Pete Hoekstra

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. And I think, you know, as we really take a look at how we help young people for those that select and believe that they want to go to higher education, I think that article points out that before we throw a lot more money and programs at some of this we need to take a look at the correlation and the dynamics between Federal spending and the cost of education. And it is kind of a complex issue, but we ought to at least have some hearings and have some debate and dialog on that to make sure that when we fund higher education programs and we are trying to help kids, that is exactly the result that we are going to have, and we do not fuel a price war in the wrong direction toward increased prices.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I have some very qualified staff people who have the opportunity to read these. But this Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance, you go to the section that is called Education, and this is all in fine print, and you read this, and you count them, and you find in this document that there are at least 660 education programs just under the Education title. You then go on to the Office of Management and Budget, and you ask them how many programs there are, and you go to the Congressional Research Service, and they say, ``Well, we think you maybe don't have all the programs,'' so they find about another 116 programs. Here is what the Congressional Research says, and the Department says: ``As is noted below, these counts do not include possible additions of education-related programs in the areas of foreign aid, educational or cultural exchanges bringing foreign citizens to the United States.'' They also go on to say that they cannot verify the completeness of this information. ``We are aware of no listing or other source of information on Federal education-related programs that is sufficiently comprehensive in detail to fully meet your needs.'' Remember, our need was a very simple question: How many Federal education programs are there? That was our need. They said there is not an exhaustive list. ``At the same time we are aware of no better source of this information than the CFDA,'' which is the big binder that I held up. So we know that, according to Government documents, there are well over 750, 760 programs that go through 39 different agencies and spend over $120 billion per year. What it means is that for a long time, Washington has been working on a program, and we are doing different lessons in education every week, but this is lesson No. 2, that we like kids, we care about kids in Washington, but we have designed a system that has given us this kind of mechanism and this kind of cottage industry. And this is two binders, OK? These are two big binders, and the title of this binder is Guide to Federal Funding for Education. And so what we have done is we have just developed layer on layer of education programs, and you know as the gentleman from Pennsylvania said earlier, we recognize we need to help kids. But when we put together this kind of process, and this tells you who to go to and how to apply for the grant and how to write your grant, and then there is an interesting thing in here that is called--what is this called? It is called the Funding Opportunity Rating System. The following system rates programs for most competitive, which is one star, to least competitive, which is five stars, to tell you that the feasibility and the probability of getting Federal funding, and what we have done is we have created a complex system that means we are friends at the IRS; you know, 110,000 plus are out there taking taxpayer dollars, taking dollars away from families. We design a complex system so that you have got to have these kinds of binders to find out exactly how to get the money. Then they go back to the classroom with all kinds of rules and regulations. The end result is we are going through this process, and we will find out more when we go to Pennsylvania and when we go to Georgia. Our expectation is that maybe only 65 or 70 cents gets to the child. That is not good enough.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. We are going to be coming to your States. What we are doing is we are working on a project which we call Education at a Crossroads: What's Working and What's Wasted. We have evidence that there are problems in education around the country, but we know that there has been a Federal response. It is kind of interesting. We have kind of gotten into a debate with how many programs are there really. Nobody can really tell us. Are there 500 programs? Are there 700 programs? We started this process a year ago and we went to this book, which is called the Catalog of Federal Domestic Assistance. This is one big book.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman will yield, in the same issue, the February issue of Tale of Two Visions, if my colleague from Georgia read on, he would know that we took care of the kitty litter. We also went on in the Federal Government to take care of rabbits. This gets to be interesting. The National Institutes of Health required one university to replace all of the school's rabbit cages. This carried a price tag of $250,000. We care about rabbits as much as we care about kitties. However, less than a year later, the Agriculture Department declared that the cages were the wrong size. The university had to once again replace the cages. We should feel really good that we have two agencies in Washington that are caring about rabbits. The frustrating thing is, I think, and the gentleman has talked about the sunset legislation for rules and regulations. There are a couple of other bills that have been introduced, one of which would require congressional review of rules and regulations before they actually go into effect, and I have introduced a piece of legislation. Can you imagine how frustrated this university was after they had just spent $250,000 on rabbit cages and another department came in and said, ``You've got to change it.'' We have said where you have got conflicting regulations, we have to provide an expedited way to review that and you are held harmless for following one set of guidelines when another agency comes in and tries to tell you that you did the wrong thing, so we protect the people in those cases.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. The key to this is, it is not that these rules or regulations are good or bad, I think they go too far. This is taxpayer dollars. This is why we have too many families in America today that are two-wage-earner families as a requirement, not by choice, not by option, to support these kinds of activities.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Well, this is exactly what we are talking about. I think our vision of education, the vision that we see, and you know the exciting thing about going around the country and in some cases going to some of the most troubled areas and some of the roughest areas in the country, education in many of those areas is working. There are entrepreneurs, there are strong, driven individuals, there are parents that are going in and they are making a difference. And you know this is our vision for education. Our vision for education is a child- centered approach where the programs that we have in place are focused on helping the child, they are empowering parents, they are recognizing the importance of teachers in this process, that it is a partnership with teachers and parents and the student coming together to help that child learn. You know, one of the exciting things about this is we have seen lots of innovations in getting to a child-centered education. Charter schools; we have got them in Michigan, we saw them in California, we visited them in Phoenix. And when we had our hearing in Phoenix, the National Education Association came out and said they are going to be doing four charter schools around the country. I think that is exciting. I think it is wonderful that the teachers' unions are accepting the challenge of charter schools which provide them a new flexibility to try to redesign and recreate what goes on in a school outside of the bureaucratic maze, and I am, you know, I am excited that they are taking that challenge because if anybody can work and design a good school, it should be teachers in the local community working with parents and designing what that community needs. I am looking forward to where they establish them. I am hoping and expecting that they will establish a charter school in the State of Michigan so that we can learn from their experience and their expertise. But the focus is this model right here along the bottom. It is parents focused on the student, it is teachers focused on the student, and the important thing is here the teachers know the name of the kids, the parents know the names of the kids; and it is an alternative to what the Washington Senate approach is, which is where we are today, which is at the end of the stream is the student, at the top of the stream is the bureaucrat. The bureaucrat does not know the name of the kids.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I thank the gentleman for yielding. That is exactly what we are doing with A Tale of Two Visions, and you know the earlier examples that we cited were examples of Government inefficiency, Government being asked to do things that maybe it could not do or that it should not do, and in the same issue of every edition of this newsletter we also publish success stories, nonprofits, individuals, private enterprise, churches going out and making a difference in their community so that people can get a sense of actually what is going on in the country.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. The system that I think we are looking forward to is developing and bringing back in balance a role for Government, highlighting the role that individuals can play, highlighting the role that private enterprise can play and highlighting the role, the responsibility of nonprofit faith-based types of organizations that American society where there is an equal balance between those four is when we really excel, and that when one of those becomes too dominant is when maybe we encounter most of our problems. And I think what we have seen over the last number of years is where the role of the Federal Government has gotten so big and where we are spending $1.6 trillion per year and we are $5, approaching $6 trillion in debt, and we are saddling our kids with interest payments of $258 billion per year. We are out of whack. You know when a two-wage earner family is a requirement and not an option, we are out of whack and we have got to bring that back into focus. I ask my colleague, and I know my colleague from Pennsylvania has a passion for higher education, and I ask my colleague if he saw this last edition of Time Magazine talking about the cost of higher education, whether you have had an opportunity to read that article?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman will yield, my subcommittee also has oversight on the Corporation for National Service, which is the parent corporation for AmeriCorps. There is debate about whether AmeriCorps works or whether it does not. I originally voted for the program, and as I have now had oversight over the program for the last 3 years, I have some questions about the program and exactly how it has worked, and it is working different than what I maybe anticipated it was going to do. There are two fundamental facts. Their books are not auditable, and we have known that for about 12, 18 months, that we really do not get a full accounting of where the money goes. We have had hearings on this and there has been some explanation that the corporation came together and it had some old programs with dirty books and they had to kind of clean those up, and they are getting there. But more disturbingly, within the last 10 days, the auditors have come out and said that their trust fund is not auditable, which means that there is not an integrity to the system that the scholarships for the kids that worked, that will actually be able to match up the scholarship money to the kids that actually did the work. So it is kind of disturbing that there is not that integrity in the system. I also wanted to build off on what my colleague from Pennsylvania is talking about, the tax deductibility for corporations to enable their employees to go to college. But in my State, it is important for them to get additional training, but it is also very important because being a huge automotive producing State, we need machinists, we need journeymen, and so we need the kids to go into the basic trades, which are great jobs, which certain kids have a great aptitude for and they love doing. I could not do it. My colleagues would not want to take a look at the parts that came off the machine after I spent a few hours on them. But we need those kids, because it is part of the heart of our industrial strength, is having the journeymen and the people talented and skilled in those areas. It is really an art, and so we need the flexibility and the programs that we design that say if you are going to go to a 4-year college, if you are going to go to medical school, or if you are going to go and be a journeyman, we are going to support you in getting that additional learning, because we need that full range and that full breadth of skills, and we need to empower young people to match the skills that they want to get with the love and the profession that they have a passion for, and we cannot use these Government programs to coerce them into doing something that maybe they would not do otherwise.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Anyway our colleague in the back might--1978 or 1979?

Mr. HOEKSTRA. The gentleman is correct.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I know we are running close to the end of our time, and I thank the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Fox], for taking the hour tonight. The gentleman from Georgia [Mr. Kingston] is absolutely right. We need to prepare our kids. But the bigger responsibility that we have is we need to prepare this country, which means I think that we have to carry forward on our vision toward getting a surplus budget and a government that can be funded by a one-wage-earner family, that a two- wage-earner family is an option, and that we get a government and we get it in a size and a scale that no longer sucks strength away from our families, but is in balance with what our families need. If we can do that, we will prepare the proper environment for our children to be successful.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, that is a wonderful idea, having a youth Congress for a week where maybe every Member of Congress has the opportunity to select one member to represent them in this youth Congress for a week, where we could define a range of issues, maybe two or three or four issues that we would like them to work on and debate for a week. The biggest fear that I would have is that at the end of the week, the American people might be more impressed with the youth Congress than what they are with us.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman will yield, we have two cats at home, and it is not too difficult to tell when you need to change the kitty litter. I am not sure we need a Federal regulation for doing it in public housing. I think in public housing they can tell as quickly as what we can at home about what happens.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. That is right. I think the Republican vision, I think Congress' vision for where we need to go with the budget is more than a surplus budget. For all we know the Soviet Union ran surplus budgets. I do not know what their budget was, but our vision is to get to a surplus budget, but a surplus budget that can be funded by a one-wage- earner family and not a requirement that we need two wage earners in the family to support this government and this bureaucracy in Washington. I think another key debate that we have as we work toward getting to a surplus budget is the whole question of whether new spending equals new tax burdens. One of the major things that we see in the budget that the President has presented to us, and that the gentleman and I are concerned about when we take a look at this budget, under the best of circumstances, the most optimistic economic assumptions, we believe that this budget barely comes into a surplus mode. But under a more realistic assumption, the most likely set of assumptions, this budget is still going to be $70 billion in the red in the year 2002. One of the primary reasons that this is happening is that this President has decided to move more power to this town by significant new increases in the number of programs that we have. This is not about slow growth and increasing the spending on Social Security because we have more seniors, or increasing the spending on Medicare because we have more seniors and those kinds of things. This is a conscious effort by this President to have an overlay of significant new programs on what we already have in Washington. I have taken a look at roughly the baseline between where the President is and where our conference may come out with a budget, and it looks like the President is somewhere between $250 and $300 billion above our baseline. The vast majority of that spending is new programs. There may be issues that we have to deal with, but when we have a $1.6 trillion budget, over 5 years we are going to spend $8 trillion, one would think that we could find, for new priorities, $250 billion out of that $8 trillion and just say there are some programs that we have had for years that are not working anymore, they are not as effective, we have a better way of solving the problem. Let us stop that program and move the money to this new priority rather than overlaying on what already exists. If this President would just be disciplined, and I think this is where I am, and the gentleman and I have not had the opportunity, but where I am, this Congress is going to have to be measured by the statement of ``Just say no.'' Just say no to new spending. If we just say no to new spending, if we kick the habit of new programs and new spending, we will be well on our way toward getting to a surplus budget without doing anything else. We can deal with tax cuts and those other kinds of things in the process, but what we talk about now, the biggest tax savings, the biggest reduction in tax burden to the American taxpayer is to stop the $250 to $300 billion of new spending that this President wants. I know exactly what we will do. We will not ask the American people to pay for it. We will put this $300 billion of new spending onto our kids and we will increase the debt and we will hope that we will get to a balanced budget or a surplus budget by the year 2002. This Congress should really say no to new spending until we get to a surplus.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank my colleague for yielding to me and for allowing us to really have this dialog this evening about the need for, and I have moved away from the term, I do not know what works for you, but I have moved away from the term ``balanced budget''. When you are talking about $1.6 trillion, $1.5, we will never get it into balance. In reality, we will either be at deficit or we will be at surplus. And I think it is important for us to move to a position where we are in a surplus budget and not in a deficit mode. I think the thing is, I had three town meetings over the weekend, and it really becomes an issue of talking about how we can save the American family, the traditional American family which over the last number of years has really come under attack. One of the biggest reasons that the American family has come under attack is that we develop a brochure which we call the Tale of Two Visions. It is a tale that has one vision which says our future is by growing Washington. And we use this and say, you know, the street that you and I cross each and every day when we come to the Capitol and we have the opportunity to vote is called Independence Avenue. And over the last number of years, it may have become more appropriate to call it Dependence Avenue. Because when you take a look down the street and you see who is lined up along that street, it is a whole series of Federal bureaucracies that have assumed control and power and tax dollars away from the American citizens and have moved it here to Washington. Last year, we together were engaged in a historic debate on welfare and moving control and power back to the States and the local level. And it appears in many ways that this welfare reform bill is working exceedingly well. So this is more of a story of getting to a surplus budget, but it is also very much a story of taking a look at problems that America faces and trying to design a more effective way to solve those problems. When we talk about the budget, some things that we talk about in our tale of two visions, the case for saving America's families, is that we move from what we call now a two-wage requirement back to where it is a one-wage earner. And that a two-wage-earner family is an option, it is not a requirement. Think about the number of families today that one of the parents might want to stay home, but they really believe that they have to go to work. The primary reason is one of them is working for Government and one of them is supporting the family.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, over the last few months we have been engaged in a process which we call Education at a Crossroads, visiting different parts of the country, visiting different school districts within my congressional district, getting feedback on the effectiveness, the quality, and the impact that Federal education programs have had. There has been some dispute about some of the findings that we may have received, but what we have been hearing consistently is that there is significant room for improvement in how the Washington establishment, how the Federal bureaucracy delivers programs to the classroom, how we help kids at the local level. A couple of weeks ago in Delaware, Bill Manning, the local superintendent of the Red Clay School District in Wilmington, DE, said he would rather see safe and drug free schools money go to academic programs of the district's choosing, asking for district flexibility. ``It is time to ask ourselves whether the time we take out of the classroom for drug awareness programs is time well spent,'' he said. He is looking for more flexibility to do for the kids in Wilmington, Delaware what they believe is most needed. Mr. Carper, the Democratic Governor of Delaware, said, We must free the schools of regulations. In California, Arizona, Delaware, we have heard time and time again that there are too many regulations associated with the hundreds of Federal programs that we have for education in America today. Marian Berguson, representative of Governor Wilson in California said, Federal requirements and dictates are stifling. That is not what we want in education at the local level. We want innovation; we want creativity, and we want results. Lisa Graham Keegan, Arizona State Superintendent, noted that 8 percent of Arizona's education money comes from the Federal Government and that easily more than 50 percent of the work in the State Department and in the school district is a result of receiving this 8 percent of their money. Ten percent funds versus 50 percent of the paperwork? It does not make sense to me. We are going to continue these hearings to get a better idea of exactly whether Federal programs are helping or whether they are hurting. What is working and what is wasted in education in America today. We are also engaged in another process. We are taking a look at somewhere in the neighborhood of 700, 800, maybe 900 Federal programs. There are some people who ask where do we come up with the number, and it is pretty tough because when we ask the executive branch they cannot give us one. But we went to a document which is called the Catalog of Federal and Domestic Assistance. For short, and this is about the only short thing there is associated with it, it is called the CFDA. It is, very simply, if we go to the section marked education and go through the pages we find out that this document, which lists all Federal grant programs, take a look at this, all Federal grant programs, and the title under education lists about 660 programs. We then went to the Congressional Research Service and said, ``They tell us there are 660 programs. What do you think?'' They went out and they came back and they said, ``There are probably more. We have identified a total of 116 programs that might be added to the 661 programs that you already have identified.'' That puts us well over 750 programs. They went on to say that we do not claim to have identified all Federal programs related to education, it is virtually impossible that this will be exhaustive, but we are aware of no better source of this information than the CFDA. So we know that there are the hundreds of programs. This is as we take a look and ask Federal agencies to identify it. We then go out and we take a look at outside sources. What do outside sources say that we have in Federal education programs? This is an independent, outside, small little cottage industry, the Guide to Federal Funding for Education, volume one and volume two. They mark it as saying there are over 500 programs receiving funding that approach education. As we begin a debate on who cares more about education and the impact that the Federal Government has on education, the most important question that we can ask before we do additional funding is what works and what is wasted. Is there not some money in these 700-plus programs, that go through 39 different agencies, that spend $120 billion, to fund some of the President's new initiatives? We do not need a new layer of programs. If we want some additional programs, now is the time to dig through these two binders, to go through this binder and say enough is enough, let us get reasonable, let us find out what works and what is wasted before we create any more programs.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, tonight I want to share with my colleagues a project that we have been working on for a number of months. We call it the Case for Saving America's Families. In this project, we are attempting to build a case for government that does only what government can and should do. Too often in Washington we have begun to ask Washington, this city, to do things that are better done at a State and local level and in many cases are better done not by bureaucracies and bureaucrats in Washington but are better done by families, by nonprofit faith-based institutions or by the private enterprise system. We have asked this city to make too many decisions that it is ill-equipped to make and that could be made much better in other parts of America. We have to look at this Washington bureaucracy. This street going down over on the right side used to be called Independence Avenue but if you take a look at the buildings that line that street, it is maybe an appropriate time to rename that street Dependence Avenue, because it demonstrates the dependency that the rest of America has developed on Washington, a dependency where we ask bureaucrats to take a larger role in raising our children, bureaucrats and bureaucracies taking a larger role in building our communities, bureaucrats taking a larger role in creating jobs. We have identified and we constantly are on the lookout for specific examples where we can identify what the Washington bureaucracy is doing, whether it is working or whether it is failing, where it abuses power, where it wastes money, where it does things which perhaps to the American citizen, the average citizen, actually makes no sense. We have begun a project of collecting these real life examples. These are things which the Washington bureaucracy actually do, and we compile these on a monthly basis. These are in your office; we send them to your office each and every month, and it is called, A Tale of Two Visions. The newsletter features actual examples of real life stories of what is happening in Washington and then compares and contrasts what Washington is doing to what successful entrepreneurs, successful individuals, and successful organizations are doing at the local level. It highlights the struggle that many Americans have with the Washington bureaucracy. Let me just highlight some of the examples that we have in our February issue, and again these are in your offices, where we highlight some things that Washington believes it is best at deciding and it believes that it is appropriate to use American taxpayer dollars to fund these kind of activities. As many of you know, we fund public housing projects around the country, and when we fund these projects it is only appropriate that Washington attaches strings to those dollars to make sure that the people who build those buildings build them to the codes that we want established and the criteria that we have established in Washington, that the people that manage those projects manage them the way that we want them to manage them, that the people who live in them live in them the way that we want them to live and that the pets that are in those public housing projects are treated with the dignity and respect that we want them to be treated with. So in 1996 our Secretary of HUD decided that we had to protect the pets in public housing because this was a national crisis and this is something that Washington had to be involved with. We developed rules regarding pet ownerships by elderly and disabled in public housing. Included in this, and this is section 5.350, paragraph 2, actual language from HUD, Washington saying people at the local level, an individual, cannot make this decision, Washington has to help them, let us write these rules and regulations, let us make sure they are aware of them so that people can listen to this and that they can abide by the rules and regulations that we have established. Paragraph 2: ``In the case of cats and other pets using litter boxes the pet rules may require the pet owner to change the litter,'' in parentheses, ``but not more than twice each week, may require pet owners to separate pet waste from litter, but not more than once each day, then may prescribe methods for the disposal of pet waste and used litter.'' Thank you, Secretary Cisneros. That is going to help us, and those were Federal dollars well spent. On a more serious note, back in 1996, we are facing a drug problem in our country, and so what is the appropriate response? It is when a product became available that would enable parents to better gauge and understand if their kids were using illegal drugs, the FDA said, ``No, it's not appropriate that we make this technology available to parents.'' It is not that the tests were unsafe, it is not that they were ineffective. The same tests are used routinely by hospitals, employers and parole officers. It is not that they were too difficult for a parent to understand how to use it correctly. The FDA was fighting to keep this product off the shelves because the parents cannot, and this is quote, ``be trusted to handle the results,'' end of quote. They fear that these tests would have a harmful effect on the parent-child relationships. After intense pressure, hallelujah, the FDA later approved the tests. We also now are carding 27-year-olds for the purchase of cigarettes. We are taking a look at, and this is probably the most frustrating thing, when we have wise bureaucrats in all of these buildings, and they are good people, but when these people, one bureaucrat working in one office decides what the right thing is to do, and then somebody in another building decides that maybe they have got something that is a little bit different--think about this. The National Institutes of Health required one university to replace all of the school's rabbit cages. This carried a pricetag of $250,000. That may have been the right thing to do for the rabbits. However, less than a year later the Agriculture Department declared that the cages were the wrong size and the university had to once again replace the cages. Now I kind of like rabbits, but I am not sure that we need two agencies in Washington who are focused and believe that it is their primary responsibility and purpose in life to design and define for people at a local level what the appropriate size and design and construction of a rabbit cage should be. This appears to be a little bit of overkill. Now let us take a look at the exciting things that are going on. There are things that are going on in the private sector that really indicate that people at the local level maybe actually have a higher degree of common sense, have a higher degree of commitment to their community and their neighbors, that they have a higher degree and sense of responsibility than what we so frequently will give them or give them credit for. The case of a father, a Catholic priest, working on job training: This is a case of Father Ronald Marino, and he took a look at what was going on in his community and said, ``This isn't good enough.'' He took a look at how government job training programs worked, and he found that this was not working. So on his own he began teaching English to immigrants, and once they had successfully mastered it he taught them a skill with on-the-job training through an apprenticeship, the participants either in pay and advancing from their salaries. They got advances on their salaries. They were teaching them things that would enable them to get a job, and this is an individual in the community going out and taking a look at government programs and saying they do not work, I can do better, and I have got a sense of commitment to my community, I am going to improve my community. A grandmother helped 70 kids after school, takes no Federal funds. A 57-year-old grandmother in southeast Washington, DC runs an afterschool program which provides hot meals, homework help, computer instruction, Bible study, and a safe place to play for at-risk children. Miss Hannah Hawkins founded a nonprofit organization called Children of Mine after her husband was murdered in 1970. Margaret Alasky writes Hawkins insists that social progress comes not when professionals take on needy children as clients, but when ordinary people treat the semi-abandoned children of others as their own. People have an intense concern and love for their community, and they demonstrate it in much more effective ways than what we so often do here in Washington. These are just a few of the examples. We continue to build this litany of examples of where Washington, well-intentioned, goes out and tries to solve problems, but in many cases does not do it very effectively, and when you take a look at the alternatives that are available: local organizations, faith-based institutions, individuals, the free enterprise system, it is kind of like why are we sucking dollars out of the community and bringing them to Washington when if they were left in the community we might be able to deliver better results and have a better impact on solving some of these very difficult problems if we just let communities have the resources for themselves. This is our vision. Our vision is of a government which costs less so that families can survive on one income. Our vision is of a government which does not compete with or attack parents or families but builds them up. Our vision is of a stronger, more vibrant private sector which is creating jobs free from the excesses of burden of taxation and regulation. I think it is time for us to step out here in the House and, as Republicans, to more clearly articulate our vision for what we want America to be, and one of the projects that we have been debating today and one of the things that we have been talking about is the President's budget, a President's budget which increases spending, which does not reach balance, and we are talking about whether that is good for America, whether that is good for our citizens, and whether that is good for our kids. But I think we ought to outline a vision about what we would like to see in a budget. The President has laid down a benchmark. I am not satisfied with it. I do not believe it meets some criteria that are very important to me. I believe that in the long run we should be working toward a Federal Government, a budget, that can be funded by a one-wageearner family. We have way too many families today where one person is working to support the family and the other person is working to support the Federal Government. We need to move back to the point where a two-wageearner family is an option and not a requirement. We have to have a budget that is in balance with and protects the core institutions of our society: families, private enterprise and faith-based and nonprivate institutions. We have to have a budget that is based on the assumption that the dollars that come to Washington are the American people's dollars and that they are best equipped to make the choices about how to spend them. We have to have a budget that respects the needs and the interests of today as well as future generations. We need a budget that protects our kids. We need a budget that reflects a learning from the long 29-year experience of deficit spending, deficit spending that developed out of an overexuberance about what people believe government could do and what people believe government could do better than what local institutions could do. Do we really want to do for our kids in education what over the last 30 years we did for the needy and welfare and public housing? No, I think we can do a whole lot better than that, and we need to do a whole lot better than that. Why does not the President's criteria, or why does not the President's budget, meet this criteria? The President's budget does not meet this criteria because what he wants to do is to continue to move dollars and spending to Washington rather than leaving the money back home. This is not about a budget that is level, that gets to balance because revenues are increasing. This is about a President who wants to grow spending in one key category. Take a look at what happens to discretionary spending. This President wants more money to fund Washington bureaucrats and Washington bureaucracy. This is a $165 billion increase in discretionary spending between 1998 and the year 2002. Now I just did a little figuring, and I come from a small- or medium- sized town in west Michigan, and I am not used to numbers this big, and I used to work for a company that finally, shortly after I left, finally got to be a billion-dollar company. A billion dollars is a lot of money, $100 million is a lot of money, but if you divide $168 billion by 5,000, which maybe is about the average tax that a family of four pays each year, you divide that 5,000 into 168 billion; do that at your own offices; and you find out that it is a lot of families who are going to have to pay for this increased spending. If we run the numbers, and then if we divide it by the 5 years, it is about, on average, to fund the increasing spending that this President wants, about 6 million families each year, or 6 million more American families are going to have to send about $5,000 to Washington. Does that move us closer to a budget that could be funded by a one- wage-earner family? I do not think so. I think asking for $165 billion more of spending in Washington is going to create more two-wage-earner families, not because of a choice, but out of necessity. Does this protect our core institutions of our society, families, private enterprise, faith-based and nonprofit institutions? No. This is Washington sucking money away from those agencies. Does this say we believe that the American people are best equipped to make the choices that they would like to make? No. It says the American people are not equipped to make choices; Washington can make better choices of this $165 billion than what the American people can. Does this respect the needs and the interests of today as well as for our kids? Does this protect our kids? We could get to balance and surplus a whole lot sooner for our kids. Most of this money in increased spending we are going to have to borrow. We are going to have to borrow it, so our kids are going to have a higher debt that they are going to have to pay back. Each and every year they are also going to have to pay interest on this. No, this does not save our kids, it does not protect our kids, it puts a bigger burden on our kids. Does this learn the lessons of deficit spending? No, it continues the over-exuberance of believing what Washington can and cannot do. This is a bad budget for a number of reasons. It does not respect the family, it does not clarify choices, and it does not reflect the lessons that we should have learned. Those are the kinds of criteria that we need to establish as we move forward and create a new budget. As Republicans outline what we want, and what we want to do, it is a matter of it is time to stop increasing spending; it is time to recognize that the most important thing is to start developing a surplus budget so that we can start protecting our kids, so that we can start moving power and authority and control to the places where the best solutions are, which is at the local level. I now want to move on to another project that we have been working on which we call Lessons in Education. We have been working, a number of us, my colleagues, the gentleman from California [Mr. McKeon], and the gentleman from California [Mr. Riggs], we are working on a project which we call Education at a Crossroads. Education at a Crossroads: What Works and What is Wasted. The purpose of our effort is to really find out what is going on in education today. The paper that we developed is lessons in education. It is a series. What are we learning as we go through this process of having hearings around the country, as we have parents, students, teachers, principals, entrepreneurs, innovators, as they testify, what have we learned about education? We have learned, not surprisingly, although I sometimes think when we try to develop programs here in Washington we forget some of these basics. The first lesson we learned: Parents care the most about their children's education. We go around to a charter school in Los Angeles and a parent gets up and says, you know what I really like about this school? We finally have been able to take back our school. The people who are running this school no longer have to look to the L.A. unified school district about what they can do. One of the testimonies of the person running the school, she said: ``You know, when I ran this school and I was part of the L.A. unified school district, I worried about the three Bs.'' You would think as a principal she would be worried about the three Rs, but no, the three Bs. She said: ``I was always measured and the people at headquarters did not ask me how well I was doing with my kids. They wanted to know what was happening with busing, what was happening with my budgets. And then I would always run into the third B, which is the bucks.'' What do you mean, the bucks? She says: ``Every time I had a good idea that I thought would benefit the kids in my school and I would go to my rules and regulations and I would find out, I cannot do that; but I wanted to do it because it is what I needed to do for my kids.'' I would go to the headquarters of the L.A. unified school district and I would say: This is what my kids need. This is what the parents of my kids want. That is what we have jointly decided is best for the kids in our school to make sure that they have the learning environment that enables them to get the most effective learning. I would go to headquarters, and the answer would be: Well, that is not a bad idea, but you cannot do it, because this and that, or that. Sometimes: It may be a good idea, but if we let you do that, we would have to let everybody else do that too. We cannot have that happen. Successful education, as we are struggling with education and the educational issues around the country, let us not forget the fact that the person who knows the kid's name and the person that named the child probably cares the most about their education and about their future. And they care more than the bureaucrat at the State bureaucracy or at the Washington bureaucracy who do not even know the name of the child. Let us not lose sight of that. Too often we are losing sight of the fact that parents care most. We have also learned that good intentions do not equal good policy. Lesson No. 2: We care about kids in Washington. We care so much about the education that our children receive in Washington that we have created program after program after program after program so that the end of 20 to 30 years of Washington having good intentions and Washington caring about our children that we now have 760 different programs running through 39 different agencies, spending $120 billion per year, and the education system is in crisis. Mr. Speaker, good intentions do not equal good policy. Just because we care does not mean that the answer has to be a new program with a nice sounding title and a few dollars associated with it, does not mean that we are actually helping our children. Lesson No. 3: More money or more does not always equal better; 760 programs probably is not better than 700 programs, and 600 programs probably is not better than 5 hub programs. More money in a failed system may sound good, but more money into a system that does not work does not do anybody any good and it does not help our kids one bit. Mr. Speaker, the interesting thing is we have developed 760 programs. There is now a cottage industry, a cottage industry that you would think would be going to schools and saying: Here is some of the research that has just been done; and this is the most effective way for kids to learn how to read; or these are some of the really interesting new tools that we have developed to help teach children math or science. Here is the latest technology that, as you get these computers into your classroom, here is what you do with them. No. The cottage industry is here: Here are two binders that tell you about 500 different education programs; they tell you, these booklets tell you what programs exist, who is eligible, and they tell you how to write the grant to get the money. They do not tell you how to write the grant to reflect and answer the questions in a way that is honest and truthful; they tell you how to write the grant so that you have the highest probability of getting the money. So now we have school districts all around the country not hiring instructional specialists, but they are hiring grant-writers to kind of go through these 500 programs and to see if they can strike gold by finding some grants that a local school district may qualify for. Wrong priorities, wrong decisions, and a bad way to spend our money. Mr. Speaker, we have created such a maze of programs that we now have to have specialists to go through this maze to figure out, this money that we sent through the IRS, how that money can get back to the local school district. Do not worry about it, we do it very efficiently. When you send a dollar to the IRS and when you send a dollar to Washington for education, you can be sure that we get about 60 to 65 cents back to the teacher and back to the classroom. That is not a bad investment. The bureaucrats in Washington, the bureaucrats in your State education association, they only steal 35 cents of that dollar from our kids. They are sucking away 35 cents that could be used in the classroom. The issue in education is not finding more money to spend in a system that sucks 35 cents out. The question is, how do we get more of that dollar that we send to Washington back to the classroom. It is not about spending $1.10 so we can get 70 cents to the classroom. It is about finding a way to get this dollar and getting 80 cents, 85 cents, 90 cents, 95 cents, back to what the purpose is of education. The purpose of education is not to make and hire bureaucrats, it is to educate kids. Education needs to be child-centered, is the lesson that we are working on now. Mr. Speaker, there are too many programs today where the focus is on the bureaucrat, it is on the bureaucracy, and it is not on the student. The system today, the students way down there at the end, there is a bureaucrat at the State level, there are some other bureaucrats through this process that work at this bureaucracy in Washington, and the student is not the focal point. The system today is about Government, it is about bureaucrats, it is about bureaucracy. The system really should be not the student at the end of the process; the student needs to be the center of the process. The people most influential on that student are the teachers in the classroom and the parents. These are the people that know that student's name, they know where they live, they know the problems and the concerns that this student faces, the special problems. They care about them. These people care. The bureaucrats care, but do they really care and know if they cannot give you the name of the student that they are trying to help? The resources and the dollars have to be focused on the student. These bureaucrats today, they are worried about writing the rules and the regulations for 760 programs here, not all in one building. Seven hundred sixty might be OK if they were all in one building in this town, but think about it. Some of the programs are in a building called the Education Department. Other programs come out of the Defense Department. Other programs come out of HUD. Other programs come out of the Agriculture Department. It is not one building, it is not 5 buildings, it is 39 different buildings, 39 different bureaucracies spending $120 billion a year. We had a great hearing yesterday in the Committee on the Budget. I asked Secretary Rubin, Secretary of the Treasury, I asked the Secretary, who is the focal point? Who is the person that is setting education strategy at the Washington level? Who is focused on coordinating this effort and making sure that these different entities come together? The answer was, the President. I am sorry, Mr. Rubin, I do not believe that the President is actually spending a whole lot of time trying to coordinate 760 programs through 39 different agencies. I think he has a few other things to do. I know education is important to him, but I believe that there are some other things on his mind. What has been the result of this ever-increasing bureaucracy? I look at this, and coming from a business standpoint I think there is some reason to be concerned about this. I do not really think this is the best way to do it. But maybe in Washington this works. Maybe this really works in Washington. It does not work in the business world, but maybe in government all these pieces somehow magically come together. What are the results? One-half of all adult Americans are functionally illiterate. Fifty-six percent of all college freshmen require remedial education. In California, we had a hearing and we had some of the chief officers and the key people in higher education in California come and testify. They said, please, please, as you are taking a look at the budget, do not cut our funds for remedial education. We would say, explain that a little bit more. These are students that you have accepted into your university. What kind of remedial education are you looking for? What are these dollars exactly being used for? Remedial seems like a pretty serious term. The answer is, well, one out of four students entering higher education in California, one out of four students cannot read or write at an eighth grade level. Excuse me? One out of four students in California entering higher ed, and this is not going into high school, this is going into higher education, one out of four cannot read or write at an eighth grade level? This is not remedial, this is a crisis. This is a big problem. Why are you not going down to the high schools, the middle schools, and the grade schools and talking to the teachers there and taking a look at what is going on in the classroom? Remember, these teachers are graduating from your universities. They are now going into the classroom, and the children going through this system are now coming to you and they cannot read or write at an eighth grade level. Are you maybe failing the students that are going through your college that are becoming teachers? Are we failing the kids who are in grade school? Absolutely. They cannot read or write when they get out. This is a big problem. Sixty-four percent of 12th graders do not read at a proficient level. SAT scores have dropped by 60 points in 3 decades. There are two ways to look at what we are going to do as a result, as we face what I think are some disappointing results in education, something we should all be concerned about. We can continue this Washington-centered approach. We can continue saying, you know, just a few more programs and a few more dollars, a few more bureaucrats and a few more buildings and a few more bigger buildings and we will be all right. We will solve this problem. No, I do not think so. It is time to start maybe rethinking what is going on in these buildings, but it is not a time to add more buildings, more people, and more dollars. We need to think in this way: How do we empower parents and teachers, the people closest to the students, closest to the kids, how do we empower them to make sure that this child gets the kind of results that we need? It is about teachers, it is about students, and it is about parents. It is not about bureaucracy and bureaucrats who have the student at the end of the system. We ought to take a look at what the President is proposing: $165 billion more spending. The President has not learned our lessons. This assumes that we need more money in Washington and that Washington bureaucrats care more about our children than parents do. That is lesson one. This does not assume this. Much of this spending is going for education, $55 billion more of spending for education over the next 5 years in Washington. This does not demonstrate a lesson learned; that parents care most. This also does not meet the criteria. He did not learn lesson two. The President's programs are well- intended, but come on, do we really think that 770 programs spending $130 billion per year going through 30 or 40 agencies is going to work better than 760 programs, spending $120 billion? I do not think so. This does not recognize that more money in a failed system is not good policy. This is pouring more money into the same bad system that we have today. The end result, if we pass what the President wants to do, if we give him more spending, what will these bureaucracies and bureaucrats do for our children? Think about it. The President wants a building program, so it means that bureaucrats in Washington will now do the building, they will build our buildings at a local level. When we build in Washington, we apply lots of rules and restrictions. Think about just one thing. when we build buildings and we put Federal dollars in construction projects, in Washington we apply a little-known law called Davis-Bacon. People may recognize that as prevailing wage, which means we have to pay probably higher wages. It means bureaucrats at the local level, individuals at the local level, have to come to Washington to find out the salaries they have to pay their contractors, rather than through competitive bidding. But another little-known feature of Davis-Bacon, and think about this as we go through the process, Davis-Bacon prohibits the use of volunteer labor. So if you are going to build your school or if you are going to renovate your school, and you say, hey, this would be kind of nice, maybe the government can buy the paint and some of the materials and volunteers can paint our classrooms; if we are going to redo the playground, maybe the government can buy some of the materials and the parents can come and clean up the playground and do some of the construction; sorry, they cannot do that anymore. Davis-Bacon Federal building laws prohibit the use of volunteer labor on these projects. Not a smart thing, especially when we consider some of the other things the President wants to do. But we will have bureaucrats who build our buildings. These bureaucrats will then decide about what kind of technology goes in because we are going to put in money for technology, so bureaucrats will decide the technology that goes into the buildings. The President wants to set standards at a national level, which means that he will have a strong role in developing curriculum. He wants to do national testing, so he will test our kids. He wants to certify our teachers, so the bureaucrats in Washington will be certifying our teachers. We already have programs that teach kids about safe sex, about appropriate or inappropriate drug use. Bureaucrats in Washington are going to continue doing those types of things. Bureaucrats in Washington already decide what our kids can eat for breakfast, what our kids can eat for lunch. We are going to have after-school programs. We are going to have midnight basketball. But other than that, it is your school. We are going to build the buildings, put in the technology, develop the curriculum, test your kids, certify your teachers, feed them breakfast, feed them lunch, teach them about sex, teach them about drugs, after-school programs, midnight basketball, but hey, other than that, it is your school. This is an approach that is Washington-centered, making these buildings bigger and more powerful, and we are moving away from parents and teachers and local control. Make no mistake about it, this is a massive shift of power and control to a Washington bureaucracy, away from parents, away from teachers, away from the students, and moving it to people who could not even give you the names of the kids going to the school. I want to highlight just one other thing that happens here. Remember, our kids cannot read. So rather than going into the classroom and saying our kids are spending 7 to 8 hours in the classroom or 6 to 7 hours in the classroom per day and they cannot read, reading is kind of a fundamental thing, let us take a look at what is going on in the classroom. The student-centered approach would say let us take a look at what is happening with this student, with that teacher in the classroom, and why can this kid not learn to read? We would focus on the classroom. The Washington approach says, now, let us develop another Band-Aid. Let us develop another program, and let us have tutors. Let us fund the Corporation for National Service to the tune of an extra $200 million. Let me get my pen out. That is $200 million per year. That is how many families paying $5,000 in taxes? That is a family of four. For the next 5 years let us have 40,000 American families pay, not to improve what is going on in the classroom, but to put a Band-Aid on a broken system through the corporation, so they can develop and get what? So they can find volunteers. Wait a minute. Davis-Bacon and construction, we are going to discourage volunteers; but now for reading, we are going to encourage volunteers. Boy, Washington sure sends some mixed signals. Actually, we are redefining the role of volunteers. We are now redefining volunteers as people who make up to $27,000 per year. That is the Washington bureaucratic definition of a volunteer. Now, let us go one step further. We are not fixing the system, we are applying a Band-Aid to a system. The only thing that I can say is the President did get one thing right, maybe right in this process. The President had to make a choice. If he believes in doing volunteers in this approach, through a bureaucratic approach, he at least made the right decision, that he was going to use the Corporation for National Service to teach our kids reading. It may or may not work, but we know that they cannot teach our kids math. The Corporation for National Service, this bureaucracy in Washington with these bureaucrats, the model organization a few months ago had an independent auditing firm come in and say, you know, can your books be audited? Can you tell us where roughly $500 million or $600 million per year is spent, where it goes, how it is spent? It is kind of like the auditors came back and said, sorry, Congress, sorry, oversight subcommittee, asking the kinds of questions we should be asking about where this money is spent, the Corporation for National Service, its books are not auditable. That is very frustrating, but the President has decided to pour $200 million more into that. We know they cannot teach our kids math. That is a sad enough story as it can be, but we know how AmeriCorps works. Students work, they get paid a stipend. Then they go to college, because they have built up a reserve that says, you know, if you are part of AmeriCorps we are going to set aside money for you to go to college. That money is set aside in a trust fund. This is fairly straightforward. You are part of AmeriCorps. We set aside money. You work, you fill out and complete your time of service, you go to college, AmeriCorps sends a check to the college to help pay your tuition, a fairly straightforward transaction; started from scratch, no new programs, nothing to corrupt the process, it started from scratch. Bring in the accountants and say, okay, this program has now been working for 3 years. What is the state of the trust account? Are the trust funds auditable? Can you tell us with any sense of integrity who the people are that worked, that actually fulfilled their obligation to receive the college tuition grant, and have we set the money aside, and do we know with any sense of surety that when these people ask for this money, that the right people will be getting the money? This is not complex math. Fortune 500 companies, a small business person, the little entrepreneur, all of their books have to be auditable each and every year. If they are not, I do not think the IRS would be very happy with them. The Corporation for National Service, not only are its regular books not auditable; the fund that it started from scratch, the trust fund, is also not auditable. But you can be sure of a couple of things. Under this model, even though it is absolutely miserable performance, where the books are not auditable, it is a first level of integrity that you have to have in any organization that, even though the books are not auditable, that the trust funds are not auditable, you can be sure that the bureaucrats will receive their salary, that the people who administer these programs at a State and local level will receive their salaries. And that is just a sad example that, even though when we do not get the results at the level of the student through these 760 programs, we do not get the level of performance or results that we need at a student level, bureaucrats and bureaucracy will continue to be paid. And under the current model that we have today, where people, some people believe that more is better, not only for miserable performance but the Corporation for National Service, when they cannot keep their own books, is going to, the President wants a $200 million increase, somewhere in the neighborhood of a 33- to 50-percent increase in their annual funding. That is the reward for not meeting the basics. Think about it. That is in Washington, that is the reward for doing a lousy job. We go back and ask you to do more. Mr. Speaker, it is about time that we rethought the model and went back to parents and teachers. The difference here in Washington is when we cannot keep the books on an $800 million program, now in my home town the mayor invited my wife and I to a dinner. And we went to dinner and saw that many of the other council members did not have their spouses along. After a few minutes I kind of asked him, I said, why is my wife here and there is a couple of other wives, but why aren't some of the other spouses here? The answer was, well, every dinner costs us $11 and we really do not have it all in our budget. At a local level, people are worrying about dollars, $10, $100, $1,000; $1,000 is a lot to many people at the local level. In Washington when a $400 million, $600 million agency cannot keep its books, remember what that means. It means that we cannot tell where the money is going or whether the money has been used for the intended purpose that Congress allocated that money to that institution for. When an organization in Washington says we cannot tell you where the money went, our response is: Great job, we need your help, we are going to expand your role, and we are going to give you $200 million more. Mr. Speaker, that is why this system feeds bureaucracy, feeds bureaucrats and has at the end of its system, way down at the end is a student. That is why in Washington today, when the dollar comes into Washington, the bureaucracy sucks up 35 to 40 cents of every dollar and never lets us get it back to the student. I just want to give one more anecdote about why we do not need a million new tutors in Washington. It is already being done. The State of Delaware had a hearing in Delaware, has one Congressman. There are 434 of us, 435 of us. In one congressional district, the State of Delaware, they already have 5,000 volunteers. And do you know what? It is because parents and teachers wanted to help students, and they made the decision all on their own. What we now have in Washington is saying, they cannot do that. They need a bureaucracy to tell them. Let us spend $200 million doing that and we do not. In my hometown, churches are embracing schools. They are sending tutors in, professionals are going in and helping children. It is already happening. We do not need to move $200 million. We do not need to move $5,000 from 40,000 American families to Washington to get tutors to our kids. It is already happening. Mr. Speaker, if we take a look at some of the other things that we learned about what the President is proposing from our hearing in Delaware, Delaware had some problems with education. They are making a turnaround. The Governor talked about and many other witnesses talked about what is enabling Delaware to make a difference. Now no, it is not more Federal programs. Like I said, with tutoring they made the difference on their own without any Federal help. Local ownership is what enabled them to produce excellent standards. They worked on developing standards. They do not need a Federal mandate. They do not want national standards. Federal standards, the President wants to establish standards and work on curriculum and wants to do it in a Washington bureaucracy. What did we learn about standards? Think about what a standard is. A standard is what we are going to tell and teach this student in a classroom. It is one of the most important things that we have in education. What do we expect this student to learn during this period of time in the classroom, working with that teacher and this parent? There are some that believe that we can develop these standards in Washington, funnel them through some bureaucrats and put it to the student. Sorry. Delaware's experience says, this is a very important issue. When you are talking about this student, when you are talking about this parent who knows the name of this student and that teacher who cares about that student, they are not real interested in a standard coming from Washington. They want to be an active participant in designing the standards for what that student will learn. They may want some help from outside agencies talking about what other people are doing, but they want to work through that process. Mr. Speaker, in Delaware they went through it. They took 3 years to develop standards. But at the end of that 3-year process, parents, students, and teachers are brought in and agree with much of what was developed because they were involved in the process. A parent understands why there are certain criteria. They understand what is going on be taught and how it is going to be taught. It is a difficult process, but when you are dealing with education and you try to cut the corners and when you try to cut out parents and when you try to cut out teachers, it just does not work. There is no way a Federal mandated standard will ever work, and, if the Federal mandated standard does not work, Federal testing will never work because what parent is going to feel good about a national test based on a national standard that they do not buy into. We need parents involved in this process, and we cannot short-circuit this process through a bureaucracy. Mr. Ferguson, the acting State superintendent, said, regarding their standards, the important thing about these standards is that they are our standards. They are the standards of this community. They are the standards of this State. They are the standards of this parent and these teachers, and they were not given to us, they have a sense of ownership. We have gone around the country. We have taken a look at all different kinds of innovations. We have seen that the wonderful thing about working on this project is on a national basis you hear some of the horror stories about what is going on in education and we are concerned about that. The other thing that we are seeing is whether you are in New York City, whether you are in LA, whether you are in Phoenix, whether you are in Chicago in a public housing project, whether you are in Cleveland or whether you are in Milwaukee or Detroit, or whether you are in west Michigan, we are seeing some great schools. The thing about these great schools is that in most cases, if not all cases, in those communities parents, students and teachers have been given the flexibility to design the school and the system that works for them. Mr. Speaker, they are not facing a mandate. This is the kind of school that you need to have. They are working on designing things because in each of those areas the schools need to be different because the needs of the students in each community are different. Not the need for what they are going to learn, they need to learn the same kinds or similar things, but where they come from, the environment that they come from, and so each school has different challenges. Each school has different opportunities and communities need the flexibility. That is why you see charters. And the charters in Delaware are different than the charters in Delaware, which are different than the charter schools in Phoenix and these choices in local communities. The choice in Delaware allows full public school choice so a parent can choose the program and the school and the curriculum that best meets the needs of their child. It is enabling parents to become consumers of education. It is empowering parents. It is empowering students and it is empowering teachers. One of the most exciting things that is happening is that the National Education Association, the National Education Association, the organization that represents teachers, they are going to get involved in the charter school effort. They are going to start I believe four charter schools in different parts of the country. If anybody should be establishing charter schools, I want our teachers to do it. They should be more knowledgeable and better equipped about what needs to go on in the classroom than almost anybody else in our society, those front-line teachers. I am excited about the opportunity and the learning that we can achieve when the National Education Association sets up its charter schools and how that may be a catalyst for learning and for change that can just go throughout our entire public school system, unleashing teachers from the rules and the regulations and the bureaucrats and the bureaucracies that have been defining for them what they need to do, rather than empowering them to do what they want to do and how they can best help their kids. Can you imagine empowered teachers working with consumers of education, parents, all focused on what the student needs? What a wonderful opportunity to improve education in America and what a much better picture and what a much more optimistic picture that is for America and American education than one which focuses on bureaucracy and bureaucrats.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from New Hampshire [Mr. Sununu] for yielding me the time. I would just like to take a look at what the President is proposing in the area of education. We all recognize that much work needs to be done in education. We are currently engaged in a process which we call Education at a Crossroads which examines what is working and what is wasted in education in America today. We are taking a look at the Washington response, which is 760 programs going through 39 different agencies, spending about a $120 billion per year, and what we believe is that before we put another overlay of new programs and spending on this education bureaucracy, let us take a look at what is working and what is wasted, and, if we have new priorities, let us find some money in the old programs that appear not to be working, and let us reestablish priorities. There is enough money in education. We do not need more money. The President is proposing a building program, recognizing that when we put Federal dollars into building programs we prohibit the use of volunteers on those projects and we have to pay premiums through the Davis-Bacon law. And then the President on the other hand wants to encourage volunteerism by expanding the Corporation for National Service, its involvement in tutoring programs. So on one hand we are saying volunteers are bad, on the other hand we are going to say we are going to have more volunteers paid $27,000 per year involved in teaching our kids to read. It is great that they are teaching our kids to read because the Corporation for National Service cannot keep its books, and just recently there was another report that said their trust fund is now unauditable. These people cannot teach our kids math, so maybe they can help on reading. What is the President's vision for education? He wants to build our schools, put in the technology, develop the correct curriculum, test our kids, certify our teachers, teach them about sex, teach them about drugs, feed them breakfast, feed them lunch, do midnight basketball, and other than that it is your school. He has got a vision of big government and more spending, proposing $55 billion of increased spending, new spending, $11 billion per year for the next 5 years. That means that 2.2 million American families will have to pay $5,000 a year for increased spending on education when that money already exists.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, today I continue my series on talking about what works and what does not work in education and why it is such a needed focus. But before I do that, I just have a few miscellaneous comments on some issues that have been in the news over the last couple of days that I would like my colleagues to be aware of. Mr. Speaker, in the last Congress I introduced a constitutional amendment. I introduced a constitutional amendment which would allow for a procedure where voters could recall their elected officials. So far in this Congress, I have not reintroduced that bill. But yesterday I decided that it was again time to perhaps make a few modifications to facilitate that process. But it is time to reintroduce the bill that allows public citizens, it allows the citizens of this country to hold their elected officials accountable for the promises and the commitments that they make during an election. Over the last few days, we have seen where individuals who campaigned and were elected during the campaign process made a series of promises and commitments to the voters that said, if I am elected, this is what I will stand for. This is what I will do. And these are the kinds of actions that you can expect me to take as your elected Representative. It appears that too often that is all they are, is campaign promises. They are a great way to get a vote, but when they get to Washington, they all of a sudden decide that maybe it is a lousy way to govern. Well, it is about time that voters started to recognize and have the opportunity to tie candidates to their performance, that when they run a campaign, they see a direct link between what an individual promises in a campaign and what they do once they get here. And that when they fail to see that link between a campaign and a performance, rather than just having to stand back and say, there is nothing that I can do about this, there is nothing that I can do about somebody that I voted for, somebody that I supported because they said they were going to do these things and then they go to Washington and they do something else. They now will be empowered with a tool that says, you said you were going to do that and you got to Washington and you decided that something else was going to happen and that your behavior was going to move in a different direction. Well, as a voter in your State, I now have the opportunity to say I voted for you because this is what you were going to do and, now that you have decided to do something else, I would like the opportunity to clarify and to hold you accountable for breaking the promises and breaking your commitment to me. It is time that the American people or at least the States in this country, it is time that the States had the opportunity to design a mechanism which will more effectively and more immediately allow the citizens to hold their elected officials accountable. It is unconscionable that we keep finding individuals on key issues who say one thing and do another. We are going to have a voter empowerment. In the States it is commonly known as the ability to hold elected officials accountable through a recall mechanism. We will have a recall bill. I urge my colleagues to take a look at it, to take a look at what is fueling voter cynicism and to say, yes, let us give the voters one more tool to hold their Representatives accountable. On another topic that again fuels cynicism in Washington, last year we had a very critical debate on partial birth abortions. It would be nice to believe that what we debate here on the floor and the information that we receive is accurate. However, we now find that an abortion rights doctor admitted to lying about the frequency of partial birth abortions. He said, I lied through my teeth. It is a form of killing. You are ending a life. Went on to say that this was used not only in rare cases, it was used more frequently, that it was not only used on situations where the fetus was in distress but was used on healthy women with healthy children. Based on that kind of testimony, President Clinton vetoed our legislation to prohibit this gruesome act. So I am hopeful and anxious that we will revisit that issue based on this new information. I also could not help but just find the irony that we as a society, as we focus on the right to kill unborn children, the headlines this week were, we are trying to find ways to clone sheep at the same time and on the same page, according to the headline, morning-after pill receives FDA approval. The FDA has also moved forward aggressively. Abortion bill accord clears way for sales, RU-486. So as we are cloning sheep, we keep trying to come up with more innovative ways to take the lives of the most defenseless in our society, the unborn. We have gone so far that environmentalist groups in this Nation score votes against abortion. They score votes in favor of protecting the unborn as a vote against the environment because they identify the greatest danger to birds and their habitat is more people. So a vote for the unborn is now a vote against the environment. It is interesting to see how these debates and these issues are being structured in our society today. But let us move on to education. Education is a critical issue in this Nation today. We have gone through a series of what we call lessons learned, what are we learning about education. We are going through a process which we call education at a crossroads. I do not think there is much doubt that there is a widespread belief that we have to take a look at what is going on in education in our country. We have lots of statistics about what the results are in our Nation. One half of all adult Americans are functionally illiterate. This includes not being able to write a letter to explain a billing error or figure out a departure on a bus schedule. Sixty-four percent of 12th graders do not read at a proficient level. In California, 2\1/2\ weeks ago, we had a hearing where the college presidents came in. They said, make sure that as you go forward and take a look at education funding, that you continue to fund remedial education. We need Federal remedial education dollars to be successful. You sit back and say, now, what do you mean by remedial? Remedial education. Somebody that has been accepted into your institution of higher learning, what are you teaching these kids, what do they need remedial education in? Are you trying to teach them more complex writing skills, more complex math skills, what are you teaching them? They said, no, when these kids are graduating from high school and, of course, many go on to college, they cannot read or write at an eighth grade level. Excuse me. They cannot read or write at an eighth grade level? They get into college and they want more remedial education dollars. As a college president, have you ever thought about going back to your high schools and trying to find out what is going on in the high schools that maybe we could teach them reading and writing and math and when they go through high school rather than trying to deal with it when they get to college. In Washington, DC, we have decided that it is necessary to take the elected school board and replace them by an appointed administrator. Why? Because these kids are getting the lowest test scores in the country. We are failing the kids right outside of this building. It is not an issue of money, $8,300 per student, and they get the lowest test scores and some of the lowest test scores in the country. In my own State of Michigan our Governor has proposed taking over a number of school districts because we are failing the kids. I asked the Governor, I said, what makes you think that as a Governor, removed from the local situation, you can do a better job of educating these kids than what the local school board can do? And the disappointing fact is, and he is probably right, he said, I cannot do any worse. When you have got 2 or 3 kids out of 250 kids who are passing a proficiency test, increasing that to 4 or 5 is a significant improvement but it is way below what is acceptable in this Nation. We know that, as we take a look at education, as we have gone around the country, as we have been in east Harlem, New York, as we have been in Chicago and we have been in Los Angeles and Phoenix and Napa and towns in my own district, we know that, No. 1, the most successful schools and the most successful kids in our country, the ones that are learning are, where parents are involved and, No. 2, in very difficult areas, where school administrators and principals have developed a dynamic program and they have reached out into their community and they have involved their parents, the parents of the kids, then we have the most likely scenario for success. And we are going around the country and we are taking a look at what works and what is wasted. Why do we have to take a look at what is working and what is wasted? We know there is a problem. Some people would say, well, why are you reviewing this at all; the Federal Government should not be involved in education. That may or may not be a correct argument. That is not the argument that we have in front of us today. The argument that we have in front of us today is that this town, Washington, DC, with this Department, the Department of Education, and 39 other agencies, has a tremendous impact on education at all levels in our Nation. This town, these bureaucrats, run 39 different agencies. This town--and these bureaucrats who are very good people, they are knowledgeable people, but they are asked to administer through 39 different agencies, we ask these people to administer 760 programs. Remember what these people do and they are matched by their counterparts at the State level and at the local level. It is all good people with good intentions trying to do the right thing, and what they are doing is they have all got a stack of paper. They are all processing paper, which means that dollars go to processing paper and employing people. It keeps the dollars away from the classroom because remember, every time we create one of these 760 programs, we have to let people know that these programs exist. So we have got a bureaucrat who designs the brochure that says, here is the program and here is who might qualify. At the other end of the communications pattern, we have got another bureaucrat that gets the brochure. They read the brochure and say, we might qualify for this program. Let us get some more information. Maybe let us even get an application. Let us fill out the application. It goes into the pile of paper. They fill out the application. They send it back to a bureaucrat in Washington who reads it and says, well, I have got a whole stack of applications. I am going to have to sort through who gets what and how much. Eventually they will decide. They send the money back. The person says, ``Well, I am getting the money. Now what stack of paper says what can I do with it?'' Of course, they have to fill out papers sending back to Washington saying, ``Here is what we did with it.'' That gets back to Washington and somebody has to read it to determine whether they actually spent it the way it was intended to be spent. So we are employing lots of bureaucrats in 39 different agencies, administering 760 programs, spending $120 billion a year; $120 billion per year in 760 programs going through 39 different agencies. Probably a little bit of concern as to whether we are actually getting our dollar's worth. And that is why we are taking a look at what is going on in Washington. What works and what is wasted? Spending time at the grassroots level and saying, we have 760 programs, we have 14 literacy programs, why can our kids not read when they are graduating from high school? And what we are saying is, before we put on another overlay of more programs and more spending and more dollars, it is time to take a look at this conglomeration of programs, and look at it from a teacher's level and look at it from a kid's level and say, are these dollars getting to our children? Are these dollars getting into the classroom, or are the dollars being spent shuffling paper back and forth? The Heritage Foundation has told us in their study that just in the Federal bureaucracy we lose 15 percent. And when we add in State and local bureaucracies, my estimate is that we lose about 35 to 40 cents of every education dollar to bureaucracy and bureaucrats who are doing what we ask them to do, but they are prohibiting the dollars from getting to our children and getting into the classroom. And even then, as we have found out as we have made these field visits, the dollars get into the classroom and you ask somebody, do you appreciate the Federal programs? Yes, we appreciate getting the money, but when we get the rules and regulations of how we need to spend it, and then we take a look at our kids and we take a look at our school and we take a look at our classrooms and we take a look at our teachers and we take a look at our community and what we would really like to do in our classrooms for our kids, and then we take a look at what the rules and the guidelines from some bureaucracy in Washington are, that has never been in our town, that does not know the names of our kids, and what they tell us to do is not what we really want to do, it is not our No. 1 priority. It might be somewhere on our priority list, but it does not help us do what we think we need to do to help our kids today. The lesson today is more does not always equal better. If we have a program, if we have 760 programs and we are spending $120 billion, there are those that are saying, and we are not getting results, we ought to be spending more. And if we had a couple more programs and a few more dollars, we would be able to solve the problem. This was in the paper this week: ``Drug Education Shows Limited Success, Department Reports.'' Many children still turn to drugs between the 5th and 8th grades despite billions of Federal dollars that have been spent on drug education since 1987. The Education Department reported that. A report commissioned by the Department said effects were small even in the programs that appeared to curb drug use. Now, this is the interesting thing. One would think that after the Education Department completes its own study that says kids are still turning to drugs, which is a terrible problem, the effects were small, one would think that they would step back and say, why are we not getting the results? This is a terrible problem. We all want to curb drug use. We have spent billions of dollars. We are not having an impact. One would think the Education Department would step back and say, let us rethink this. Let us come together and say this is not working, and let us think about bringing in parents, bringing in legislators, bringing in State people, bringing in teachers and saying, let us take another look at this problem; how are we going to solve this? We need to approach it in a different way. So what is the Department's solution? The Department wants $620 million next year for drug education. They do not want us to rethink or come up with new programs or different programs to replace what they admit are the failed policies and a billion dollars of wasted money. They want $620 million next year for drug education, up from $558 million this year and $438 million in 1996. This is the lesson we should be learning: More does not always equal better. More dollars going to Washington bureaucracies--dollars to bureaucracies, dollars to bureaucracies--does not necessarily mean we are going to be solving the problem. It is amazing to me that as we prepared this lesson this week, I cut this out of the paper this week. It is a classic case of bureaucrats not worrying about whether we are solving the problem but saying we solve the problem purely by making more dollars available; not making them available in an attempt to build off an analysis that says these programs failed, and here is why they failed and here is a new approach. They just say, here are the failed programs. Let us not rethink it. But if you just give me $62 million more into this same failed system, we will have protected a lot of bureaucrats and a lot of paperwork. We will not have helped any more kids, but we will be able to go back and say we gave $62 million more for drug education. Probably will not spend a lot of time talking about it does not really matter they will not work, but, hey, they are spending more. So they can say we are spending more than a 10-percent increase in funding, more than a 10-percent increase in funding in failed programs. But the disappointing thing here is there is no thinking about what we need to do for our kids. It means pouring more money, hard-earned money into a broken system, a tragic system. And in too many places it is the argument that we hear over and over again. And let me say this. We may raise an issue during the appropriations process about why are we going to increase spending by $62 million on drug education programs that, by the way, do not work, and it will be said, there they go again, those mean-spirited people cutting dollars for our kids. No, the Education Department said it. The drug education programs are not working. It is about time that that issue was raised. It is the same question that we are trying to answer in Education at a Crossroads; that when the President proposes spending $50 billion more on education, before we go out and spend $50 billion more into what in some cases is a failed system, we should step back and say, 760 programs, 39 agencies, $120 billion per year: Is there maybe not a better way to do it? Is there not maybe an issue that we should be raising, before we try to mobilize 100,000 tutors, that we take a look and say why do our 14 literacy programs not work today? And if tutors are better than our current literacy programs, if tutors are the right answer, let us go for tutors. Maybe we can pay for the tutors by saying the literacy programs we had in place were not working and so we will be able to fund not 100,000 tutors but 200,000 tutors because we are going to get rid of the failed literacy programs. Let us step back and see what is working and what does not work before we just put a patchwork of more programs on a failed system. The issue here is not money. There is plenty of money in the system. The issue is making sure that we spend the dollars on the right kinds of things. We have gone to schools in, like I said, in New York, Chicago, Milwaukee, L.A., Napa, Phoenix. We are going to Cincinnati, we are going to Delaware next week, we are going to have hearings on the D.C. schools, schools in Detroit. We have gone and we are going all around the country, and we have seen schools that spend $2,200 per child, we have seen schools that spend $8,300 per child. What does the research of our committee show? Our committee's research shows that more does not always equal better. Pouring more dollars into a bad system does not fix the system. If we put in place the right system, we can educate the kids. It is the fun thing about this project. The great thing about this project is going into some of what we in Washington define as some of the greatest areas of at-risk kids, kids who supposedly are at a disadvantage for learning, and seeing schools and seeing children that are getting a great education. It is because parents are involved, the schools are focusing on the basics, and the dollars go into the classroom and not into a bureaucracy. The issue is not how much money is spent but it is how we spend it. Are we spending it on kids? Are we spending it on the basics? Are we spending it on teachers? Are we spending it at places closest to the kids, or are we pouring it into bureaucracies and bureaucrats who are greatly removed from the system? The dollars: The District of Columbia, as I mentioned, spends over $8,000 per child yet their children are not graduating, they are not reading and they are not succeeding. Schools in New York: Some of the schools that I visited, $2,200 to $2,500 per child, and they are very, very successful. More spending does not always equal better. We need to focus on how we spend it, not how much money is being spent. That is what Education at a Crossroads is doing: Visiting communities, talking to people, finding out what is working, finding out how effective the Federal programs are, and then going back and identifying what we need to do in Washington to straighten out our bureaucratic mess so that we can help our kids. The focus of this whole issue cannot be the Department of Education or the other 38 agencies that are trying to educate kids. It cannot be a bureaucratic focus. It cannot be on this town. The focus has to be on kids around the country. The problem that we have in Washington today and the problem that we maybe have in our country today is if we go back and take a look at this graphic: Where education in this country is supposed to be, parental involvement and local control, independent of Washington interference, so that programs in classrooms, in instructional materials, in instructional lessons can be tailored to the needs of every individual child in every individual community. What we have found is that rather than local control, these 39 agencies in Washington that are trying to educate our kids have made the street that some of you may walk down to get to work every day, which we fondly call Independence Avenue, when you take a look at who is lining the sides of that street, it is all the bureaucracies here in Washington, and the end result is one of these days we may have to rename it, not Independence Avenue but Dependence Avenue because all of these agencies are fostering local dependence on Washington bureaucracies before they can do anything. That is why parents are frustrated. This is ironic. Why are parents frustrated? Kids cannot do math so we are going to have 100,000 new tutors. They are going to be administered by an agency that cannot even keep its own books. All parents are frustrated because they want to give their children a chance to receive a quality education and we stand in the way. We are investing a tremendous amount of money in education. But too often it seems like that money is wasted. It is not getting to our kids and it is going to inefficient systems, so it is wasted. Think of how much money is spent on administrators and education bureaucrats. Think of how little money actually reaches the kids. Like I told you earlier, 60 cents of every dollar gets to our children. I yield to my colleague from Florida.

Mr. HOEKSTRA. I thank my colleague from Florida for those comments. That is why parents are frustrated. They want to give their kids a quality education, and at the end of the day they see us taking care of bureaucrats and bureaucrats not taking care of their kids, taking care of Washington but not taking care of Holland, MI. And it is kind of like, well, we never really wanted you to take care of Holland, MI, in the first place, but you took all of our money and you sent it to Washington and now to get it back we need to do what you want us to do and then think of the results. What is happening? How much money is spent on education? Consider the results. Half of American children cannot read, cannot meet the minimum expectations for math and reading. We spend more money per child than nearly every other industrial country, yet our children simply are not learning the way we would like them to. Think about this. Why are parents frustrated? Why are parents frustrated? They want to give their kids a quality education. Fewer than half of all dollars spent on public education are spent in the classroom. Fewer than half. Low test scores, frustrated parents, kids who are not learning, plenty of money, fewer than half the dollars are spent in the classroom. They are spent on bureaucrats, on support personnel, on administration buildings, but less than half are spent on children in the classroom. Parents, local control, that is most important about getting our kids to learn. We must restore the crucial parental role in education. Parents have the right to choose the school that is best for their child. Parents have the right to choose the best school for their child. Parents have the right, not bureaucrats assigning kids. Parents pay for it, it is their tax dollars, it is your tax dollars. Tax dollars should go to the schools of the taxpayers' choice. Remember, at the end of the day, more does not always equal better. Only in Washington is that accepted, that more equals better. In the rest of America, it is fairly common knowledge that more does not always equal better. It is not how much money is spent, it is how we spend it. When we spend a dollar and only 50 cents goes into the classroom, the answer may not be spending $1.20 to get 60 cents in the classroom. It may be taking a look at the dollar and saying 50 cents of overhead, that may just be too much. Maybe we can take that dollar and maybe we can find another dime for our kids if we take it out of the bureaucracy, maybe if we take it out of the paperwork shuffle between local school districts, State bureaucrats and Washington bureaucrats. Maybe if we take it out of that system, maybe if we simplify it and we make it 200 programs instead of 760 programs, maybe if we make it 2 agencies instead of 39 agencies, maybe we could just find that extra nickel or that extra dime for our kids. It is not how much is spent, it is how we spend it. Today we are spending way too much on the wrong kinds of things. We need to get the money into the classroom.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I was amazed again yesterday when I read Secretary Rubin's statement in Congress Daily, implying that tax cuts would unduly harm our economy. Think about it: What Secretary Rubin really thinks is that Washington bureaucrats know better how to spend the American people's money than the American people themselves. It takes a lot of nerve to suggest to the American people, who have to balance their own budgets, pay their own bills on time, that the Federal Government, which does not do these things, will make better decisions about managing money than they will. It takes a lot of nerve, especially since this President is proposing an additional $1 billion in spending for a bureaucracy whose financial books are unauditable. What responsible American would put a billion dollars into a company whose books were unauditable? This is not about tax cuts. It is about arrogance, the arrogance of the President and his advisors suggesting that a dollar spent by Washington bureaucrats is better spent than a dollar spent by parents, families, across America.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, today we continue a discussion that began in 1996. It deals with this city. This is a picture of Washington, DC. And it deals with what we really can expect Washington to do and the kind of balance that we need to strive for in this country between what we expect from Washington, what we expect from the private sector, what we expect from individuals, and perhaps what we can expect from faith- based and religious and volunteer organizations in America. In many cases, I believe we have moved too much power to this town. We have asked Washington to do all kinds of things that perhaps it is not best equipped to do. We saw some of this last week when we heard the President articulate a vision for education, a vision that I believe moves power, authority, and control from the local level, from the parental level back to this community, back to this town, and it says the way we improve education in America is we empower Washington and we empower the bureaucrats in Washington to make decisions. We used this chart for the first time or this picture for the first time in 1996 when we talked about the crisis that this Nation was facing in welfare. Because what we had done in welfare is we had moved decisionmaking away from the local level, where we were best equipped to help those in need, and we moved it to Washington. We moved it to buildings here in Washington, so that when the State of Michigan or when the State of Wisconsin wanted to design a program that they felt best met the needs of their citizens, they had to come to a building over here and a bureaucrat in Washington, who had maybe never been in Wisconsin, maybe never been in California, maybe never been in Michigan, and say ``Can I do this in my State?'' And the bureaucrats in Washington were empowered to make the decisions. Yesterday I had the opportunity to meet with a new program in the State of Michigan, where in my home county they are working on what they call Project Zero, which is to move everybody off of welfare. It is a partnership. It is a partnership between local agencies, it is a partnership with the State, and it is a partnership in a volunteer way with faith-based institutions to reach out and embrace those families that need help and to lift them up in a permanent and in a meaningful way off of welfare. Those are the kinds of programs that I expect we will see over the next 12, 18, 24 months that will have a dramatic improvement in the welfare situation in this country. Now, after we have made that change in welfare, which moves power back from Washington, back to the States and, more important, back to the local communities where we can have these creative mergers of people coming together to help others in the community, we find that the President does not really believe that the era of big government is over. He now believes that the era of big government has moved from a failure in welfare, and it is kind of like we did not learn our lesson: We are going to take that bureaucracy now and create and expand the Department of Education. Over the last 9 months we have had hearings around the country, and we know that that model does not work. We know that the model of moving power to Washington and moving power to bureaucrats in Washington is not the answer. These bureaucrats are knowledgeable, talented people, but they cannot address the problems at the local level. In hearings that we have had in New York City, that we have had in Chicago, that we have had in Cleveland, that we had a couple of weeks ago in Los Angeles and Phoenix, the answer is very clear. The way that we improve education is we empower parents, we move decisionmaking back to the local level, we focus on basic academics, and we drive dollars back into the classroom and not into a bureaucracy and into bureaucrats, as well-meaning as they may be. The system today is fairly clear and what the President proposes is fairly clear. It is the myth. It is the myth of the magical President who believes that by having good intentions in Washington and outlining wonderful-sounding programs, and moving dollars to Washington and moving responsibility to Washington, we can actually solve the problems that we have in education. There is no doubt that in certain parts of our country education is in crisis, if we take a look at some of the statistics. This is not a debate about whether we need to improve education or whether we need to put a focus on education. The statistics are clear: One-half of all adult Americans are functionally illiterate. Two weeks ago we had a hearing in California. Think about it: Twenty- five percent of the students that enter higher education in the State of California need remedial education. This is kids in 8th grade, this is kids in 10th grade, these are kids going into higher education. Twenty-five percent of them, when they enter the institution of higher education, need remedial education. What does that mean? That means that they are entering into college and they cannot read or write at an 8th grade level. Sixty-four percent of 12th graders do not read at a proficient level. In international comparisons U.S. students scored worse in math than any other country except for Jordan. If we take a look outside of this building in Washington, DC, it is also not an issue of money. We spend about $8,300 per child in the city of Washington, DC, and we have some of the lowest test scores in the country. In the State of Michigan we spend about $5,400 per student. So it is not let us pour more money into these programs or into these cities, it is let us focus on the basics. When we have gone around the country, the exciting thing that we have noticed is that we can go into many areas that we would identify as having at-risk kids, the kids that maybe when we take a look at their environment and a whole series of factors we might be saying they are at risk, and they are at risk because maybe they are in an environment where it is most difficult for them to learn. The exciting thing about this is, as we go into these areas we see schools, we see teachers and we see parents and, most importantly, we see some of the greatest kids in this country, and they are learning and they are learning successfully. But it is because of the schools, and it does not make a difference whether it is a public school or a private school or whether it is a charter school. We have seen examples of all of these, but when the schools make a commitment to involve the parents, where they have been freed from the rules and regulations from Washington and from the State so that the teachers and the administration can focus on the kids rather than the rules and regulations, it works. When the dollars go into the classroom rather than into paperwork, it works, and when the schools are focusing on basic academics, it works. Here is the system today, and here is why I am leery about sending more money to Washington and why I believe it is a myth and why I believe that in the area of education, at least in Washington, more does not mean better. Remember what we have in Washington today when we say education. Washington has been trying to help in the area of education for the last 20 years. Twenty years of work, 760 different programs running through 39 different agencies, spending about $120 billion per year. Washington has been going after this problem, but we have not been doing it very successfully. Why? What is the process? Well, we start with parents, which is where we should start. We should have focus on parents and kids. But when we move the education system and the focus of education to Washington, we end up getting a whole bunch of layers in between parents, kids and teachers and local school boards. In Washington, in this model that some want to expand, we have parents paying into Washington about $120 billion, into Washington programs, into Washington bureaucracies, 760 different programs. We are worried about reading and writing? Washington, a couple of years ago, had 32 different literacy programs. We still have more than 14 literacy programs. $120 billion into 760 programs, 39 different agencies. Then the Washington bureaucracy, all the arrows point one way in terms of putting rules and regulations and dollars back on State and local school boards, but what happens when we create a program? If you create a program, somebody has to find out about it, so we spend dollars communicating to a school board or to a State saying, ``We've got these dollars available for these kinds of programs.'' So we invest dollars in a communications effort. School boards find out about it; they do not automatically get it. They have to now say, ``I wonder if we qualify for this? What do we need to do to qualify for this? How do we apply?'' They then fill out applications, and it goes back to the bureaucracy. The bureaucrats in Washington say, ``Well, you know, we've got x amount of dollars, we've got so many school districts applying. We're going to have to go through a sorting process to decide who gets this money and who does not.'' So they go through a decisionmaking process in the awarding of grants. The Vice President's National Performance Review outlined that in one of these grant applications in the Department of Education the process went through 487 different steps to move dollars from Washington actually back to a school board, back actually to the kids. Washington then sends money to a school board or to a local school district. Of course, we cannot trust the people at the local level to do what we ask them to do, so of course we have rules and regulations and we have reporting structures back into Washington that says, ``Yes, we received your money,'' and ``Yes, here is proof that we spent it exactly the way you wanted us to.'' We in Washington, of course, cannot believe those, so we have to put in place an auditing program that says, ``Make sure you keep your records, because we may want to come back and audit that you actually spent the money the way we intended you to spend it.'' The bottom line is when parents send $120 billion to Washington and they funnel it through the 760 programs that we lose at least, conservatively we lose at least 15 cents of the Federal dollar. If you take a look at how much we lose at the State and the local level as they go through the process of applying and meeting the rules and regulations in the local cost, we probably lose somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 to 40 cents of each and every education dollar that goes to Washington to funnel it back. We are not getting the money into the classroom. Most of this money or a good portion of it, probably 35 to 40 percent of the dollars that we think we are investing in education, gets sucked up into the bureaucracy and into the paperwork, and what happens is rather than school boards focusing on and working with parents as to what they need to do in their local district, what we have created is a model that says, kids are important, but I need to meet the rules, the requirements and the regulations from Washington. So their focus goes to a bureaucracy in Washington and not to parents and not on kids. We have got to break the cycle. We have to focus on what is important, the basics, local and parental control and getting dollars into the classroom. We need to focus and we need a model where the people who are involved in education and setting the direction for education for our kids are parents, kids, and local leaders in the community. I can say that with conviction because of the success we have seen around the country. We visited the Vaughn Charter School in L.A. 2 weeks ago, south central Los Angeles, one of the lowest performing schools when it was part of the Unified Los Angeles School District. It is now a charter school. It is still a public school. It is still accountable to the taxpayers. But what they did when they became a charter school, they cut the strings of bureaucracy. Dr. Chan, who is heading that school, saved the school district, and the number is a little bit disputed, but somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.5 million. But more importantly, talking to the parents, talking to the kids, going into the classrooms, sitting around a table and talking about what makes this school different today, the parents, Dr. Chan, and the students are all saying it is because this is the model. The model is one where the school, the principal, and the teachers have a partnership with the parents, and they are focused on the kids. Parents talk about we got our school back. As a matter of fact, it is now a neighborhood school. The kids in this neighborhood were being bused all over. The kids now have the choice of where they want to go to school. They are now going back to this school. They not only took control of the school back for the parents, but it is now a neighborhood school and in a very rough part of Los Angeles. It is kind of like a bright beacon in that community about what a local community can do when it cuts the strings from a bureaucracy and is empowered to take over a small part of its own community, and it is empowered to take over a very important part of its community, which is the schools. There are a couple of other interesting statistics when we talk about what happens when dollars go into Washington. We know we lose at least 15 cents here in Washington and we know that we lose at least another 20 cents when you go to the costs incurred by the local schools and the State, but it is kind of interesting how these dollars get distributed. Dollars do not follow kids. Dollars go all over the place. If you are in Alaska, sending dollars to Washington and increasing the Washington bureaucracy is a good deal, because even though you maybe lose 40 cents of every dollar you send to Washington, with Alaska, when you send $1 in, you get $3.12 back. So the dollars coming in, the share back to you is very positive. It is a disproportionate share back to Alaska. If you are in Connecticut, it does not really pay. Connecticut gets all of 39 cents back to that State. If you are in Mississippi, you get $2.41, if you are in New Mexico, you get $2.34. If you are close to New Mexico, in Nevada, too bad, you only get 39 cents back. So it is a huge shell game in Washington that is not focused on kids. It is not focused on improving education. It is focused on bureaucrats and politicians trying to do something that really parents and local school districts can do a whole lot better. As we take a look at this, this system does not work, when we take a look at what is going on and some of the proposals that the President has to improve learning, to improve education. It is interesting, one of the proposals he has, and I have oversight over this area, is the President proposes $809 million for the Corporation for National and Community Service. National and community service. It sounds great. Our volunteers through the Corporation for National Service cost us as taxpayers about $27,000 apiece, or as high as $27,000. They are going to go out and they are going to get tutors. I think that is a laudable objective. Schools are doing this today. Community groups are involved, and I am not sure what the Federal Government can do to help and assist in that process. We fund and send money through the Corporation for National Service, and it would be one thing if we knew where now another roughly $1 billion going into this model, we know we are going to lose some of that in the structure and in the hierarchy and in the bureaucracy. We also know that, at least for the Corporation for National Service and for many of these other agencies, we are not actually going to know where the money goes. The Corporation for National Service, this is an agency that spends about $600 to $700 million per year. The books still are not auditable. Think about it. Sending taxpayer dollars to an agency that was set up and was going to be the model for a government agency and how government should run but cannot have an independent accounting firm come in and audit its books. That is one example. The Heritage Foundation cites a number of other examples that says these 760 programs do not have the kind of oversight necessary to determine whether they work and where the dollars are going and whether they are efficient or not. Is it not interesting that we know we have a problem in reading, we know that our kids are not reading at competitive standards, that in certain States a high percentage of them need remedial education, and rather than focusing on the real problem as to why kids are not learning in the classroom, the response in Washington is to create another program. We have known that this has been an issue. We have got 14 literacy programs. And now what we are doing is we are funding an overlay of perhaps volunteers reading 2 hours per day or 2 hours per week with students, but we are not asking the fundamental questions as to why are kids not learning to read in the classroom. Is there something going on in the classroom that is prohibiting kids from learning? Why do we not take a look at what is going on in the classroom before we do anything else, and maybe moving dollars into the classroom is a more effective way of addressing this problem than putting another Band-Aid on an open wound. Maybe we ought to go back and take a look at the 14 literacy programs that are already spending over $8 billion per year from a Washington level and saying, why are those 14 literacy programs not driving the kinds of results that we would like to have? If they are good programs and they are working, why are we not putting more money into those programs? If those programs are not working and we do not feel we should be putting more money into them, but we should be going in this new route or in a different route, why do we not take a look at eliminating those programs and getting true effectiveness into the system? But no, the proposal that we have in front of us is more bureaucracy in Washington, not critically evaluating the programs that we have in place. Well, that is not going to work in this Congress. We do have in place a program which we call Crossroads in Education. The Crossroads in Education project that is coming out of the Committee on Education and the Workforce is going to do, and is in the process of doing, a critical analysis of these 760 programs. We want to find out where the dollars go; are they getting results or are they not getting results; how can we make them more effective; and what is working and what is wasted in education today? So what does that mean? It means that the first step is last year we asked the question: How many programs are there? Nobody had ever asked that question before. We did some work, we did some research; some other outside organizations, some parts of the executive branch helped us. They said 760 programs, 39 agencies--actually the 760 is a little old. Since that point in time they have identified about a hundred more programs that we have. So it is somewhere in the neighborhood of 850 to 900 programs that we really have in Washington. But we are now going through and we are asking what is the process; how is this money distributed; what are the actual links back and forth between a bureaucracy and the State and a local school board; how are people awarded and granted dollars; what is the largest grant request you get or that you gave out; what is the smallest? We found a grant request for safe and drug-free schools. The school district went through all of the work, a very thick application, and I will tell you they got their money's worth. They got a grant for $13. The Government cannot even write a check for $13, but that is what the school district got. Maybe that went out and would have paid for lunch for the person who spent considerable time putting this grant request together: $13 for a school district to develop their safe and drug-free school program. Think of the costs that went in. We are doing that. What is the largest and the smallest grant request you got? What do these grant requests look like? Are they 2 pages, are they 50 pages? In some cases we found that they may be a thousand pages. How much time and energy? What happens to the grant requests when they come to Washington? How are they sorted through? Who reads them? You then go back and you take a look at when the grants go out, how much paperwork? The statistics I believe that we had in our hearing in Arizona 2 weeks ago was that of the 6 percent--let me find the exact quote--this was from Lisa Graham Keegan who is Arizona's superintendent of education--said, I will say that the 8 percent Arizona receives from the Federal Government easily accounts for more than 50 percent of the work in my department and school districts. The paperwork. They receive 8 percent of their money--remember this $120 billion is only about 5 or 6 percent of what any school district gets, but on a national average some get more, some get less. Here in Arizona it is about 8 percent of their total dollars come from Washington and about 50 percent of their paperwork. Is that a good investment? What do bureaucrats in Washington really know about what needs to be done in Arizona? So what is the paperwork that goes back and forth? We have had meetings, and we asked superintendents to tell us about their paperwork, and one of the things that they keep coming back with is, we appreciate the money we get from Washington. In some cases it does some good and we can work in those areas. But the real problem is when we take a look at our local school district and we take a look at the needs that we have. If we had more flexibility to use that money in different ways, we would spend it in different ways than what you are mandating that we spend it on. So we know that this process is not an ideal process. Fifty billion dollars of more spending in Washington is not the way to improve education. Spending $50 on education may be a worthwhile effort. It is probably a good exercise. Spending it at the State and the local level, where you have more control and direction about what you need in your community, and actually getting the dollars into the classroom probably makes a lot more sense. Recognize that when we spend and say we are going to spend $50 billion in Washington, maybe only 25 to 30 billion will actually make it back into the classroom. Twenty billion is going to get lost somewhere else in the process. A couple of other proposals that the President is talking about that I think need serious consideration: talking about school construction. As soon as we put in Federal dollars, any amount of Federal dollars, into a local school construction, Washington will come in and mandate what contractors need to be paid on an hourly basis for the work that they perform in your school district. It is called Davis-Bacon, mandated from Washington what you will pay. We have an elaborate system in the Department of Labor that is not very good but that tries to track wages in thousands of different communities around this Nation, in a number of different construction categories, and that is what you have to pay. In other projects where you do not have Davis-Bacon, we go through this kind of complex way of determining how much a project will cost. It is called competitive bidding. School districts cannot competitively bid. They have to pay Davis-Bacon wages. So in effect, when you go on a construction project with Federal dollars or partially funded with Federal dollars, you lose again about 15 percent of your purchasing power by being required to pay the wages established here in Washington versus what you may be able to get in a competitive bid. I enjoy the discussion about the HOPE scholarships. Making education available to more students on a longer basis I think is a worthwhile goal, saying that Washington is now going to provide scholarships for those that maintain a B average. The IRS today cannot track our income tax system, our Income Tax Code. Just think of what wonderful work they are now going to have also trying to match tax deductions with information from schools indicating that, yes, these people did maintain a B average and that B averages across the country are consistent, so that the same B that you get in Michigan is equivalent to a B that you get in Arizona. It is going to create a lot more work for bureaucrats, and it is going to move a lot less money into the classroom. The evidence is clear. We need to focus on education, but more compelling is the case that rather than increasing and building and expanding this city in Washington, the keys to improving education is moving dollars and power away from this city and moving it back to parents, moving it back to local school boards and empowering teachers. It is not only school boards. It is teachers that want control of their classroom. It is the parents that want their schools back. They do not want to come to Washington to take a look or to fight for what they want to do in their classroom. They want control of their schools. They know specifically what they need for their kids and their community. The needs of this country are so diverse. We need to be able to have the flexibility to tailor the programs for our kids from one city and one community to the next, and we need to empower parents. That is not a concept or a theory. We know that it works. Take a look at the schools that are working, take a look at the schools that are excelling, and that is the bright spot in the picture in education. Yes, there is some bad news, there is some information that says we ought to be worried about this and that in some parts of the Nation education may be in a state of crisis. But the good news is that we can look at models of success and we can learn from those models of success, we can learn what the characteristics are, and we can then tailor Federal policies and rules and regulations, or whatever, to empower that kind of change and reform to happen at the local level. And what we learn is very simple: Parents, basics and getting dollars into the classroom, empowering parents instead of empowering bureaucrats, dollars to kids, not to bureaucracy, fundamental basic education, not the latest education fads; it is a key issue, it is an important issue. It is going to be a vigorous debate. I think in the end kids and parents will win, and politicians and bureaucrats in Washington will lose. That is the system that works, that is the model that we will build on, and that is the direction that we need to go.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I want to continue the dialog on education. In my role in Congress I have the opportunity to serve as chairman of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations of the Committee on Education and the Workforce. In that committee last year, we researched the Office of Management and Budget documents to get a better understanding of how the executive branch defined education at the Federal level. In researching their documents we found out that when you take a look at education from a Washington level, you find 760 programs spread over 39 different agencies spending about $120 billion per year. Our work in the last Congress has led us to initiate a new project here in 1997. We call that project Education At A Crossroads: What Works and What is Wasted. What we are really saying is before we begin any major new initiatives in the education area, let us take a look at this broad range of Federal programs and find out what really is working and what is not working. Let us go around the country and take a look at local school districts, at parents, at teachers, and at school boards that are educating kids and providing a good environment where kids can learn. Last night the President really did not spend a lot of time talking about it, the specific problems, but he did highlight, obviously, the area of education. At many different levels we can say that education may be in somewhat of a crisis, or there are symptoms that say we may have a significant problem. Statistics tell us that one-half of all adult Americans are functionally illiterate. This includes not being able to write a letter to explain a billing error or figure out a departure on a bus schedule. Sixty-four percent of 12th graders do not read at a proficient level. In many cases these students cannot read their own high school diplomas. In international comparisons, United States students scored worse in math than any other major industrialized country except for Jordan. Now, if we take that down another level, last week we had a hearing out in California. In California, think about this, 25 percent of all the students entering higher education need remedial education. They have graduated from high school, they have been accepted into college, and now they need remedial education. What does that mean? It means that they cannot read or write at an eighth grade level. In Michigan, our Governor may propose that he needs and the State needs to take over eight failing school districts because they have high dropout rates, low test scores, and low graduation rates. Right here in Washington, DC, right outside of this building, we are spending $8,300 per student and we are getting some of the lowest test scores in the country. What is the vision or what is the picture that many people have of education today when they are asked about it? The general public see three recurring images: They see metal detectors in high schools, they see kids outside of the school during school hours, and they see checkout clerks who cannot make change. You put this all together, it is clear something needs to be done in education. We have known this for quite some time. The Federal Government's solution, as I outlined earlier, 760 bureaucracies or programs spread across 39 departments, agencies, and commissions, spending 120 billion in taxpayers' dollars on education in 1995. What are these programs focused on? Of the programs, 3.6 percent are science related, 1.9 percent are reading related, and 1.1 percent are math related. Less than 10 percent of these programs are focused on either science, reading, or math. What else do they do? One of the programs pays for closed captioning of things like ``Baywatch.'' That is an educational program. Perhaps the problem we have in Washington is not that we are not spending enough dollars or that we have too many programs, we are spending it on the wrong things. That is why we are saying before we embark on major new programs and major new initiatives, let us take a look at what we are doing today. I think we all believe that when it comes to education we can do better, we need to do better. Our children only begin to receive a high quality education--we have heard this from hearings, we have gone into a number of areas around the country--when what? When we focus on basic academics, where we have strong parental involvement, and where dollars end up in the classroom and do not get sucked up by a bureaucracy. Let us talk about some of the goals and some of the programs that we are working on and some of the process that we are going to go through. In Crossroads With Education, we are going around the country taking a look at classes and at schools that work where kids learn. We have had the opportunity to go to east Harlem, some of the toughest neighborhoods in the country. We have gone to schools in public housing projects in Chicago. Last week we were in south central L.A. The exciting thing about each one of these areas and each one of these neighborhoods is we saw schools that were providing a wonderful environment for learning, and they were not doing it because of Federal programs. In most cases they were doing it in spite of Federal programs. They were experimenting and they were doing innovative things where there was a barrier to them getting Federal dollars. The Federal Government, in many of its laws, is actually stopping innovation and creativity at the local level rather than facilitating it. Again, what works? Basic academics, parental involvement. Each one of these schools really has had parental involvement. Parents feel like they have control of their school. And when parents have the opportunity to control their school and to be involved with their kids, it makes a difference. Each one of these had a strong inspirational leader who had a vision for their school and is driving to make that school serve the patients and the kids and not a bureaucracy. We are focusing on dollars to the classroom. A study that was just completed said that when a dollar comes to Washington, only 85 cents of it makes it back into the classroom. And that is when you are only taking a look at the Federal bureaucracy. If you take a look at the applications that local school districts and States have to spend time and effort and energy on to get these Federal dollars, if you take a look at the time and expense that they have to monitor their programs and send reports back to Washington, I am sure that you could take a look at these dollars that go to Washington and say for every dollar that goes to Washington, probably less than 60 or 65 cents of it makes it back into the classroom. This is not about moving more money and bigger programs into Washington, this is about taking the dollars that Washington has committed to spending on education and getting them back in the classroom. One of the exciting things we are going to be doing is we are going to be going back to the Department of Education, these other 38 agencies, and saying how hard is it to apply for these grants? How complex is the process? How many people are applying for how many grants? What kind of paperwork is involved once people receive these grants? When they file reports back to Washington, when they send them back to the Education Department, does anybody read them? Is any action taken off of these reports? The Federal dollars going into the District. We have done superintendent surveys and the one message we get back consistently is, yeah, the broad outlines and the things that you are trying to solve from Washington work, but when you send us the dollars, the parameters are so tight, yeah, we do what you tell us to do, but that does not really enable us to do what we need to do and what we want to do in our schools. It leads to the comment of one of the principals that we talked to last week. When she was talking she said, when I worked in the public school district and I was a public school principal, before I became a public school principal in a charter school, I had to worry about not the 3 R's, I had to worry about the 3 B's. That is kind of like her reaction working either with her school district or working with the Federal Government. The 3 B's. What are they? I had to worry about bussing. Are the buses running on time? I had to worry about budgets to make sure that the dollars fell in the right categories and that I stayed within the budget. And then I had to worry about the buts. What are the buts? The buts are every time I had a good idea and every time my parents came into the school with a good idea about what they wanted to do in this school and I went to the centralized administration, I would get the comment back, ``That is a good idea, but if we let you do it, everybody else will have to be able to do it.'' ``But the rules don't allow for that.'' ``But yet we can't do that.'' ``But we've never done that before.'' When the parents took over that school and created a public school, but a charter public school with parental involvement, the buts went away and we now have a high quality, high performing school in one of the toughest areas in one of our major cities. We want to minimize what is wasted in education. We want dollars back into the classroom. We want the dollars focused on what really works. And it is really important that we work in a collaborative fashion, that we work in a collaborative fashion with parents, with school boards, with local school boards to ensure that they are given the tools and the control to create the schools that best meet the needs of their kids. What we are going to be doing, we are going to be continuing this process for the next 12 months. Obviously we have done a lot of work in 1996. We have already done a lot of work in 1997. But before we go out and spend another $50 billion as Band-Aids on a system that is currently broken, we need to evaluate the current system and put the money into things that work. There are wonderful success stories out there, there are wonderful environments, there are wonderful schools, and they are all wonderful kids and they are learning. What we need to do is to make sure that we help them and do not continue to hurt them with programs from Washington that do not work. Why are we experiencing some of the failure today? Too often we have put bureaucrats ahead of kids. When we get done with education reform in this Congress, we are going to put kids ahead of bureaucrats. Too often we have put social engineering ahead of the basics. It is time to focus on reading, writing, and math. It is time to focus on the basics. We have put money into the bureaucracy, not into the classroom. We need to move the dollars out of the bureaucracy. We need to move the dollars to the local level so that they can get into the classroom. Before we put 1 million new tutors on the streets, we need to ask the basic question, Why are kids not learning today? We have at least 14 literacy programs in the Federal Government. Kids are spending 6 to 7 hours a day in school. Why are they not learning today? Do we need to revamp these 14 literacy programs? Do we need to take a look at what is going on in the classroom? Those are the kinds of questions that over the next 6 to 12 months, the Education and Oversight Subcommittee is going to be looking at. As we develop answers to those kinds of questions, we will be developing, hopefully in collaboration with the President, the proposals that will put kids in front of bureaucrats, it will move dollars into the classroom, and it will move us in education back to focusing on the basics, reading, writing, and math. Like I said earlier, the wonderful thing about this project is I have seen success stories from one end of the country to the next. It is about common sense, it is about getting back to the basics and it is about doing the right things. As we work on getting back to that commonsense approach, we can and we will improve education. It is an exciting process and an exciting challenge on which to work.

Mr. HOEKSTRA

Mr. HOEKSTRA. Mr. Speaker, I move that the House do now adjourn.