with members of both parties, listening to their priorities, and meeting their priorities to the maximum possible extent. It was in no way a partisan exercise. Last Friday, a much larger and more controversial bill on the Veterans' Administration and the Department of Housing and Urban Development was passed by a voice vote. No one even bothered to ask for a rollcall because agreement on that bill was so widespread. Yes, it is too bad we have to pass a 3-week continuing resolution at the present time. It is too bad there are differences between the House and the Senate. It is too bad there are such disagreements between the President and the Congress. That is the way we arrive, in a society such as this, at appropriate answers to all of these questions. It is a long way from being unprecedented. With any luck, this year, we won't have one agglomeration, one huge bill that no Member understands at the end of this process, but we will deal with 13 individual appropriations bills for determining the priorities of the United States. Tomorrow, we will once again be engaged in a debate on education, among other subjects. I hope that debate will be more realistic than the debate that took place yesterday, that had no relationship to reality whatsoever, in connection with the basis for the Democratic resolution on the subject. I hope it will be on a serious subject matter, not just of the amount of money we in the United States are going to devote to education-- though that is vitally important, and this bill is quite generous in connection with it--but on the way in which that money ought to be spent. It ought to be spent in a way that increases the student performance of the children in the United States in our schools through grade 12 all the way across the board. We ought to have the imagination to revise a system that has not been a notable success by any stretch of the imagination and go forward to a new system that looks not at forms to be filled out by school districts all across the country, not at the presumed wisdom of 100 Members of this body, many of whom seem to think they know more about education than the professionals who deal with it every day, but one that trusts in the genius of the American people and the dedication of the American educational establishment to make their own decisions in communities all across the United States of America about what may very well be the most important of all of our social functions--the education of the generation to come. With that, Mr. President, I yield the floor.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I rise to support the energy and water development appropriations conference report. Within this bill is funding for a critical effort that is essential to the long-term future for citizens of the Northwest: the cleanup and restoration of the Hanford site in the State of Washington. The citizens near the Hanford area played a major role in the Nation's successful effort to win the cold war. Now it is the responsibility of our Federal Government to conduct environmental remediation so that the site will not threaten the health of future generations. This bill appears to fully fund the cleanup effort based on the priorities presented in the administration's February budget request. One unresolved Hanford-related concern pertains to the Fast Flux Text Facility (FFTF). This is one of the world's premier research reactors, and last month the Secretary of Energy made the right decision to proceed with an Environment Impact Statement (EIS) on future missions for this facility. The FFTF holds the potential to create a sufficient and dependable source of medical isotopes used to cure cancer; it can also meet the needs of a variety of other missions, including the production of needed material for deep space missions. In the administration's budget request, an inadequate amount of funding was requested for the FFTF. Subsequently the Secretary's decision to proceed with an EIS will require additional funds to complete this necessary analysis. I call on the Secretary to address this situation immediately so that the necessary reprogramming of funds can be approved expeditiously, something he has not yet done. This conference report also wisely deletes or fixes several provisions that were attacks on the Power Marketing Agencies generally and the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) specifically. Report language asks BPA to report on fish and wildlife costs that will be incorporated within the upcoming BPA rate case. The timing of this request is awkward as it calls for a report prior to the end of the rate case; I request that BPA only make this report if it has no negative consequences on the rate case process. Another area of concern pertains to the solar and renewable energy portion of this report. Due to budget restrictions, the amount of funding available for this program is less than ideal. Not only has this area of energy development seen recent dramatic breakthroughs in cost-effectiveness, it holds great promise for developing nations and emerging economies. My State of Washington is home to many of the Nation's leading solar and renewable energy companies and projects. I hope we will be able to give greater emphasis to this program next year. On this subject, the conference report also references a specific appropriation to develop a materials center pertaining to photovoltaic energy systems. I hope the Department of Energy is aware that Washington State University has been leading an effort--along with 14 other top-tier universities and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory--specific to this area of research. DOE should proceed with these efforts in a competitive process, allowing the WSU-led consortium to remain under serious consideration for leading this area of research.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, the Washington Post printed an article last Sunday about a group of WWII veterans returning to the beaches of Normandy to share stories and remember fallen brothers. It was yet another reminder of the closing window of opportunity historians have to glean first-hand accounts from the generation of men and women who lived through the Great Depression, fought in WWII and came back to build America into the greatest power of health and wealth in the world. The Washington Post wrote: ``World War II veterans are dying at a rate of more than 1,000 a day. `It's the equivalent to a library burning down every day,' said National Guard Maj. Gen. Gene Krase.'' This week I'm presenting my Innovation in Education award to a group of students and educators in Wenatchee, Washington who are working to preserve the oral testimonies and first-hand accounts of the men and women who make up what some have called our greatest generation. Allison Agnew's 11th grade Honors English class at Eastmont High School began the Honor By Listening program last year, which pairs each student with an elder in the Wenatchee valley to document his or her personal history. After the student recorded and transcribed oral testimonies, they wrote out each story in narrative form. Businesses and leaders in the community support the process. Representatives from the North Central Washington Museum gave the students lessons on interviewing techniques and how to transcribe oral histories. Local librarians, attorneys, and business leaders joined educators to help the students edit their narratives. Materials and funds for publishing the final product came through donations from local businesses. It was a marvelous community effort. Incidentally, one of my own staff members, Don Moos, has volunteered countless hours of his time to help connect students with potential interviewees. Don himself is a veteran who fought in the European theater during World War II. In fact, he won a Purple Heart in the Battle of the Bulge, but I have yet to hear his whole story though we have been friends for years. I look forward to reading about his experiences. This year the junior class at Eastmont will continue the program. It already has obtained a list of 200 possible candidates to interview this fall. I am proud of the efforts these students are putting forth to not only learn about, but to preserve, the rich heritage of Washington State. It is efforts like these that convince me I am heading in the right direction with my Straight A's bill. If we give educators the freedom and flexibility to meet the unique needs of their students, while providing them with a system of accountability for the results, we will see more innovative programs like this one. Mr. President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Madam President, I thank the Senator from Arkansas for his eloquent comments. I am honored to be a part of a partnership with him and with the distinguished Senator from Maine, who now occupies the chair, in proposing a set of reforms on the way in which the Federal Government relates to education in the United States that emphasizes student achievement and a higher quality of education, as against a number of categorical programs where school districts become eligible simply by filling out the right forms and spending the money in the way the Secretary of Education tells them to spend the money, without regard to student achievement and without regard to the priorities set by elected school board members and superintendents and principals and teachers and parents all across the United States. This afternoon, we are going to vote on two distinctly different approaches to education--a proposal by the minority leader and a proposal by the majority leader. The proposal by the minority leader beats a dead horse. It starts from the proposition that we are to reduce the amount of money we spend on education by some 17 percent, when later on this afternoon--at 6 o'clock--the subcommittee in charge of appropriations for education, in fact, will pass an appropriations bill that not only increases the amount of money we spend on common school education in the United States but increases it by more than the amount requested by the President of the United States in his budget. That is a true commitment to education. The Democratic proposal ignores the proposition that the President's budget, in fact, lessens the amount of money available for special needs students and education for the disabled; that it reduces very substantially the amount of money for impact aid to those school districts that are greatly impacted by a Federal presence in national parks or forests or military installations; in fact, the proposal before us from the minority leader, ignoring the responsibilities the Federal Government has already undertaken in education, simply talks about new programs, the great advantage of which is that they are titled with names either of the President or of present members of the minority party. It does seem to me that even if we are working within the present system, we would be far better off financing those undertakings which the Congress and the President have already made than by beginning new ones, not particularly requested by the schools themselves, while leaving the financing of past programs to local entities, whether they regard them as the highest priority or not. But there are, as I think the Senator from Arkansas pointed out, two major differences in the philosophy of education of the two parties exemplified by these two resolutions. First, as I have said, the resolution by the minority leader speaks about a proposal that does not, in fact, exist. It talks about the fact that education spending will be reduced when, in fact, it will be increased by more than the amount the President requests. Now, the end of that resolution, of course, does say that we should spend more. Interestingly enough, however, it says we should spend more and take it out of other spending programs without breaking the so- called budget caps. That is an interesting proposition but one that would require genuine magic to accomplish. This body has already passed every appropriations bill, except that which includes education. It is on the basis of the passage of those bills that the minority leader comes up with this proposition that we will cut spending for education. I cannot remember a single member of the other party voting and speaking against a single one of these appropriations bills on the grounds that it spent too much money. As a matter of fact, the great majority of them voted for each one of these bills that brings us into exactly this situation. Yet they state, with alarm, the fact that we would reduce this amount of spending, saying we should not do it; we should spend more money; we should not break the caps; we should take it out of something else--something they have already voted for. Well, we are, in fact, going to increase the amount of money we are spending on education. But we should do it--and this is the second great difference between the two resolutions--in a way that actually improves the quality of education of our young people, measures it in an objective fashion--actual student achievement. The other side proposes not only more programs that have not dramatically had that impact, but they would like a half a dozen new ones in addition--all categorical aid programs--decided here in Washington D.C., all one-size-fits-all for every school district in the country. The proposal of the Presiding Officer, myself, and others is a very simple one. We believe the people who spend their lives educating our children, and who have dedicated their lives to educating our children, might just possibly know more about what they need than do Members of this body or bureaucrats in the U.S. Department of Education. We say, let's take 12, 21, or 24 of these present programs, and let any State which guarantees that it will use that money to improve student grade achievement do so for a period of 5 years and then be tested on one ground: Have students done better? Is the quality of the education they are getting improved by teachers, parents, principals, superintendents, and school board members who decide priorities? A rural district in Maine or an urban district in Washington or a suburban district in Pennsylvania will obviously have different priorities. That is our goal, and it is a goal that is finding agreement in our educational establishment, wherever the Presiding Officer goes in her State, or wherever I go in my State, or wherever any of us go. Our schools want to be liberated because it is their goal to provide better educational opportunities for the kids. They think they know what the kids and students need. It is as simple as that. We are fighting a phony battle today because, in fact, we are going to increase the amount of money available for education. But it will do us little good unless student achievement is increased and improved upon. We can only do that by changing the system and trusting those who have devoted their lives to educating our children with coming up with the right answers by which to do so.

Mr. GORTON. I yield myself 10 minutes of the time on this side of the aisle.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent to speak for 5 minutes as in morning business.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the Committee on Foreign Relations be authorized to meet during the session of the Senate on Monday, September 27, 1999, during the first rollcall vote to hold a business meeting.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I move to reconsider the vote.

Mr. GORTON. Have the yeas and nays been ordered?