T. Gorton

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I send an amendment to the desk on behalf of Senator Chafee and ask for its immediate consideration.

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

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Yes. This amendment changes the one we talked about yesterday only in that it has the distribution of the amount of money going to title I based on the total number of eligible title I students in each district rather than the total of all students in each district.

Mr. GORTON. It would.

Mr. GORTON. This amendment provides $4 million to the Department of Labor for the administration of the welfare-to-work job training program authorized and funded in the recently enacted Balanced Budget Act of 1997. The administration had requested $6.2 million but the level was reduced in the amendment because of concerns raised by the Finance Committee. The additional funds are fully offsetted. The amendment has been cleared on both sides. I urge its adoption.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, on behalf of Senator Mack, I ask unanimous consent amendment No. 1090 be withdrawn.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I believe my friend and colleague from Vermont has stated the arguments on his side forcefully and eloquently and has illustrated, as I hope I have, the fundamental philosophical differences over this amendment, over any amendment that is even remotely similar to this. The Senator from Vermont believes that a large number of educational priorities ought to be set here in the Congress of the United States by the Secretary of Education and the people who work in his department. Certainly there is an appropriate theory in this country that that is true, that the U.S. Department of Education ought to be able to impose significant controls over State departments of education and even more detailed controls over every school district in the United States, and that in the absence of such requirements not only will money be wasted but the quality of the educational product will be depreciated, will be less. I don't know that there is much out there in the educational field that indicates any huge degree of success on the part of this top-down set of educational priorities. But nonetheless, it is possible to make such an argument. My argument, and this is where the Senator from Vermont and I disagree, is that I believe informed parents, informed teachers who are in the classroom every single day of their professional lives, informed and dedicated administrators and school board members, most of whom are elected to nonpaying jobs, not only have an interest in the quality of education that they supply to their children, their students, the young people in their community, but that they are better able to determine how the money they have from whatever source is spent toward those ends than can we here, or anyone in a Washington, DC bureaucracy. As a consequence, this amendment says get rid of the regulations that apply to the programs that are covered by it, distribute the money directly to the school districts that are providing education and let them spend it as they will. At one level, of course, that does bypass State education entities in order that they not spend any of the money or hold any of it back, but it does not prevent any State education entity from saying you have to instruct the mathematics, history, whatever they wish to do, to set a curriculum, much of which is set by the States. It just says with Federal money, the Federal Government is not going to tell you how to spend it. It is as simple as that. We are not talking about local governments. The phrase in this amendment is ``local education agencies.'' By and large, though not entirely, single-purpose school districts. To say what this really means is that people in these local communities will immediately take the new money and not spend it on education but do something else with it or provide property tax relief, in my view, evidences a great lack of trust in the fact that our citizens care about the education of their children. I think we know from all of the surveys in which we engage, from all the speeches we make, from all the people we listen to, that our citizens care very deeply about the education of their children, and to say if we do not force them to spend money in particular ways here in Washington, DC, they will not spend it at all, that they will ignore our kids, is without any evidence, in fact, in the real world. Much of this money is getting through to these school districts right now. I differ with the Senator from Vermont on how much we are talking about. We have not, by any of the changes of this amendment, taken out impact aid, disability education, or 50 percent of local education. They were never in the first version. With respect to title I, we have not taken it out. We just have a somewhat different distribution formula. The same number of dollars is involved now as when I first discussed it earlier. The point, roughly 85 percent of this money is somehow or another getting at least down to the State level at the present time. Added money that school districts will get will be the money we save in administration here and in State capitals. I am convinced it will all go into the education of our children. But the number of dollars, the additional dollars, even if they can be measured, will not be nearly as important as the removal of Federal regulatory detail. The Senator from Idaho described the situation in one of his districts, which I believe is pretty close to universal: 10 percent of the money comes from the Federal Government and 60 percent of the rules. That is a terrible imbalance. We would like to get rid of almost all of those 60 percent of the rules and power our school districts, power our teachers, and power our parents and see whether or not they cannot do a somewhat better job than the rather poor job we have done so far ourselves. I yield the floor. Amendment No. 1090 Withdrawn

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I see no overriding reason to extend this debate. I want to thank the large number of my colleagues who have come to the floor, many of them greatly to their inconvenience, during the course of this evening to speak in favor of my ideas, and the significant number who, at one time or another during the course of the last 3 days, have spoken on it at other times. I am prepared now to summarize the reasons for favoring the amendment, to defer to Senator Jeffords from Vermont, who will oppose the amendment, and perhaps take the opportunity to close very briefly and to announce, as I understand it, there is no further business to come before the Senate this evening except for a little wrapup which I will undertake. The Senator from Oklahoma spoke about a study that I believe was prepared by a very thoughtful Member of the House on the total number of Federal education programs, and the number approaches almost 800. He also spoke of almost $100 billion that were spent on these programs. That is a longer list and a larger amount of money than is involved in this amendment because, of course, it includes higher education, it includes preschool education, like Head Start, and it includes a number of education and training programs managed by departments other than the Department of Education. I think that many of those programs could be and should be equally integrated into the formula that I have posed here, but I simply lacked the ability to analyze each of those 760 or 788 programs. So what we have done is to take the principal kindergarten through 12th grade programs administered by the U.S. Department of Education, with the exception of the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, which we debated very thoroughly in the Senate a few months ago, impact aid and a few other programs which don't fit well into this formula, and to say that instead of continuing dozens of narrow, categorical aid programs to education, each managed by its own bureaucracy not just here in Washington, DC, but in State capitals and in school district offices all across the country, each with its own requirements, each presenting to school districts the risk that they may inadvertently spend some of the money on an educational purpose other than that outlined in the statute, and consolidating all of them into one appropriation which will total something over $11 billion and stating that once each State has received the net amount of money that it would get under present law, that all of the money will be distributed not to State education agencies, but to local school districts on the basis of the number of students each of those school districts serve, with some slight preferences for school districts in poorer States and with the changes I have already described in title I. One of the goals of this amendment, Mr. President, is to see to it that our school districts get more money, and get more money they will, because close to 15 percent of all of the money that we appropriate at the present time stays in administration in Washington, DC, or close to Washington, DC. More of it sticks in our State capitals with the administrators of school programs in each of those States, not so much because the State capitals want to stick it there, but because they have to meet the multitudinous requirements in Federal statutes and regulations. And much more of it must be spent by school districts, not on education, but on complying with these hundreds of pages of statutory and administrative requirements. So if this amendment is adopted, school districts will have more money to spend on educating children in an aggregate amount of well over $1 billion, and I suspect probably $2 or $3 billion out of the $11 billion. But I think more important than even the extra money is the freedom that we will give to the people who are actually providing our children with their education: their teachers, with the contributions that come from active and concerned parents, the principals and other administrators of our schools, the elected school board members who almost, without exception, serve without pay. They will be empowered by this legislation to determine in each case how best to meet their educational goals, how best to meet standards imposed by the States or, in some cases, by the Federal Government, general standards of how well people should be educated, not detailed standards of how money should be spent. So, in summary, seeing my friend and colleague from Vermont here, I simply want to present the issue in these terms: Do we believe that fundamental educational policies and procedures are best determined by those who are closest to the students--their parents and teachers and administrators--or do we believe that those policies are best determined on the floor of this U.S. Senate or by the bureaucrats of the U.S. Department of Education? To the extent that we hold the latter belief, of course, this amendment is unacceptable. I don't think that that belief is warranted. I don't think it is shared by other than a relatively small minority of the American people. In a free country, in a free society, we trust the people, and that's exactly what this amendment proposes to do. Mr. JEFFORDS addressed the Chair.

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

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President I send a modification to the amendment to the desk.

Mr. GORTON. I make that request.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. I ask unanimous consent that the Judiciary Committee be discharged from further consideration of Senate Resolution 111, and the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

Mr. GORTON. Senator Thurmond has an amendment at the desk. I ask for its immediate consideration.

Mr. GORTON. I ask unanimous consent the amendment be agreed to, the resolution as amended be agreed to, the preamble be agreed to, as amended, the amendment to the title be agreed to, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and any statements relating to the resolution appear at this point in the Record.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. I ask unanimous consent S. 1124 be discharged from the Judiciary Committee and referred to the Labor Committee.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. I ask unanimous consent Senate Concurrent Resolution 49 be discharged from the Governmental Affairs Committee and be referred to the Rules Committee.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I now ask for a second reading of the bill and object to my own request.

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, on behalf of the Democratic leader, I understand that there is a bill at the desk introduced by Senator Daschle, and I ask for its first reading.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, in accordance with the consent agreement, tomorrow morning there will be 30 minutes of debate remaining on the Teamsters amendment, to be followed by 30 minutes of debate on the testing issue. Following that debate time, at approximately 10 a.m., there will be a series of four stacked rollcall votes, including final passage of the Labor-HHS appropriations bill. Following those votes, the Senate will begin debate on the FDA reform bill. In addition, additional votes are expected during Thursday's session following the ordered votes which begin at approximately 10 a.m. I thank my colleagues for their attention.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that when the Senate completes its business today, it stand in adjournment until the hour of 9 a.m. on Thursday, September 11. I further ask that on Thursday, immediately following the prayer, the routine requests through the morning hour be granted and the Senate immediately resume consideration of S. 1061, the Labor-HHS appropriations bill, as under the previous order.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. I ask unanimous consent the bill be read the third time and passed, the motion to reconsider be laid upon the table, and any statements relating to the bill appear at this point in the Record.

Mr. GORTON. I ask unanimous consent the Senate now proceed to the consideration of S. 1161, introduced earlier today by Senator Abraham.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. As in executive session, I ask unanimous consent the nomination of Espiridion A. Borrego, of Texas, to be Assistant Secretary of Labor for Veteran's Employment and Training, sent to the Senate by the President on September 2, 1997, be referred jointly to the Committees on Labor and Human Resources and Veterans' Affairs.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. I ask unanimous consent that report 105-65 which accompanies S. 542 be star printed with the changes that are at the desk.

Mr. GORTON

Mr. GORTON. I ask unanimous consent there now be a period for the transaction of morning business with Senators permitted to speak for up to 5 minutes each.