Pete Hoekstra

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I thank the gentleman for his comments. He points out some statistics that tell us we need a meaningful dialogue on education because our kids are not getting the kind of results that we would like them to be achieving and the kind of results that we need for them to be able to be successful in a world economy. I think my colleague from Colorado had a few statistics of his own, and we will get to our colleague from North Carolina, because I know what he wants to talk about and we will get there. But I think my colleague from Colorado had some statistics, again, that talk about the less than satisfactory results we are getting out of our educational system today.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman will yield, I do not think anybody in this Chamber will be satisfied until we score No. 1. The evidence our colleague from Colorado has pointed out shows the issue is not money. We are spending more than most people around the globe and we are getting mediocre, unacceptable results. So the answer is not to pour more money into the system, but it is taking a look at where the money is going and taking a look at the system and how we make the system more effective. I want to yield to my other colleague from Georgia, and I appreciate his being here. This is wonderful tonight.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Does the gentleman mean 39 agencies dealing with education is too many in Washington?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I thank my colleague from Georgia. I do express my regrets that I was unable to be at the hearing. I think the gentleman has got some wonderful testimony. I find it interesting. It has been one of the most exciting projects I have worked on because we have been able to go around the country. We have been in California, we have been in Arizona, we were in Georgia, we are going to New York, we have done some things in Michigan, Milwaukee, Chicago, and we are learning about what is working on education. From what my colleague has told me, I did not catch the full impact, there are some that are blasting or taking some pot shots at a discovery process, finding out what is working when we obviously know that what we are doing today is not working, but there are some that are taking a real critical look at that.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I thank the vice chairman of the subcommittee for participating and sharing those comments with me and chairing the hearing in Georgia last week.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I yield to the gentleman from South Dakota.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I am not sure that we are even talking about the lowest possible cost. I think everybody here is willing to take a look. If we were getting exemplary results, we would not go through a cost reduction effort, and that is not the focus here, is saving a penny. The problem that we are facing today is the results that our kids are getting is not good enough and that is the number one priority.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I thank the gentleman for his comments. We really are going through a process where we are identifying what is working. We actually have developed what we call lessons in education. Some of the lessons we have learned as we have had hearings around the country are: Parents care the most about their children's education. They actually know the name of the teacher like the student does versus the bureaucrat that may be here in Washington. Good intentions do not equal good policy. We have seen that in Washington. Every time there appears to be a problem, we create a new program. The end result is 760 programs, 39 agencies. More does not always equal better. More money through the same failed system is not going to improve results. Education must be child-centered. Lesson number 5. When we spend more, we create more tax burden. Somebody has to come up with the dollars. It is our responsibility to make sure that we are getting the kind of results that we need. Mr. Speaker, I am going to move to my colleague from North Carolina. I cannot imagine what he wants to talk about, but he has been sitting there so patiently. I believe he may want to talk about one of the President's proposals.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. My colleague from Kentucky may want to jump in. The gentleman may want to just explain the hearing that we went to in Oklahoma.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. What does Davis-Bacon do? Maybe our colleague from Kentucky can explain exactly what Davis-Bacon does because it is important that people understand this concept. Then we can go back into what we found about paving machines doing concrete and all of these kinds of things.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman will yield, I think the gentleman clearly points out that we all do care about education. We have developed a kind of a monthly brochure or briefer here which we call A Tale of Two Visions, because there are at least two very different beliefs on how to move education forward in our country. I think we believe that moving decision-making and dollars back to the children, back to the parents, and back to the teachers is the way to go. There is another whole group of people here in Washington that believe in moving more power, authority, money into the buildings here in Washington, so that they can issue rules and regulations on ``how to'' to the local levels, and saying that parents and teachers and principals can be good teachers and good principals and good parents by reading manuals and saying this is what Washington wants you to do. That is not the vision that we have in mind, and I do not think that is the vision the gentleman heard in Georgia.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. The report was sent in, so on the report they outlined the wage scales that are paid or were paid to these workers on this project and for any Federal project or any project that had Federal dollars on it, these were going to be the wages that were going to be paid. So this was bogus information coming into Washington from the State of Oklahoma, and for any project now being constructed in Oklahoma that is the wage rate that was going to have to be paid. They tried to do the same thing in Kentucky.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. So with the process the gentleman from North Carolina has outlined, fraudulent data coming in is what can lead to excessive costs for further Federal projects.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. The gentleman from North Carolina will explain why that will happen with the school construction now. I thought we were helping the schools to get more bang for their buck.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If any of my colleagues could maybe answer the question. I mean if Washington does not set the wages for these projects, how would we actually find out the wages?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. It is kind of interesting what the woman has outlined. It is that would make the people in this building feel very uncomfortable because they do not believe that competitive bidding actually works in the construction industry. Even though we build huge buildings, construction projects, and we use it every day, for some reason the Federal Government does not believe that competitive bidding would work for us.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If we put in the prevailing wage provision without the people here in Washington determining the wages, we will lose, I say to the gentleman from North Carolina [Mr. Ballenger], anywhere from 10 to 20 percent, maybe more of the purchasing power. So this $5 billion, and it is going--I mean we will lose more than that because this is just a partial contribution to these projects, but the whole project will then be subject to Davis or to the prevailing wage law. My colleague from Colorado.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I thank my colleagues for participating tonight. We are going to continue this dialogue on education. It is a very important one. We are going to continue hearings. This President in many cases has the same vision of quality education for our children, the best educated kids in the world. We share that vision. I think where we separate and go down different paths is he believes the answer perhaps too often lies here in Washington where we believe the answer lies with parents, with teachers and a local classroom. I thank my colleagues for being here tonight.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. The poorest districts in the country will end up paying a premium for all of their construction costs and will actually end up, may end up, getting less bang for their dollar than if they had never gotten involved with the Federal Government in the first place. But sometimes the stuff looks just so enticing, and it makes great rhetoric. I think the gentleman from Colorado is absolutely right. We are not talking about the quality of education. We are talking about designing the best system of getting the financial resources to the child and to the classroom and the school construction program, and as with many of the other programs, one of our colleagues pointed out earlier, some of these programs take 21 weeks, not some, most of them on the average take 21 weeks, 216 steps, and even then you get an inflated price.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. This is all about using the taxpayers' dollars more effectively.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. My colleague from Colorado.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, tonight I am joined by a number of my colleagues to talk about what my other colleagues were talking about in the previous hour, and that is education. And rather than going through a long introduction, I want to start right off with a quote that the President of the United States made on March 27, 1996. This was in a response to the Governors Summit on Education: Education Excellence. And the President said, and I cannot agree with him more, ``We cannot ask the American people to spend more on education until we do a better job with the money we have got now.'' This is the President of the United States about a year ago. That remark, along with some of the debate in Congress in 1996, led the committee that I chair, the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, to begin a project, which we call education at a crossroads, to ask and to find out what are we accomplishing and achieving with the money that we are spending today. We started with a very basic question. We said, how many education programs are there? Went to the Education Department because, of course, in Washington we coordinate all of the education programs through one department. Wrong. We found out that they go through 39 different agencies. We have over 760 different programs, and we are spending over or in the neighborhood of $100 billion per year on education today. That is a very appropriate question to ask. It is the question that we must answer before we expand the 760. Actually, I think as we have worked on this, it is now over 780 programs, we now have to take a look at the 780 programs, the $100 billion that we are spending, the 39 different agencies that this money is flowing through, because the focus here should not be on an education bureaucracy. Our focus needs to be on the kids. Before we have 10 new programs with $50 billion of more spending, we need to take a look at whether and where this money is going and whether we are having an impact with it or not. We do not want to pour $50 billion through a broken system. Mr. Speaker, I have got some of my colleagues with me tonight to talk about this very issue. I would like to have one of my colleagues from Pennsylvania just briefly explain to us, we will have a dialogue, more of a dialogue tonight so that we can build off each other's comments about what is going on in education because we all have our own perspectives and our own learning about what is going on and we have got six of us here tonight. We will be able to share perspectives and learn from each other. Tomorrow my colleague from Pennsylvania is going to be introducing or announcing a resolution that I think gets at the very issue about doing some important work to find out the kind of impact that we are having with the dollars today. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Pitts].

Mr. HOEKSTRA. My colleague from North Carolina can explain exactly how this happens. The process is we try here in Washington, some people, the gentleman and I have been to the building, I am not sure I can find it on here, but I think it is somewhere in this neighborhood over here. There is a person in a building over here, and a group of about 60, 80 people that are trying to determine pay rates for 40, 50 job categories in every county in America. What did we find in Oklahoma?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Let us listen to the President and understand what works and what does not before we add any new programs and ask the American taxpayer to spend more money. Mr. Speaker, I yield to the gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Norwood] who may have a comment.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, we have also had the opportunity to go around the country and have hearings. One of the first hearings we had was in California, where we had a number of the chief administrators from a lot of the colleges in California come and testify. What they told us is, do not cut remedial education. You are sitting there and you are thinking, this is higher ed, what are we teaching remedial education at higher ed for? And so we asked and we said, what are you teaching? They said, well, 25 percent of the students that we get coming into our universities, 25 percent, one out of four, cannot read or write at an eighth grade level. It is kind of like, the President is proposing America Reads, which is the tutors and all of that, and the, you take, you peal away a little bit in California and what you found is they left phonics, they went to whole language. Did not work. Got a generation of kids now that are scoring some of the lowest scores in the country. Nobody is taking a look at what is going on in the classroom where the kids are spending 6 to 8 hours per day, and we should be focusing on them. The message of the college administrators was, get back into the classroom. Do not ask for more remedial education money. Your job is to get back into the classroom and find out why those teachers that you have trained are giving such disappointing results with the kids that they are teaching all day. It is kind of like, get to the basics, get dollars in the classroom and local control.