Joseph Lieberman

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. The Senator from Michigan is correct.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. The Senator is correct.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Senator from Massachusetts. I thank my friend and colleague from Arkansas, Senator Lincoln, not only for a superb statement on behalf of this amendment but for the work the Senator has done as we developed the proposal, for the practical experience and common sense she brought, specifically for her genuine advocacy for children, particularly rural poor children. I thank the Senator for that and for her excellent statement. I ask that Senator Feinstein of California be added as a cosponsor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I thank my good friend and colleague from the State of Washington for his gracious words and for the discussions we have been having for almost 2 years about this particular reauthorization, in which I have learned a lot. I appreciate his openmindedness. These discussions continue more broadly now. As he said, there are gaps remaining, but it has been a very good faith and worthwhile process. I look forward to continuing it with him and others in the days ahead toward the aim, which we hope is not going to elude us, of having a bipartisan reauthorization of ESEA. I am grateful that the Senator from Virginia has come to the floor to speak on behalf of the amendment that is before the Senate. Senator Robb is a cosponsor. He has been very active in our discussions of this proposal and, as always, he brings to these discussions the clear- headed vision based on experience-- in this case, not only his experience as the Senator but valuable experience as the Governor of Virginia. I yield whatever time Senator Robb needs to discuss this proposal.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I yield myself such time as I may consume from the amendment. I thank the Chair. I thank my friend and colleague from Texas for her thoughtful statement. I would like to respond to it. It is interesting in this debate how common the usage of terms is on both sides. You have to really get down into the details. The Senator from Texas talked about her support of flexibility for school systems at the local level. That is a centerpiece of the amendment that is now before the Senate, which is to consolidate a whole series of current Federal categorical grant education programs and give the local school systems some flexibility in the use of that money. But I think the difference between our proposal, the proposal before the Senate now, and the underlying bill is the difference between flexibility with purpose and essentially a blank check. In our proposal, we have taken a series of categorical grant programs and put them together into four broad titles. We call them performance- based partnership grants--not block grants. As I understand block grants, they are basically pooling money and sending it back to the States and localities to be spent for education as they would wish. As others have pointed out before, and Senator Kennedy particularly, at the outset of the ESEA program, the Federal Government essentially gave block grants to the communities and States. It was found that the money was being spent for what most in Congress at that time did not think were priority educational goals. They were not being spent for the focused purpose of the ESEA, which was to help disadvantaged children. Block grants don't target the disadvantaged children, and they don't have enough accountability for results that are ongoing. There is no guidance from the Federal Government. I think this is a broad category of how the money should be spent. This is the difference between the underlying bill and the amendment before us now. Yes, we believe that Washington doesn't have all the answers. Yes, we think that some of the current categorical grant programs are too focused with too much micromanagement. So we fold them together. But we feel very strongly that if we in Congress and the Federal Government are authorizing and appropriating literally billions of dollars to be spent by the States and localities on education, it is not just our right but our responsibility to set overall standards, categories, and goals for how that money should be spent. When we say we create performance-based partnership grants, that is what we mean. They are partnerships between the Federal, State, and local governments to achieve national educational goals. I will get to that in a minute. They are performance-based because there is an annual measurement of how students are doing. That is what this is all about. Is adequate yearly progress being made on these various proposals? If not, we ought to rush in with some extra help. If it continues to not be made, then we ought to impose some sanctions. We have taken these four titles and asked that the localities spend in areas that we think enjoy broad support in the Nation as priority educational areas. First and foremost, I think we granted title I for disadvantaged children. But of the other four, first and foremost, here is more money than the Federal Government has ever sent to the States and localities before for the purpose of improving teacher quality. Second, here again, it is more money than the Federal Government has ever sent back before for the purpose of improving programs in limited- English proficiency, commonly known as bilingual education. It is a critical need. Too many children for whom English is not the first language are not getting the education they should get. Third, public school choice--a great concept that is being adopted at the local level; again, a new funding stream to create new charter schools and to create new experiments in public school choice. Let parents and children have some choice within the public school setting by creating competition and forces that will improve the overall quality of education. Finally, a broad category of what might be called public school innovation, including afterschool programs, summer school programs. Whatever the localities may decide is an innovative idea, we want them to be able to test. There is a big difference between sending a blank check from Washington back to the States and localities, saying here is a substantially increased check but we are asking that localities spend it in one of these four priority areas and we are going to hold localities accountable every year for the results of that spending. Ultimately, that is what matters. It is interesting and not unimportant to talk about performance-based partnership grants, but ultimately it is important to consolidate categorical grants. What is most important is, What is the result? Are our children being better educated? If not, we in Washington will set up a system that does not accept failure, that does not allow the Federal Government to sit back and accept failure, but pushes into the debate and the action to encourage success for our children. The second broad point of response is on the question of teacher quality. As we all know, we have a rising need for new teachers--2 million over the next decade. We also want to make sure those teachers are the most able. There are a lot of ways to do this. In my State of Connecticut, the legislature adopted a program a decade or more ago that has worked. It begins with the State of Connecticut setting standards for paying teachers more money. It is true we get what we pay for. There are a certain number of people who have devoted themselves to teaching, regardless of salary, because they had a sense of mission. It is what gave them satisfaction. In an increasingly competitive economy, one of the ways we make it easier to attract the best people to teach is by paying more money. The second is to create opportunities in midcareer for people to come into teaching. I point out to my friend from Texas, title II of our proposal on teacher quality specifically urges the States to open up alternative paths for people. In our proposal, title II encourages the localities to do exactly what Senator Hutchison advocates, which is to create alternative paths to teacher certification for people in midcareers so we can get the best people to better educate our children. We think this is a balanced proposal. We ask our colleagues to consider it and hopefully support it as we come close to the time for voting. I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, this brings to double figures the cosponsors. We now have 10 cosponsors. We are proud to have the Senator from California with us. I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I ask that amendment No. 3127, an amendment in the nature of a substitute to the bill, be called up at this time.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, briefly, if I may respond to the two questions, and I appreciate the comments of my colleague from Connecticut. It has been a pleasure, as always, to work with the Senator and others. We have made progress. I am grateful for his acknowledging that. I am also grateful for his long-time progressive leadership in this whole area of public education. I thank my friend from Minnesota for his kind words about the bill. I respond briefly to the two good and fair questions. We struggled with both of them, particularly the question that if we set up a system where we give more money for education, and we want to reorient the program so we are not just arguing about how much money we will send or, when the auditors come from Washington, they do not just ask if we are spending the money in the particular paths we were told to spend it in, but that somebody asks: What is the result? Are the kids educated? That is what we want to see happen, to put teeth into it. We believed we had to reward and punish. We have bonuses for schools and States that do well. How do we have answers without punishing the kids? That is a struggle. One answer is that the kids, particularly poor kids, are too often punished by the status quo because they do not get a good education and they are trapped by income. They have nowhere else to go even though their parents clearly want a better way. We have set this out over a period of years and allowed the States themselves to set the standard of adequate, clear progress. We are not setting an absolute standard. We are saying: You set the standard for each school district, for each school. The standard is, how much do you want to improve each year from the base, where they are now--not where an idealized base might be but where they are now. Our first sanction: When a school fails to achieve its adequate clear progress for 2 years, it goes on to a ``troubled" list and extra money comes in to help the school. If after 4 years it does not get raised-- the kids are the victims, they are being punished--at that point, the bill says the school system has a choice: Radically restructure the school into a charter school, perhaps, or something similar within the public school system, or close it and give every child and their parents the right to go to a higher performing public school in the district. Beyond that, if the State continues not to make the adequate yearly progress, the Senator is right, after 3 years they get 50 percent taken from the State administrative budgets. That was our attempt to impose penalties without hitting the kids. Finally, after 4 years, if there is no adequate yearly progress, something is really wrong, then we take 30 percent of title VI, the public school innovation title. Yes, that reduces some programs that could be enrichment and improvement programs, but at some point we have to put teeth in the system to make it work. In no event, I stress to my friend from Minnesota, do we ever take any money away from title I for disadvantaged kids. That, we thought, would be unfair. We will not touch the basic program to help disadvantaged kids learn better. I was surprised that in my State of Connecticut when we introduced the bill, the area of the bill that got the most concern was from the paraprofessionals themselves who feared we were going to force them to get a college degree or put them out of jobs. Our aims are exactly what the Senator has said. I was surprised to learn that 25 percent of title I money around the country is spent on paraprofessionals. Some of that is very well spent because they supplement what the teacher is doing or they provide nonteaching support for children which can be critical to the child's ability to learn. Our basic aim is what the Senator from Minnesota said. Let's not shortchange poor kids by asking paraprofessionals who are not trained to be teachers to be their teachers. Suburban schools would not accept that. We shouldn't accept it for our poorest children. Let's try to help them upgrade themselves. Also, we provide State-adopted certification programs for the paraprofessionals. I hope my answers have been responsive.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Chair. Mr. President, I am very proud to offer this amendment on behalf of the colleagues who have been mentioned, eight in number, and myself. We have worked for a very long time on the contents of this amendment. We have spent a lot of time in our home States and elsewhere observing what is happening in our public schools today, and this amendment is a response to what we have seen. I would roughly categorize that in two ways, which I will describe in a little more detail. The first is, there remains an unacceptable gap in achievement levels between children in America's public schools who are disadvantaged economically and those who are advantaged, and that is unfair and unacceptable. Secondly, there is occurring, and has been occurring throughout our country over the last decade really, an extraordinary outburst of educational reform at the local level. Superior efforts are being made by teachers, by school administrators, by superintendents, by parents, by whole communities, to try to do everything possible to improve the status quo because when the status quo is not adequately educating our children, in this information age particularly, we are not achieving one of the great goals of our Government. This proposal we make today is an attempt to respond to both of those observations and to use the 5-year reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act as an opportunity to leverage Federal dollars, perhaps small in percentage in the overall cost of public education in our country but large in absolute terms, to do better at educating the poor and disadvantaged in our country and do much better at encouraging, facilitating, and financially supporting the extraordinary educational reform efforts going on around the country, I am pleased to say particularly in States such as my own State of Connecticut. As we continue this debate on the ESEA, Congress itself is facing a major test, one that will likely be far more important to the future of millions of America's children than any of the school exams or assessments they have to take this year. Our challenge in Congress is to reform, and in some ways to reinvent in some fundamental ways, our Federal education policy to help States and school districts meet the demands of this new century and to help us fulfill our responsibility to provide a quality education for all of America's children. That is why I join today with eight of my colleagues, and perhaps at least one more, in offering this amendment to the bill before us that calls for a totally new approach to Federal education policy, one that we who cosponsor this amendment believe could also serve as a bridge to a bipartisan solution to this problem, to a bipartisan reauthorization of the ESEA. Of course, that has to be the goal to which all of us aspire. It may be an interesting debate on Federal education policy, it may be stimulating, it may be fascinating, it may even be educational, but if it is only a debate without a result, it does nothing for the children of our country. We hope this proposal we are making today can be a bridge to a bipartisan reauthorization of ESEA. Our approach will refocus our national policy on helping States and local school districts raise academic achievement for all children. That has to be our priority. It would put the priority, therefore, for Federal programs on performance instead of process, on delivering results instead of developing rules. I am asking not just how much we are going to spend on education or what specific pipes it goes through to the State and local districts, but on what comes out of the other end, which is to say how are our children being educated. Our approach calls on States and local districts to enter into a new compact with the Federal Government to work together to strengthen standards and to improve educational opportunities, particularly for America's poorest children. It would provide State and local educators with significantly more funding from the Federal Government and significantly more flexibility in using that funding to meet their specific local needs. In exchange, our proposal would demand real accountability and, for the first time, impose consequences on schools that continue to fail to show progress. You cannot have a system of accountability that winks at those who fail to appropriately educate our children. In order to implement effective education policy, I think we have to first acknowledge that there are serious problems with the performance of many of our schools and that public confidence in public education will erode seriously if we do not acknowledge and address those problems now. While overall student achievement is up, we must face the alarming achievement gap that still separates poorer minority Americans from better off white Americans. According to the State-by-State reading scores of fourth graders, in the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the achievement gap between African American and Caucasian American students actually grew larger in 16 States between 1992 and 1998, notwithstanding the billions of dollars we have sent back to the States and local districts to reduce that gap over the last 35 years. The gap between Hispanic American students and white American students became larger in nine States over the same period of time. Perhaps most alarming is the data that reveals that the average African American and Latino American 17- year-old has about the same reading and math skills as the average Caucasian American 13-year-old. That is an unfair and unacceptable outrage. We must do something about it. One recent report states: Students are being unconsciously eliminated from the candidate pool of Information Technology workers by the knowledge and attitudes they acquire in their K-12 years. Many students do not learn the basic skills of reasoning, mathematics, and communication that provide the foundation for higher education or entry-level jobs in Information Technology work. One cause of this, I am afraid, is that we have not done a very good job in recent years of providing more of our children with high-quality teachers, a critical component to higher student achievement. After all, what is education? Education is one person, the teacher, conveying knowledge and the ability to learn to another person, a younger person, a student. We are failing to deliver enough teachers to the classroom who truly know their subject matter. One national survey found that one-fourth of all secondary school teachers did not major in their core area of instruction. And note this. In terms of the inequity in the current system, in the school districts with the highest concentration of minority students, those students have less than a 50-percent chance of getting a math or science teacher who has a license or degree in those fields. So we are putting them behind before they even get started. While more money alone will not solve our problems, we cannot honestly expect to reform and reinvent our schools without more money either. The reality is, there is a tremendous need for the additional investment in our public schools, not just in urban areas but in every kind of community, including, of course, poorer rural communities. Not only are thousands of crumbling and overcrowded schools in need of modernization, but a looming shortage of 2 million new teachers to train and hire faces our country. Add to this billions in spiraling special education costs the local school districts have to meet and we can see we cannot really uphold our responsibility without sending more money back to the States and local school districts. Trying to raise standards at a time of profound social turbulence for our poorest families means we will need to expend new sums to reach and teach children who in the past, frankly, have never been asked to excel, whose failure was accepted--in some senses perhaps even encouraged--who in the present will have to overcome enormous hurdles to do better. At the same time that schools are trying to cope with new and complex societal changes, we are demanding that they teach more than they ever have before. Parents and potential employers both want better teachers, stronger standards, and higher test scores for all our students as well as state-of-the-art technology and skills to match. It is a tribute to the many dedicated men and women who are responsible for teaching our children every schoolday across America that the bulk of our schools are as good as they are today in light of these broader contextual and sociological pressures. I believe--and I believe it is a fundamental premise of our system of government in our education system--that any child can learn, any child. That has been proven over and over again in the best schools in my home State of Connecticut and in many of America's poorest cities and rural areas. There are, in fact, plenty of positives to highlight in public education today, which is something else we have to acknowledge, yet too often do not, as part of this debate. I have made a real effort over the last few years to visit a broad range of public schools and programs in Connecticut. I can tell you that there is much happening in our schools we can be heartened by, proud of, and learn from. There is the exemplary John Barry Elementary School in Meriden, CT, for instance, which has a very-high-poverty, high-mobility student population but, through intervention programs, has had remarkable success in improving the reading skills of many of its students. There is the Side By Side Charter School in Norwalk--1 of 17 charters in Connecticut--which has created an exemplary multicultural, multiracial program in response to the challenges of a State court decision, Sheff versus O'Neill, to diminish racial isolation and segregation in our schools. Side By Side is experimenting with a different approach to classroom assignments, having students stay with teachers for 2 consecutive years to take advantage of the relationships that develop. By all indications, it is working quite well for those kids. There is the Bridge Academy, which is a charter high school in Bridgeport, CT, formed, as so many of the most effective schools have been, by teachers from the public schools who wanted to go out and run their own schools to create the environment in which they believed they could best teach. It is a remarkable experience to visit this school in Bridgeport. I remember when I went to the students a second time a couple months ago. Some people criticize charter schools and say they skim off the best students from the other schools. The kids laughed. One of the young women there, high school age, said, ``I think you can say, Mr. Senator, that what you have before you is the worst students from the public high schools.'' She said, ``I will go one step further. If I remained at the high school I was attending, I would not be in the high school; I would have dropped out by now. I was going nowhere.'' But there was something about this school, the Bridge Academy, which, she said to me, maybe was the smaller class size, interestingly. ``Maybe it is the fact that we know the teachers here really care about us. We are like a family here. Whatever it is, I have worked very hard and I have done things I thought I was never able to do. I am going to college next year.'' That is a remarkable story. I don't have the number with me, but a great majority of the students graduating there are going to college next year. They will probably have the acceptance letter on the central bulletin board in the school. But that is occurring. In Connecticut, we have the BEST program, which is building on previous efforts to raise teacher skills and salaries. It is now targeting additional State aid and training and, most importantly, mentoring support to help local school districts bring in new teachers and prepare them to excel. It is very exciting to see the more senior teachers--the mentors--committing time, with little or no extra compensation, to help the younger teachers learn how to be good teachers. I think you have to say that is one of the reasons why Connecticut scores on the national tests have now gone to the top. It is one of the big reasons why they have, and it is why this BEST program of mentoring is cited by many groups, including the National Commission on Teaching in America's Future, as a model for us to follow. A number of other States, including, by most accounts, North Carolina and Texas, have moved in the same direction, refocusing their education systems, not on process but on performance, not on prescriptive rules and regulations but on results. More and more of them are, in fact, adopting what might be called a reinvest, reinvent and responsibility strategy by, first, infusing new resources into their public education system; second, giving local districts more flexibility; and, third, demanding new measures and mechanisms of accountability to increase the chances that these investments will yield the intended return, meaning improved academic achievement by more students. To ensure that more States and localities have the ability to build on these successes around the country and prepare every student to succeed in the classroom, which has to be our national objective, we must invest more resources. The amendment my colleagues and I are offering today would boost ESEA funding by $35 billion over the next 5 years. But we also believe that the impact of this funding will be severely diluted if it is not better targeted to the worst performing schools and if it is not coupled with a demand for results. That is why we not only increase title I funding for disadvantaged kids by 50 percent, but we use the more targeted formula for distributing those dollars to schools with the highest concentrations of poverty. That is why we develop a new accountability system that strips Federal funding from States that continually fail to meet their performance goals. I wish to highlight for a moment our formula changes in title I on the hope that they will draw some attention to an area I believe is very worthy of debate, which is how best to target funds to the poorest children, the disadvantaged, who are still being left behind in great numbers in our education system. Our formula distributes more of the new funding through the targeted grant formula enacted into law by Congress in 1994, which has never been funded by congressional appropriators. It is progressive, but there is no money in it. It ensures that no State will lose funds while providing for better targeting of new funds with those States with the highest rates of poverty. In other words, it has a hold harmless in the current level of funding under title I, but it takes the new money and targets it to those who need it most. I am calling for this targeting to the school districts receiving the highest percentage of poor children. We must face the fact that title I funds today are currently spread too thin to help the truly disadvantaged. According to a 1999 CRS report, title I grants are provided to approximately 90 percent of all local education agencies--way beyond what we would guess are the truly needy--and 58 percent of all public schools receive title I money. Federal funds for poor children are currently distributed through two grants known as the basic grant and the concentration grant. In order to be eligible for the basic grants, through which 85 percent of title I money is now distributed, local school districts only need to have 10 school age children from low-income families, and these children must constitute only 2 percent of the total school age population. I want to repeat that because it is so stunning. When I first read it, I went back to my staff and the documents to see if I had read it right. This is the result of, frankly, a political formula. In order to be eligible for basic grants, through which 85 percent of title I funds are distributed--it is supposed to help disadvantaged kids--local districts only need to have 10 school age children from low-income families, and those children must constitute only 2 percent of the school age population. You can see how that money, therefore, is being spread so thin that a lot of poor kids are not getting help and a lot of kids who are not so poor, from schools in which there are few poor kids, are receiving that money. Under the concentration grant, districts with a child poverty rate of 15 percent are eligible to receive funding. That is a little better but still minimal. With those low thresholds, we have to ask ourselves are we really living up to the original intent of the ESEA, which was to ensure that poor children have access to a quality education on the same level as more affluent children. I think the answer has to be, no, we are not. That is what the facts say. In fact, another number, which unsettled me even more, is one out of every five schools in America that has between 50 and 75 percent of its student body under the poverty level doesn't receive a dime of title I money. One out of every five schools in America that has half to three-quarters of its student population under the poverty level doesn't receive a dime of title I money, which is supposed to benefit exactly those children. I think we have to acknowledge that the current formula is not doing what it should be doing. It is a starting point and a way to draw our attention and resources back to the original intent of this act and the primary function of the Federal Government in education stated in 1965, which we are not fulfilling now, and that is to better educate economically disadvantaged children. In calling for a refocus of our Federal priorities, we who have sponsored this amendment agree with those concerned that the current system of Federal education grants are both too numerous and too bureaucratic, too prescriptive, and too strong on mandates from Washington. That is why this amendment eliminates dozens of federally microtargeted, micromanaged programs that are redundant or incidental to our core national mission of raising academic achievement. We also believe we have a great overriding national interest in promoting a few important education goals, and chief among them is delivering on the promise of equal opportunity. It is irresponsible, it seems to us, to hand out Federal dollars to the localities with no questions asked and no thought of national priorities. That is why we carve out separate titles in those areas that we think are critical to helping local districts elevate the performance of their schools. In other words, we consolidate almost 50 existing Federal categorical grant programs into the title I program for disadvantaged kids, the largest by far. And performance-based grant programs in which we state a national objective but give the local school district and the State the opportunity and the authority to work out their priorities are in meeting those objectives. The first of these is title I with more money, $12 billion--a 50- percent increase in better targeting. The second--a performance-based grant program--would combine various teacher training and professional development programs into a single teacher-quality grant, increase funding by 100 percent to $1.6 billion annually--the quality of our teachers is so important--and challenge each State to pursue the kind of bold, performance-based reforms, if it is their desire and choice, and higher salaries for teachers, as my own State of Connecticut has undertaken with great success and effect. The third performance-based grant program would reform the Federal Bilingual Education Program and hopefully diffuse the ongoing controversy surrounding it by making it absolutely clear that our national mission is to help immigrant children learn and master English, as well, of course, as to achieve high levels of achievement on all subjects. We must be willing to back this commitment with more resources--the resources that are essential to help ensure that all limited English-proficient students are served better and are not left behind, and that the gap between their knowledge and that of the majority does not grow larger in the years ahead as it has in the years immediately past. Under our approach, funding for limited English-proficient programs would be more than doubled to $1 billion a year and for the first time be distributed to States and local districts through a reliable formula based on the number of students who need help with their English proficiency. As a result, school districts serving large LEP--limited English-proficient--and high-poverty student populations would for the first time be guaranteed Federal funding and would not be penalized because of their inability to hire clever proposal writers for competitive grants. The fourth performance-based grant title would provide greater choice within the public school framework by authorizing additional funding for charter school startups and new incentives for expanding local, intradistrict public school choice programs. The fifth performance-based grant program in this amendment would establish and radically restructure the remaining ESEA and ensure that funds are much better targeted while giving local districts more flexibility. In this new title VI, our amendment would consolidate more than 20 different programs into a single, high-performance initiatives title with a focus on supporting bold new ideas, such as expanding access to summer school and afterschool programs, improving school safety, and building technological literacy, which is to say to close the looming digital divide in our country for our children before it gets deep and unfixable. We increase overall funding for these innovative programs by more than $200 million annually and distribute this aid through a formula that targets more resources for the highest poverty areas. The boldest changes we are proposing are in the new accountability title. As of today, we have plenty of rules and requirements on inputs, on how funding is to be allocated and who must be served, but little if any attention to outcomes on how schools ultimately perform in educating children. This amendment would reverse that imbalance by linking Federal funding to the progress State and local districts make in raising academic achievements. It would call on State and local leaders to set specific performance standards and adopt rigorous amendments for measuring how each district is faring and meeting these goals. In turn, States that exceed those goals would be rewarded with additional funds, and those that fail repeatedly to show progress would be penalized. In other words, for the first time there would be consequences for schools that perform poorly. In discussing how exactly to impose those consequences, we have run into understandable concerns about whether we can penalize failing schools and school systems without also hurting the children. The truth is we are hurting too many children right now, especially the most economically and sociologically vulnerable of them, by forcing them to attend chronically troubled schools that are accountable to no one--a situation that is just not acceptable anymore. Our amendment minimizes the potential negative impact of these consequences on students. It provides the States with 3 years to set their performance-based goals and put in place a monitoring system for gauging how local districts are progressing. It also provides additional resources for States to help school districts identify and then improve low- performing schools. If after those 3 years the State is still failing to meet its goals, the State would be cut in its administrative funding by 50 percent. Only after 4 years of underperformance would dollars targeted for the classroom through the new title VI be put in jeopardy. At that point, protecting kids by continuing to subsidize bad schools honestly becomes more like punishing them. I want to point out that at no point would our proposal cut title I funding, or the largest part of ESEA--the part focused on the needs of our poorest children. Another concern that may be raised is that these performance-based grants are open-ended block grants in sheep's clothing. There are substantial differences between a straight block-grant approach and our performance-based grant proposal. First, in most block grant proposals, the accountability mechanisms are often nonexistent or, if they are, they are quite vague. Our bill would have tangible consequences pegged not just to raising test scores in the more affluent areas, but to closing the troubling achievement gap between them and students in the poor, largely minority districts. We believe our amendment embraces a commonsense strategy--reinvest in our public schools, reinvent the way we run them, and restore a sense of responsibility in our schools to the children who we are supposed to be educating and to their parents. Hence the title of our bill, ``The Public Education Reinvention, Reinvestment, and Responsibility Act,'' which we call RRR for short. I guess you could say our approach in this amendment is modest enough to recognize that there are no easy answers, particularly not from the Federal Government, for turning around low-performing schools, to lifting teaching standards, to closing the debilitating achievement gap, and that most of those answers won't be found in Washington anyway. But our proposal is bold enough to try to harness our unique ability to set the national agenda and recast the Federal Government as an active catalyst for educational success instead of a passive enabler of failure. Finally, this debate raises again for all of us in the Senate the basic question: Did we come here to produce or to posture? Are we going to be practical or are we going to be partisan? At this moment, when our constituents seem to be telling us everywhere in the country that the deed they most want us to do is to help reform the public schools of this country, are we going to be content with a debate that does not produce a bill? At this moment, the apparent answers to these questions are not encouraging. But there is still time. And we hope this amendment can be the path to bipartisan discussions, compromises, and ultimately educational reform. I thank my colleagues who are cosponsors of this bill for the contributions that each and every one of them has made. I urge my fellow Members of the Senate in the time ahead to take the time to look at our proposal with an open mind--nobody will like every part of it-- and to see if there is enough here to form the basis of a bridge that a significant majority of us can walk across to achieve a bipartisan reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. I thank the Chair. I thank my colleagues. I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I wanted to bring to the attention of my colleagues an important letter dated March 22, 2000 sent to our Senate leadership by forty-seven leaders of our high technology companies, universities and labor organizations who are members of the highly-respected Council on Competitiveness. The letter argues for a significant increase in federal Research and Development funding as key to our economic future. It also points out that much of the current technology talent shortage Congress has been spending so much time on could be alleviated through increased R&D support, since that funding supports our technology education and training system. It is frankly unique in my Senate experience to see a letter signed by such a significant segment of our nation's technology leaders and I hope the Senate will heed its counsel. This letter comes to us in the context of the recently passed Budget Resolution which calls for a small increase in federal investments in science and technology over last year's levels. I believe that a strong bipartisan majority of the Senate would agree that more is needed. Past investments in research, made in all scientific disciplines and supporting work performed in universities, industry, and government labs, have been the driving force for creating the technologies that have driven our high tech economic boom, preserved our national security, and created fantastic new advances in medical care. The Senate has recognized this, and last year passed the Federal Research Investment Act (S. 296) unanimously--legislation which had 42 bipartisan cosponsors and which calls for a doubling of funding for civilian science and technology over the next decade. I note that this year the Administration has submitted an aggressive program for civilian science investments for many key agencies, consistent with both the spirit and text of the Senate's legislation, and with the points made in the letter. In particular, I want to call attention to the Administration's efforts to restore balance to the federal research portfolio by aggressively funding work in the physical sciences and engineering, through programs at the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy. Consistent with the March 22nd message sent to us by our country's technology leadership, I hope the Congressional Appropriations Committees will be able to support critical civilian federal Research and Development programs at least at the levels called for in the FY01 Administration Budget Request. This investment, administered by the National Science Foundation, National Institutes of Health, Department of Energy, National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and other agencies, funds university, government lab, and industrial efforts to develop the technologies that energize our economy and protect our health. I also hope the Congress will increase funding for the Department of Defense's Science and Technology program--whose products are critical to our security. Defense science and technology has in the past given us the technologies--including stealth, advanced computing, the Global Positioning System, and precision munitions--that have provided our defense technology edge and led to our victories in the Gulf and Kosovo. These investments have been drastically reduced over the years--risking both our national security and our technological leadership in a variety of key physical sciences and engineering disciplines. On April 5th, I and the other members of the Senate Science and Technology Caucus had the opportunity to learn about an example of excellent federally-funded science--the fantastic new world of nanotechnology--from a group of world renowned academics and industrial researchers. Investments in nanotechnology will help create the systems that will shrink microelectronics down to the scale of atoms and molecules and create entire chemistry labs on a single computer chip, potentially leading to a technology revolution along the lines of those generated by the transistor and the Internet. One of my constituents, Professor Mark Reed of Yale University, is already taking steps to turn federal investments in fundamental nanotechnology research into technologies that will enhance our nation's productivity. He recently announced the creation of a single molecule electronic switch, using a chemical process called ``self-assembly.'' A nano-scale switch is a breakthrough that may lead to huge performance improvements in digital electronics. Professor Reed has just established a new company aiming to move the integrated electronics world into the era of molecular manufacturing, by making the building blocks of computer circuits out of single molecules. But these kinds of commercial ventures and the resulting gains in productivity and economic growth that result will only occur if the federal government maintains and increases its investments in science and technology. The Internet, the Human Genome Project, the Space Shuttle, miracle drugs, and global telecommunications networks are but a few examples of what previous investments by the federal government in science and technology have generated. Current work in nanotechnology and other fields supported by sufficient and stable federal investments can also lead to developments that will affect and improve our lives in ways we cannot imagine today. Congress will soon enter the annual Appropriations cycle and I hope that our Appropriations Committee and Subcommittee leaders over the course of this session can work together in a bipartisan fashion to insure that we adequately invest in our nation's technological future. I ask unanimous consent that the March 22nd letter from the Council on Competitiveness members be printed in the Record in full immediately following my remarks. The letter demonstrates to the Congress that our constituents and the leaders of our high-tech industries and institutions are calling for more far aggressive action in increasing Federal support for science and technology research.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, the first anniversary of the Columbine massacre has been a time for great contemplation and reflection-- contemplation of the horror and tragedy of that event, and reflection on what has become of the safety and security so many of us once took for granted. From Paducah, Kentucky, to Jonesboro, Arkansas, to Springfield, Oregon, to Mount Morris Township, Michigan, to Littleton, Colorado, the surreal has too often become mortally real. Senseless, horrific and seemingly random gun violence has invaded all corners of our nation. These incidents have shattered our collective sense of security. What's worse, they have done so with respect to the very places where we and our children have the right to feel most secure: our schools and our places of worship. There are many facets to this problem--a media culture that desensitizes our children to violence, a feeling of hopelessness that invades too many of our children and the often too easy accessibility of firearms. We must address all of these problems, and I hope we soon will start to do so by taking action on the long-stalled juvenile justice bill with its several sensible gun-safety provisions and its measures aimed at the culture of violence surrounding our children. But there is one more thing we can do for ourselves and our children: restore a sense of sanctuary and safe haven to spaces where guns have no place. Ask parents, educators or congregants, and they'll say every community is entitled to at least a few sites of sanctuary, where they can honor their families and their God without fearing for their safety or their lives. But the reality is that at least 22 states permit gun owners to carry concealed weapons into places of worship, and many allow them at school events off campus. Why does anyone other than a law enforcement or security officer need to carry a firearm into these spaces? Why at this moment of such concern about gun violence do we want to add to it the potential for more terror and tragedy in what should be our safest places? Why after at least a dozen shootings in American churches and synagogues over the last five years do we want to invite another? Making clear that guns have no place in what are supposed to be sanctuaries would put the law on the right side of reason. It would help diminish the odds that another Columbine is around the corner. And it would reassure the American people that it is possible for us to come together on common ground to fight this threat to our safety and security. With these thoughts in mind, and with the Million Mom March against gun violence soon to occur in Washington, I am today joining a coalition of more than 25 Members in submitting a resolution expressing our support for prohibitions on firearms in schools, scholastic settings, and places of worship. This resolution would make a clear statement that, like most Americans, we in the Senate believe that Saturday Night Specials do not belong in Sunday School classes or any other place where families are learning, playing or praying. This in the end is not an ideological or constitutional issue, but a question of common sense. We can respect the rights of law-abiding gun owners while also acknowledging that bullets and Bibles don't mix. This is not a hard line to take. Nor should it be a hard line to draw, in order to provide safe havens for our families. It is time for the Senate to go on record and say that there are certain places in our society that must be safe havens from even the threat of violence, spaces where we and our children can go to pray and play with the confidence that safety and security will follow. I urge my colleagues to join me in supporting this resolution.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise to explain my opposition to the Senate Budget Committee's resolution for FY2001. How unfortunate that during these great economic times, my Republican colleagues have outlined a fiscal policy that will squander our hard earned on-budget surplus on misguided economic priorities. Instead of using our on- budget surplus to make important investments for our economic future, this plan calls for large tax cuts that will devour nearly all of our on-budget surplus. Simply put, the budget we are considering today does not reflect my economic priorities of fiscal discipline and wise investment in our people in order to ensure that all Americans participate in our history's greatest economic expansion. The committee's budget makes unrealistic assumptions about the level of discretionary spending for the next five years and assumes that the projected surplus will materialize to pay for a large tax cut. The Budget Resolution provides for FY2001 $596 billion for total discretionary spending. When defense discretionary spending is taken out, there is a ten percent across the board cut from FY2000 spending levels. This means that important investments in our economic future will not be made. For example, 20,000 new teachers will not be hired. Subsidies and grants for school construction to 5,000 schools would be eliminated and 62,000 students will not be able to participate in Head Start. Instead, the Republican budget calls for a $150 to $200 billion tax cut over five years. When an additional $17 billion is added for servicing the larger national debt created by the tax cut, the Republican tax plan will consume at least $168 billion of the $170 billion CBO projected on-budget surplus. Moreover, at a time when the Federal Reserve is already nervous about inflation and has been raising interest rates to protect against higher inflation, a tax cut will only increase inflationary pressure. At this time of strong growth I cannot see a benefit to a tax cut other than that it serves as a consumption subsidy. By assuming unrealistic spending levels and using the surplus for a large tax cut, this budget leaves no funding for debt reduction. It only dedicates $1 billion for debt reduction in FY2001. If the on- budget surplus funds were used to service the debt, the result would be less inflationary pressure and lower interest rates--a de facto tax cut for all Americans, not just the wealthiest Americans. Paying down the debt would also reflect a commitment to fiscal discipline. After we have worked so hard to balance the budget, it seems only reasonable that it should stay balanced and that we use the surplus funds to benefit our economy not hurt it. This budget does not promote savings and reduce the growing income and wealth gaps in our economy. The budget proposed by the majority party does not take advantage of our booming economy to rectify some of our greatest economic inequalities. The economic expansion that began in April, 1991 is the longest in American history. It is now more than 9 years old and shows few signs letting up. Both inflation and unemployment remain remarkably low. The key to economic vitality, worker productivity, hit a 7 year high last year. This expansion is being fueled by combination of new and old economy fundamentals, technological innovation and fiscal discipline. Along with this phenomenal economy we would expect to see the circle of opportunity expanding to include many more Americans. But we do not. Despite this historic era of growth, we are seeing the opposite--a growing gulf between the have and have nots, with more Americans falling further behind and out of the economic mainstream. As we have celebrated continued economic successes, we have scarcely noticed a swelling opportunity gap that is as much about wealth as it is about income. Several recent studies have documented a growing income gap in the U.S.--an increasing income disparity between the rich and poor with declining incomes for both poor and low-income families. In addition to that income gap, a report released recently by the Federal Reserve Bank, has identified a significant wealth gap in this country. A gap where the net worth--or assets--of the typical American family has risen substantially since 1989, while the net worth--or assets--of lower income families has actually declined during the economic boom of recent years. According to the Fed report, families earning under $10,000 a year had a median net worth of $1,900 in 1989. That climbed to $4,800 in 1995, but had slipped back to $3,600 by 1998. Those families earning $10,000 to $25,000 saw their net worth drop from $31,000 in 1995 to $24,800 in 1998. More specifically, while the percent of all U.S. families that own a home or business has risen during the boom years of 1995-98, the percent among lower income families has decreased. For example, in 1995, 36.1% of families earning under $10,000 annually owned their home. By 1998 the rate had dropped to 34.5%. The drop for families earning $10,000 to $25,000 was from 54.9% to 51.7%. The same story is true for the percent of lower income families owning a business. Other recent studies show that this wealth gap is even more profound in certain parts of our society. We also know that wealth accumulation is generational; it runs in families. According to some studies, up to 50% of all household wealth is passed down from generation to generation. If this trend is not corrected, we are putting at risk some of the very fundamentals of the American Dream--essential values like home ownership and the small, family-owned business. But closing the wealth gap is not just an issue of opportunity and fairness. If this trend is not corrected, we also put at risk future economic growth. We must begin to question how sustainable is our economy if its growth continues to elude so many. How many potential entrepreneurs are we leaving behind and to what extent are we limiting our future economic growth by doing so? We can take steps to address this wealth gap and expand economic opportunity. One innovative and powerful approach to help low-income, working families save and develop the assets they need to get ahead and thrive in the new economy is Individual Development Accounts, or IDAs. Similar to Individual Retirement Accounts, IDAs are incentive-based savings accounts that can be opened and used only for specific, predetermined purposes. Deposits into an IDA by an account holder are matched dollar for dollar through public and private funding. The matching funds are held in a parallel account until the account holder completes a financial education course and saves enough to purchase an asset. Low income individuals and families may use their IDA to purchase a home, start a small business, or seek postsecondary education--to pursue the American Dream. Currently, there are nearly 250 IDA programs across the country with approximately 5,000 account holders. The early evidence from these programs is convincing. It shows that IDAs are highly effective in promoting savings and asset building among the working poor. In less than two years, 1,300 account holders in the largest national IDA program saved more than $375,000 and leveraged an additional $740,000 in matching funds. Participants made an average deposit of just $33 a month. The majority of account holders are women. Twenty percent of account holders had never even held a bank account before enrolling in the IDA program. In the new economy, where job churn is the norm and individuals are increasingly responsible for funding their own retirements, wealth- building assets are rapidly becoming the main source of economic security. IDAs can give millions of low income working families, parents, their children, and future generations, an opportunity for upward mobility and economic stability. By proposing such a large and unrealistic tax cut, the majority will make it harder to resource our military at the level it will need to maintain its battlefield capability today and begin the difficult and costly process to transform the force into one that can counter the kinds of threats we are likely to see in the future. We have worked very hard over several years to raise the defense budget to ensure our soldiers, sailors, and airmen are fairly and adequately compensated for their unique and arduous sacrifices to protect our freedoms. The President has also proposed a budget that increases procurement spending to $60 billion, a level that the Quadrennial Defense Review deemed necessary in 1997, but until this year was not achievable. Indeed, the President's proposed budget increases defense over the previous years' budget in real terms for the first time since 1985, and keeps us on a path to modernize our current force and transform it in later years. Although the rhetoric of this Resolution would increase spending over the President's budget this year and in the immediate out years, we can only hope that it will allow us to transform our military over the long term because the huge tax cut that is being proposed will most likely squash our superiority in readiness and technology in the long term. As more than one military commander has noted, hope is not a method. The majority wants to provide a large tax cut and talk the talk of strong defense. Unfortunately, they will not be able to have it both ways, and given a choice, we should all vote against such a large tax cut, and walk the walk with responsible defense spending now and in the future. We are at a critical time in our society where more young people, particularly minorities and low-income individuals, are being left behind in the new economy because they are not learning the basic skills of reasoning, mathematics, and communication that provide the foundation for higher education or entry-level jobs in high tech work. The committee's budget fails to invest the level of resources necessary to ensure that all of our children are adequately prepared to compete in this challenging marketplace. While more money alone won't solve our problems, we cannot honestly expect to reinvent our schools without it either. The reality is that there is a tremendous need for additional investment in our public schools, not just in urban areas but in every kind of community. Not only are thousands of crumbling and overcrowded schools in need of modernization, but a looming shortage of two million new teachers to hire and train lurks on the horizon. Add to this, billions in spiraling special education costs to meet. During the upcoming debate on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization, several of my colleagues and I will offer a reform proposal, which concentrates our national efforts on closing the achievement gap between the haves and have-nots, fostering English proficiency for immigrant children, improving the quality of teaching for all children, promoting choice and competition within the public system, and stimulating innovative and high performance educational initiatives. We would ask the states to set performance standards in each of these areas, and in exchange for the funding and flexibility, we would--for the first time ever--hold states accountable for delivering demonstrable results. The Function 300 account of the budget--the function that funds core environmental and conservation projects--contains some important increases in funding for particular programs, but suffers from the overall cuts in discretionary spending. While I support additional funding for water infrastructure projects and land management, I remain concerned that core programs of the Environmental Protection Agency are suffering unjustified cuts. Discretionary decreases can substantially undermine clean-ups at Superfund sites, review of pesticide tolerances under the Food Quality Protection Act, and ongoing work to identify air toxics. I am particularly concerned that the Senate mark includes $1.2 billion in assumed revenues from oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. These revenues are fiscally irresponsible, as drilling is not in place to bring in net receipts over the five year time frame of the budget. More importantly, I, like the majority of the American public, am opposed to drilling in the Refuge as it would irreversibly damage a critical national ecological treasure. A responsible strategy would be to set aside about one-third of the surplus during this period of growth to pay for a drug benefit, to strengthen Medicare against the future, and to address the desperate condition of many facilities in Connecticut and other states. The approach of the Republican majority saves about 2% of the on-budget surplus, and uses the rest to fund new tax breaks. If this budget passes, the Medicare program will have $331 billion less--$331 billion less to cover drug benefits for our seniors, $331 billion less to keep hospitals and nursing homes open, and $331 billion that our children will have to pay. Our past investments in research, made in all scientific disciplines and supporting work performed in universities, industry, and government labs, have been the driving force for creating the technologies that have driven our high tech economic boom, preserved our national security, and created fantastic new advances in medical care. Yet, this budget resolution calls for only a small increase in federal investments in science and technology over last year's levels. This budget resolution presents a timid and incremental approach to innovation, even though the Senate has recognized the importance of research and development and last year passed the Federal Research Investment Act unanimously--which called for a doubling of funding for civilian science and technology over the next decade. Unfortunately, the small increase in the budget resolution does not match the administration's aggressive program for civilian science investments, nor the spirit of the Senate's own legislation, for many key agencies. In particular, I support the Administration's efforts to restore balance to the federal research portfolio by aggressively funding work in the physical sciences and engineering, through programs at the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy. A number of my colleagues and I are introducing a Sense of the Senate Resolution which calls for funding science at increasing levels each year in order to achieve a goal of doubling the federal investment in civilian R&D over an eleven year period, as well as for annually increasing funding of the Department of Defense's Science and Technology program--whose products are critical to the safety of our nation's warfighters. In conclusion, Mr. President, I would like to support a budget resolution that more closely reflects sound budget and economic priorities. It should be a budget plan that follows the policy of fiscal discipline and strategic investment that achieved and has sustained our current economic expansion. Unfortunately, this resolution does not and it will only lead us back into deficit.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to clarify the intent of a Sense of the Senate amendment we passed earlier today regarding the Census. That amendment, which we passed unanimously, expressed the sense of the Senate that Americans should not be prosecuted, fined or harassed for not answering certain Census questions. At the same time, the amendment expresses our encouragement that all Americans should fill out and send back their Census forms. I want to emphasize that there has not been a prosecution for failing to fill out the Census in decades. The American people should not fear the Census; we should fear an incomplete or inaccurate count due to lack of participation. The Constitution requires an enumeration of our population every 10 years. While the data the Census Bureau collects are used for purposes of apportionment of the House and redistricting, this information is also used to help determine funding for thousands of Federal, state and local programs that benefit all Americans. Moreover, the law requires Census forms to be kept confidential for 72 years--not only from the public but from all other government agencies. We should support the Census Bureau in its effort to carry out this massive task. I encourage every resident to fill out and send back his or her census form and to cooperate with census-takers or enumerators who will be in the neighborhoods in the coming weeks. I also want to make clear that the amendment is not intended to impede census-takers or enumerators in appropriate followup actions they may need to undertake.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to join the distinguished Senator from Delaware in voicing my strenuous objections to opening the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration, and in urging our colleagues not to sacrifice this natural wonder at the altar of short- term economic expediency. I recognize that ANWR is once again a tempting target at this moment of record high oil and gasoline prices and low consumer patience. Proponents of drilling, as they have many times before, hold out the promise of a quick fix to this recent price spike and a long-term solution to our dependence on foreign oil. They go so far as to portray the refuge as a kind of energy security blanket that will protect us from the whims of foreign producers. But appealing as that sounds, the truth remains that ANWR is not the answer to our current oil woes. Opening this pristine place of wilderness to drilling will not bring down gas prices months or years from now, let alone in the immediate future. And it will not yield anywhere near the amount of crude needed to successfully wean us from our addiction to OPEC in years to come. What it will do, we know from plenty of analysis and experience, is immeasurable and irreversible damage to one of the last pure preserves of its kind in the world and one of G-d's most awesome creations. That is the real price at issue here, and it is far too high to pay for the modest benefit it will bring to our domestic oil supply and to those who produce it. I would suggest to my colleagues that ``modest'' is a generous characterization. The fact is that we have no guarantees about the potential recovery of oil in ANWR. More than 20 different independent and federal studies have been completed on the amount of oil in ANWR, and estimates vary wildly. One of those, completed during the Reagan Administration, determined that there was only a one in five chance of finding any commercially recoverable oil at all. More recently, an assessment by the U.S. Geological Survey estimates that 5.2 billion barrels of oil would be ``economically recoverable'' from the refuge for the rest of its life. Compared against projections of the potential for an aggressive program to produce biomass ethanol to displace oil-- 2.5 million barrels per day by 2030 and over 3 million per day in 2035--the oil promise of the Refuge is minuscule. The Refuge would probably never meet more than a negligible percentage of our Nation's energy needs at any given time. In exchange for this minimal return, we would threaten one of the most unique animal and plant habitats in the world. Consider the fate of the Porcupine Caribou Herd, for which the Coastal Plain within the refuge is an important calving ground. An Environmental Impact Statement issued by the Interior Department in 1995 shows that development of ANWR will likely have significant negative effects on the PCH, displacing them to areas of higher predator density, reducing the amount and quality of forage species available during calving, and restricting the animals' access to areas where they can get relief from insects. Experts predict similar risks await polar bears, muskoxen, brown bears, snow geese, wolves, seals, and whales. That is if all goes well with the drilling, which is not a safe assumption. Data from the Alaska Department of Conservation show that the Trans-Alaska and Prudhoe Bay oil fields have caused an average of 427 spills annually since 1996. The most common spills involve crude and diesel oil, but more than 40 substances, from acid to waste oil, could be released. What is more, current oil operations in Alaska's North Slope emits about 56,427 tons of nitrous oxides, which contribute to smog and acid rain, and about 24,000 tons of methane, a greenhouse gas, per year. Drilling for more oil in ANWR thus compounds the serious problem of global climate change, generating methane emissions in addition to the carbon dioxide emissions that result from increased dependence on oil resources. It is this lopsided tradeoff--uncertain dividends for likely devastation--that has generated cries of outrage from practically every environmental group every time Congress has attempted to open ANWR to drilling, generated several veto threats from President Clinton, and prompted editorials in newspapers from Seattle to Tampa to Des Moines to Atlanta questioning the wisdom of such a move. It was not right then, it's not right now, and it won't be right come the next price spike. Nor is it right to mislead the public into thinking a quick fix exists. The reality is we don't have any easy answers to our foreign oil addiction. There is no untapped domestic oil oasis out there that will end our dependence on foreign oil and minimize our vulnerability to fluctuations of the global market. But that is not to say we are helpless. In fact, there are several steps we as a nation could take over the next year that would go a long way toward curing our OPEC addiction. The solution, I would argue to my colleagues, is nurturing alternative energy sources and improving our energy efficiency. First, we should invest more in exploring the power potential of wind and geothermal energy, fuel cells, and organic materials, and developing long-range strategies for harnessing these renewable energy sources. We have made a good start this year by passing legislation sponsored by Senator Lugar to spur more research into harvesting energy from common crops. I hope we will build on that progress by adopting the President's budget recommendation of increased funding for research, development, and deployment of renewable energy technologies by 30 percent. Second, we should take stock of the domestic energy market and evaluate national and individual consumer decisions affecting our own energy supply and efficiency. In some areas the results are encouraging. As the President has noted, conservation measures taken by U.S. businesses have significantly improved the efficiency of the overall economy. During the crisis of the 1970s, nearly nine percent of our GDP was spent on oil, compared with only three percent today. But we can and should do better. The promise of this approach was spelled out in detail by leading experts at a recent hearing held by the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. To cite just one example, Dr. John Holdren, the Director of the Program on Science, Technology, and Public Policy at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, and Chairman of the President's Committee of Advisors on Science and Technology, stated that if the U.S. increases its efficiency by 2.2 percent per year, it could reduce its dependence on oil by more than 50 percent, approximately 5.5 million barrels of oil per day. This goal is more than realistic, for as Dr. Holdren noted, the U.S. decreased its energy intensity by 1.7 percent from 1972 to 1979 and by 3.2 percent from 1979 to 1982. In short, we don't have to defile the Alaskan wilderness to declare our energy independence. Assaulting ANWR is bad energy policy, it's even worse environmental policy, and it's simply not necessary to help the American consumer and protect our economy. For that reason, I implore my colleagues to once again stand as firm as the tundra and uphold the ban on drilling in the Arctic Refuge.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, with deference to my friend and colleague from Louisiana, I am going to be brief. Mr. President, I rise today in support of the amendment offered by my colleague, Senator Graham. This amendment would set aside and protect $15 billion over the next five years, holding funds in reserve so that resources are available once legislation reuathorizing ESEA is enacted. The amendment adds that to qualify for funds, ESEA reauthorization must contain a few fundamental elements: (1) increased accountability; (2) the ability of States and localities to set high student performance standards; (3) the targeting of funds to the most impoverished areas and schools most in need of improvement; and (4) the concentration of Federal resources on key national goals of compensatory education for disadvantaged children, teacher quality, innovative education strategies, serving limited English proficient students, student safety, and educational technology. During the upcoming debate on ESEA, I will join with several of my colleagues in offering a new approach that meets these qualifications. It is an approach that would refocus our national policy on helping States and local school districts raise academic achievement for all children, putting the priority for Federal programs on performance instead of process, and on delivering results instead of developing rules. Our approach calls on States and local districts to enter into a new compact with the Federal Government to work together to strengthen standards and improve educational opportunities, particularly for America's poorest children. It would provide States and local educators with significantly more Federal funding and significantly more flexibility in targeting aid to meet the specific needs. In exchange; it would demand real accountability, and for the first time impose consequences on schools that continually fail to show progress. In order to implement effective educational policy, we have to first recognize that there are serious problems with the performance of many public schools, and that public confidence in public education will continue to erode if we do not acknowledge and address those problems soon. While student achievement is up, we must realize the alarming achievement gap that separates minorities from whites and low-income students from their more affluent counterparts. According to the State- by-State reading scores of fourth graders on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the achievement gap between African American and white students grew in 16 States between 1992 and 1998. The gap between Hispanic and white students grew in nine States over the same period of time. Most alarmingly, student data reveals that the average African- American and Latino 17-year-old has about the same reading and math skills as the average white 13-year-old. We must also question whether our schools are adequately preparing our youth to enter the globally competitive market place when, as one report states, ``Students are being unconsciously eliminated from the candidate pool of Information Technology (IT) workers by the knowledge and attitudes in their K-12 years. Many students do not learn the basic skills of reasoning, mathematics and communication that provide the foundation for higher education or entry-level jobs in IT work.'' We also have to acknowledge that we have done a very good job in recent years in providing every child with a well-qualified teacher, a critical component to higher student achievement. We are failing to deliver teachers to the classroom who truly know their subject matter-- one national survey found that one-fourth of all secondary school teachers did not major in their core area of instruction, and that in the school districts with the highest concentration of minorities, students have less than a 50 percent chance of getting a math or science teacher who has a license or a degree in their field. While more money alone will not solve our problems, we cannot honestly expect to reinvent our schools without it either. The reality is that there is a tremendous need for additional investment in our public schools, not just in urban areas but in every kind of community. Not only are thousands of crumbling and overcrowded schools in need of modernization, but a looming shortage of two million new teachers to hire and train lurks on the horizon. Add to this, billions in spiraling special education costs to meet. We also have to recognize the basic math of trying to raise standards at a time of profound social turbulence that we will need to expend new sums to reach and teach children who in the past we never asked to excel, and who in the present will have to overcome enormous hurdles to do so. At the same time that schools are trying to cope with new and complex societal changes, we are demanding that they teach more than they ever have before. Employers and parents alike what better teachers, stronger standards, and higher test scores for all students, as well as state-of-the-art technology and skills to match. It is a tribute to the many dedicated men and women who are responsible for teaching our children that the bulk of our schools are as good as they are, in light of these intensifying pressures. I believe any child can learn--any child--and that has been proven over and over again in the best schools in both my home state of Connecticut and in many of America's cities. There are, in fact, plenty of positives to highlight in public education today, which is something else that we have to acknowledge, yet too often do not. I have made a concerted effort over the last few years to visit a broad range of schools and programs in Connecticut, and I can tell you that there is much happening in our public schools that we can be heartened by, proud of, and learn from. There is the exemplary John Barry Elementary School in Meriden, CT, which has to contend with a high-poverty, high-mobility student population, but through intervention programs has had real success improving the reading skills of many of its students. In addition, there is the Side by Side Charter School in Norwalk, one of 17 charter schools in Connecticut, which has created an exemplary multiracial program in response to the challenge of Sheff v. O'Neill to diminish racial isolation. Side by Side is experimenting with a different approach to classroom assignments, having students stay with teachers for two consecutive years to take advantage of the relationships that develop, and by all indications it is working quite well for those kids. And there is the BEST program, which, building on previous efforts to raise teacher skills and salaries, is now targeting additional state aid, training, and mentoring support to help local districts nurture new teachers and prepare them to excel. The result is that Connecticut's blueprint is touted by some, including the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, as a national model for others to follow. A number of other States, led by Texas and North Carolina, are moving in this same direction--refocusing their education systems not on process but on performance, not on prescriptive rules and regulations but on results. More and more of them are in fact adopting what might be called a ``reinvest, reinvent, and responsibility'' strategy, by (1) infusing new resources into their public education systems; (2) giving local districts more flexibility; and (3) demanding new measures and mechanisms of accountability, to increase the chances that these investments will yield the intended return, meaning improved academic achievement for all students. To ensure that more States and localities have the ability to build on these successes and prepare student to succeed in the classroom, we must invest more resources. That is why we would boost ESEA funding by $35 billion over the next five years. But we also believe that the impact of this funding will be severely diluted if it is not better targeted to the worst-performing schools and if it is not coupled with a demand for results. That is why we not only increase Title I funding by 50 percent, but use a more targeted formula for distributing these new dollars to schools with the highest concentrations of poverty. And that is why we develop a new accountability system that strips federal funding from states that continually fail to meet their performance goals. We also agree with those concerned with the current system that federal education programs are too numerous and too bureaucratic. That is why we eliminate dozens of federally microtargeted, micromanaged programs that are redundant or incidental to our core mission of raising academic achievement. But we also believe that we have a great national interest in promoting broad national educational goals, chief among them delivering on the promise of equal opportunity. It is not only foolish, however, but irresponsible to hand out federal dollars with no questions asked and no thought of national priorities. That is why we carve out separate titles in those areas that we think are critical to helping local districts elevate the performance of their schools. The first would enhance our longstanding commitment to providing extra help to disadvantaged children through the title I program, while better targeting $12 billion in aid--a 50 percent increase in funding-- to schools with the highest concentrations of poor students. The second would combine various teacher training and professional development programs into a single teacher quality grant, increase funding by 100 percent to $1.6 billion annually, and challenge each state to pursue the kind of bold, performance-based reforms that my own state of Connecticut has undertaken with great success. The third would reform the Federal bilingual education program and hopefully defuse the ongoing controversy surrounding it by making absolutely clear that our national mission is to help immigrant children learn and master English, as well as achieve high levels of achievement in all subjects. We must be willing to back this commitment with essential resources required to help ensure that all limited English proficient students are served. Under our approach, funding for LEP programs would be more than doubled to $1 billion a year, and for the first time be distributed to states and local districts through a reliable formula, based on their LEP student population. As a result, school districts serving large LEP and high poverty student populations would be guaranteed federal funding, and would not be penalized because of their inability to hire savvy proposal writers for competitive grants. The fourth would respond to the public demands for greater choice within the public school framework, by providing additional resources for charter school start-ups and new incentives for expanding local, intradistrict choice programs. And the fifth would radically restructure the remaining ESEA and ensure that funds are much better targeted while giving local districts greater flexibility in addressing specific needs. We consolidate more than 20 different programs into a single High Performance Initiatives title, with a focus on supporting bold new ideas, expanding access to summer school and after school programs, improving school safety, and building technological literacy. We increase overall funding by more than $200 million, and distribute this aid through a formula that targets more resources to the highest poverty areas. The boldest change we are proposing is to create a new accountability title. As of today, we have plenty of rules and requirements on inputs, on how funding is to be allocated and who must be served, but little if any attention to outcomes, on how schools ultimately perform in educating children. This bill would reverse that imbalance by linking Federal funding to the progress States and local districts make in raising academic achievement. It would call on State and local leaders to set specific performance standards and adopt rigorous assessments for measuring how each district is faring in meeting those goals. In turn, States that exceed those goals would be rewarded with additional funds, and those that fail repeatedly to show progress would be penalized. In other words, for the first time, there would be consequences for poor performance. In discussing how exactly to impose those consequences, we have run into understandable concerns about whether you can penalize failing schools without also penalizing children. The truth is that we are punishing many children right now, especially the most vulnerable of them, by forcing them to attend chronically troubled schools that are accountable to no one, a situation that is just not acceptable anymore. This bill minimizes the potential negative impact of these consequences on students. It provides the States with three years to set their performance-based goals and put in place a monitoring system for gauging how local districts are progressing, and also provides additional resources for States to help school districts identify and improve low-performing schools. If after those three years a State is still failing to meet its goals, the State would be penalized by cutting its administrative funding by 50 percent. Only after 4 years of under performance would dollars targeted for the classroom be put in jeopardy. At that point, protecting kids by continuing to subsidize bad schools becomes more like punishing them. I must address another concern that may be raised that this is a block grant in sheep's clothing. There are substantial differences between a straight block-grant approach and this streamlined structure. First, in most block-grant proposals the accountability mechanisms are vague, weak and often non-existent, which is one reason why I have opposed them in the Senate. Our bill would have tangible consequences, pegged not just to raise test scores in the more affluent suburban areas, but to closing the troubling achievement gap between students in poor, largely minority districts and their better-off peers. It is a commonsense strategy--reinvest in our public schools, reinvent the way we administer them, and restore a sense of responsibility to the children we are supposed to be serving. Hence the title of our bill: the Public Education Reinvention, Reinvestment, and Responsibility Act, or the Three Rs for short. Our approach is humble enough to recognize there are no easy answers to turning around low- performing schools, to lifting teaching standards, to closing the debilitating achievement gap, and that most of those answers won't be found here in Washington anyway. But it is ambitious enough to try to harness our unique ability to set the national agenda and recast the federal government as an active catalyst for success instead of a passive enabler of failure. I am pleased to support the Graham amendment which will ensure we have the necessary resources in reserve to provide for the kind of education reform that I have outlined. Reauthorization of the status quo is not the answer. We need real reform that concentrates resources around central national goals, targets those resources to the most impoverished areas and schools in greatest need, and holds States and localities to a new, higher standard of accountability for results in raising student academic achievement. I am pleased to support the Graham amendment which will ensure we have the necessary resources in reserve to provide for the kind of education reform that I have outlined. Reauthorization of the status quo is not the answer. We need real reform that concentrates resources around central national goals, targets those resources to the most impoverished areas and schools in greatest need, and holds States and localities to a new, higher standard of accountability for results in raising student academic achievement. I am very grateful for the strong statements that have been made by my colleagues in support of this amendment by Senator Graham. This amendment is, in a sense, our first statement of support for a major reform of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which we intend to offer when that act comes before the Senate in May. There are two facts to state about the Federal role in education and what is happening throughout the country. The first is that we have not achieved what the ESEA was adopted to achieve in 1965, and that is to close the academic achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged children. The proposal that I will offer, along with Senators Bayh, Landrieu, Lincoln, Kohl, Graham, Robb, and Breaux, is aimed at investing more money in the education of disadvantaged children while giving local authorities the flexibility to set achievement goals and decide what they think is the best way to achieve them, and then to hold them accountable for producing measurable results. It will reward those who succeed and, for the first time ever, impose real consequences on those who do not. The second reality in American education today is that there are also cases of magnificent reform happening at the local and State level, which we must recognize. These success stories include many of the same elements--more accountability, more innovation, more public school choice, higher teaching standards, and superb work by great teachers and school administrators. Our proposal will streamline more than 40 current ESEA programs into five performance-based grants that will support and expand these reform efforts that are occurring at the grassroots level in America. It is a common sense proposal built upon the core principles of reinvestment, reinvention, and responsibility that will finally provide the full, decent, and equal education we want for all our children, and the educational reform that our children need. I thank my friend and colleague from Florida for offering this amendment. We have a very strong working group in favor of reform. We hope this proposal not only represents innovation and change that will be a catalyst for broad-scale national education reform, but that it will constitute a bridge on which Members of both parties can meet in the Senate to accomplish the most sweeping reform of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in its 35-year history. I thank the Chair and my friend from Nevada, and particularly my patient and learned friend from Louisiana. I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I thank my friend and colleague. I am delighted in the midst of this debate on the budget, which sometimes lacks exhilaration, to interject, along with our friends from Michigan, a note of euphoria. This euphoria, of course, is of the basketball variety. We are just days removed from the completion of that exhilarating spring spectacle we've come to know as March Madness--the National Collegiate Athletic Association Basketball Tournament. And here in the Nation's Capital, Senator Dodd and I are very fortunate and proud to be establishing a spring rite of our own: coming to the floor on behalf of grateful fans across Connecticut--and we would like to think admiring fans across America--to praise the incomparable University of Connecticut Huskies, last year's men's team and this year's women's team champions of the basketball world once more. With this victory on Sunday night defeating archrival Tennessee 71 to 52, the women Huskies not only earned their second national championship in 5 years, they also managed to set a school record for wins with 36 and to overcome what was their only loss in an otherwise perfect season to a very good Tennessee Volunteer team. As just one measure of the University of Connecticut's captivating run to the championship, four of the five players named to the All- Tournament team were Huskies, including the tournament's Most Valuable Player--the extraordinary and indomitable Shea Ralph. In celebrating this tremendous achievement, we are particularly proud of our National Coach of the Year, Geno Auriemma, for whom victory served on Sunday night as something of a triumphant homecoming. Geno was raised in the steel mill town of Norristown on the outskirts of Philly by his parents who brought him and his family from their country of birth, which was Italy. He was accompanied to Sunday's game by his mother, Marsiella, who watched from the stands. And, as anybody who watched the game on television learned, she was holding a jar of holy water in her lap, which she sprinkled on Connecticut's players for good luck. They responded by playing what I would have to call a divinely inspired game. It was, if you saw the game, one of those occasions when everything seems to come together and go right. It was an extraordinary experience for those of us who are the fans of this team. On Monday, as the dawn came, people across Connecticut bore witness to a spectacle that I think few fans of women athletics could have envisioned when Congress first passed title IX in 1972. Across the State, from Danbury to Dayville, from Stamford to Stonington, communities came together and exalted in the accomplishments of this great Huskies team, a celebration equal in intensity to the one sparked by the men's championship last year. The Hartford Courant thought so much of the Husky victory that it dedicated its entire front page to their win, and it says it in one word. Here is a great picture of our coach, Geno Auriemma, doing his impersonation of Alan Keyes in the mosh pit --in this case, the team holding our triumphant coach. The one word which expresses our attitude in Connecticut about this great team is ``euphoria.'' Huskymania, we have come to learn, is an equal opportunity experience. In the town of Storrs, the picturesque, wooded hamlet that the University of Connecticut students, faculty, and administrators call home, more than 5,000 people turned out Monday for a midday pep rally of appreciation at the Gampel Pavilion, where sellout crowds watched this great team work their magic all year long. As the celebration grew more and more boisterous and enthusiastic, it seemed hard to believe that this was the same part of our State that used to be called ``The Forgotten Corner,'' because these days, if you follow college basketball, it is an awfully hard place to forget. The fact is, thanks to the Huskies, Storrs is home to the stars now. We like to think of it as the ``College Hoops Capital of America. Last year, when we came to the floor to celebrate the men's victory, I closed with an impersonation of a University of Connecticut cheerleader. I was advised by many people, including my dear friend and senior colleague, not to repeat this performance. But you know that I feel it would be unfair. So very briefly, U-C-O-N-N, UConn. Thank you. I yield the floor.

Mr. LIEBERMAN. The Senator, let it be known, was one of my role models. I compliment him.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to pay tribute to Cardinal Kung, who passed away on March 12 in Stamford, CT, at the age of 98. Cardinal Kung was a historic figure in the Roman Catholic Church and a symbol of strength and hope for all of us who care about religious freedom. In China, his native land, the Cardinal endured terrible persecution because of his unwillingness to surrender his religious beliefs. My state, Connecticut, had the great honor and privilege of welcoming him as a resident for the final years of his life. Born in Shanghai in 1901, and ordained a priest in 1930, Cardinal Kung's heroic story began soon after the Communists took power in China. In 1949, he became the Bishop of Shanghai and, in 1950, the Apostolic Administrator of Soochow and Nanking. Resisting the new regime's attempt to control the Catholic Church, he refused to join the government-sanctioned Catholic Patriotic Association, which cut ties to the Vatican. Instead, Cardinal Kung remained loyal to the Pope and led the devoutly Catholic Legion of Mary, which the Communists declared to be counter-revolutionary. After 5 years of tension, the Chinese Government in 1955 arrested Cardinal Kung and several hundred other people involved in the unofficial Catholic Church. Dragged into a stadium in Shanghai for a public confession, the Cardinal, with his hands tied behind his back, instead courageously shouted: ``long live Christ the King, long live the Pope.'' The security forces rushed him off the stage, and Cardinal Kung was held in detention for another 5 years. When he was finally brought to trial in 1960, the authorities convicted Cardinal Kung and sentenced him to life imprisonment for the so-called counter- revolutionary activity of pursuing his Catholic faith. Cardinal Kung was a prisoner of conscience whose plight became known around the world. He suffered 30 years of isolating imprisonment, during which time he was denied visits from family and concerned representatives of the international community, and other forms of contact such as written correspondence. Despite this tortuous experience, he refused to renounce his beliefs or give in to his oppressors. In fact, when told that he could win his release by denouncing the Pope and cooperating with the government-sanctions Catholic Patriotic Association, he responded: ``I am a Roman Catholic Bishop. If I denounce the Holy Father, not only would I not be a Bishop, I would not even be a Catholic. You can cut off my head, but you can never take away my duties.'' The Vatican has recognized Cardinal Kung's extraordinary devotion and sacrifice to the Roman Catholic Church. In 1979, while he was still serving his life sentence, Pope John Paul II secretly elevated Kung to Cardinal, in pectore (in his heart), and the Pope announced this to the world in 1991. In 1985, after sustained pressure from his family, human rights organizations, and foreign governments, the Chinese Government moved Cardinal Kung to house arrest, and in 1987 finally released him, though they notably did not exonerate him. He soon traveled to the United States for medical treatment and lived with his nephew, Joseph Kung, in Connecticut. In 1998, the Chinese Government refused to renew Cardinal Kung's passport, effectively exiling him, and the Cardinal never returned to his country. Cardinal Kung's life demonstrates, I believe, the power of an individual's faith and will to resist the repression of the state, and thus replenish the wellspring of human liberty for others. He refused to bend, to abandon his commitment to his Church, and his example inspired millions of his countrymen to hold firm in their beliefs and to their rights. When the Communists took power, there were an estimated 3 million Roman Catholics in China. According to current Chinese government statistics, there are now 4 million persons registered with the official Catholic Church. However, according to China's unofficial Catholic Church, for whom Cardinal Kung was the greatest symbol, the number of underground Catholics has swelled to as many as 9-10 million. It is no secret that religious persecution in China, including of underground Catholics, continues. It is my hope that the spirit of Cardinal Kung will endure and continue to inspire others in China and around the world to follow his courageous example. And that one day there will be the complete religious freedom in China that Cardinal Kung lived, worked, and prayed for.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today in support of the Estuary Habitat Restoration Partnership Act, S. 835. When our late colleague, Senator John Chafee, introduced this bill, he did so because he understood the tremendous importance of estuaries to our national economy and environment. At the same time, Senator Chafee was concerned about the considerable challenges the nation's estuaries face, such as habitat loss, concentration of upstream pollutants, and coastal development. S. 835 would enable us to move forward as a nation in addressing those challenges, and I am proud to be a cosponsor of this bill. Mr. President, I am particularly happy to be here today because this legislation, if passed, would have a real impact on the estuary nearest and dearest to my own heart, the Long Island Sound. Title 3 of the bill reauthorizes the Long Island Sound Office through 2005 and significantly increases the funding authorization. Last fall, with the Connecticut and New York delegations, I introduced S. 1632 to reauthorize the Office and provide significant new funding to implement critical conservation and restoration projects which will directly improve the health of the Sound. I am grateful to my colleagues for including that reauthorization in the Estuary Habitat Restoration Partnership Act. Having grown up on the coast of Connecticut, I am well aware of the importance of Long Island Sound to the region's economic health and quality of life. Water-quality-dependent activities such as commercial and recreational fishing, boating, and swimming contribute an estimated $5 billion to the regional economy each year. The Sound is the leading producer of oysters along the east coast. In addition, despite the many industrial facilities and residential developments along its shoreline, the Sound is recognized nationally for its distinctive habitat types, including tidal wetlands, tidal flats, beaches, dunes, bluffs, rocky tidal areas, eelgrass, kelp beds, and natural and artificial reefs. However, the Sound does experience many of the same challenges as other estuaries--residential, commercial, and industrial development have increased pollution and removed or altered habitat, and excess nutrients have resulted in low levels of dissolved oxygen in the waters of the Sound. The Long Island Sound estuary program predated the National Estuary Program (NEP). As early as 1985, Congress recognized Long Island Sound as a national treasure when it appropriated funding for the Long Island Sound Study to research, monitor, and assess the water quality of the Sound. When the National Estuary Program was created in 1987, the Long Island Sound became a charter member. In the intervening years, Federal and state government, business, labor, environmental groups, and local communities in Connecticut and New York have come together to make a significant commitment to cleaning up the Sound. More recently, in 1994, the Governors of Connecticut and New York and the Administrator of the EPA jointly adopted the Long Island Sound Comprehensive Conservation and Management Plan (CCMP) which incorporated the results of the Long Island Sound Study. Since 1985, Federal, state, and private funds have been well spent on researching the existing conditions of the Sound and identifying conservation and restoration needs. These efforts bode well for the health of the Long Island Sound; however, much work remains to be done. Last fall, the Long Island Sound lobster fishery experienced a severe die-off, with losses in some ports as high as 90 percent. Preliminary research suggests that a combination of environmental stresses may have caused this dramatic collapse. The time has come to move from identifying to implementing the conservation and restoration projects which will directly improve the water quality and habitat of the Long Island Sound. The Estuary Habitat Restoration Partnership Act would help make this possible by leveraging on-the-ground restoration work with Federal funding and by creating market-based incentives for the private sector to work with community- based organizations and local governments on restoration efforts. This is an important bill for my state and our country, and I look forward to seeing it pass this body.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President. I rise today to explain my vote on the Flag Amendment. This is one of the most difficult votes I will have to cast during my tenure in the United States Senate. Words cannot fully express the anger I feel towards those who desecrate the American Flag. The Flag is a symbol of what is great about our country. It is the standard we rally around in war and in peace, in mourning and in celebration and, ultimately, in life and in death. It unites us in our past and in our future. When someone desecrates the Flag, they in a sense strike at all of those things. It is because I find desecrating the Flag to be so abhorrent and despicable an act, that I will, as I have in the past, support using any statutory means possible to prohibit Flag desecration. But after thinking long and hard about this issue, I have decided that I will again vote against this constitutional amendment. Although I recognize that a statute cannot do the whole job, I cannot vote to amend the Constitution's Bill of Rights for the first time ever in a manner that would restrict, rather than expand, individual liberties. In my view, however great a symbol the Flag is, our Constitution and its Bill of Rights are all that and more. More than a symbol of liberty, they are liberty's real guardian and its true protector. They are not only what unites us, but also what keeps our more than 200-year-old experiment in self-government working. They are the best the Founders of this great nation left to us--a lasting testament to the Framers' brilliant insight that for any people to remain truly free and capable of self- government, that there must be some limits to what the State can do to regulate the speech and political behavior of its citizens. The Flag is an important symbol, but the Bill of Rights is what the Flag symbolizes. We must be extremely cautious in altering the freedoms that this great document guarantees, lest we diminish the ideals for which our Flag stands. My former colleague Senator John Glenn--an individual whose patriotism and love of country none could doubt--expressed this view well when he submitted a statement to the Judiciary Committee last April. He explained: The flag is the nation's most powerful and emotional symbol. It is our most sacred symbol. And it is our most revered symbol. But it is a symbol. It symbolizes the freedoms that we have in this country, but it is not the freedoms themselves. That is why this debate is not between those who love the flag on the one hand and those we do not on the other. No matter how often some try to indicate otherwise, everyone on both sides of this debate loves and respects the flag. The question is, how best to honor it and at the same time not take a chance of defiling what it represents. As General Colin Powell also recently so well put it: ``I would not amend that great shield of democracy to hammer a few miscreants. The flag will be flying proudly long after they have slunk away.'' Of course I do not believe that our Constitution or its Bill of Rights must remain forever unaltered. But the importance of the Bill of Rights requires us to establish an exceedingly high threshold for agreeing to any amendment. For me, that threshold lies at the point where an amendment is shown to be necessary to address some extreme threat to the Republic or redress some outrageous wrong. In this case, abhorrent though Flag desecration may be, it simply does not meet that threshold. I know that this is an issue that many feel passionately about. Many of my constituents have brought their views on this issue to me, and I would like to take just a couple of minutes to address some of the arguments they have made. I have heard it argued that a vote for this amendment is merely a vote to let the People--through their state legislatures--decide the issue. Those who make this argument point to polls showing that as much as 75 to 80 percent of the American public support the amendment. It frankly is unclear whether support is all that high. I have seen polls showing that a majority of Americans opposed the amendment when they knew that it would be the first in our nation's history to restrict our First Amendment freedoms of speech and expression. But more importantly, a decision on an issue as important as this one should not be made on the basis of polling. It is precisely because of the caution the Framers meant us to use in amending the Constitution, that they required supermajorities of both Houses of Congress as well as of the State legislatures to give their assent before our nation's foundational document could be altered. The Senate was never meant to serve as a rubber stamp in this process, and so I owe it to the People of Connecticut, who have elected me to use my best judgment, to carefully consider issues before me, and to vote the way I believe to be correct. Some also have suggested that it is not this Amendment that would be changing the Bill of Rights or the First Amendment--that it was instead the Supreme Court that did that when, in 1989, it overturned 200 years of precedent and found Flag desecration to be protected by the First Amendment. The history of this issue is more complicated than that. Most importantly, it's just not correct to say that the Supreme Court reversed 200 years of precedent. The first state Flag statute apparently was not enacted until the end of the 19th Century, and there was no federal Flag statute until 1968. Moreover, it's not really fair to say that the Supreme Court reversed any of its precedents in 1989, because before the 1989 Texas v. Johnson case, the Supreme Court never addressed this issue head on. In fact, in a number of cases throughout the 20th Century dealing with people who treated the Flag in a manner that offended others, the Supreme Court repeatedly either held the conduct to be protected by the First Amendment or found other reasons to overturn the convictions. For that reason, despite dicta in some of these cases distinguishing them from pure Flag desecration, the dissent in Johnson had to acknowledge that ``Our prior cases dealing with flag desecration statutes have left open the question that the Court resolves today.'' 491 U.S. 397, 432. I must conclude that, abhorrent and despicable as I find desecrating the Flag to be, I cannot vote to support this amendment. In the end, Flag desecration is hateful and worthy of condemnation, but I just cannot conclude that it threatens the Republic. For that reason, although I stand ready to support any statutory means possible to curtail desecration of the Flag, I just cannot support amending our nation's foundational document to address it.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I am pleased to join with Senators Thompson, Voinovich, Brownback and Roth today to introduce the Government for the 21st Century Act. This bill provides an opportunity to address the challenges our government will face in the new millennium. Our country is undergoing rapid changes--changes brought about by technological advancements, by our expanding and increasingly global economy, and by the new and more diverse threats to our nation and our world. It is essential for our government to be prepared to respond effectively to these challenges. We should take the opportunity now to rethink the structure of our government to be sure it can meet the needs of our citizens in the years to come. The Commission that will be established under this bill will have a critical task--to study the current shape of our government and to make recommendations about how we can improve its efficiency and effectiveness, streamline its operations, and eliminate unnecessary duplication. I view the bill we are introducing today as a discussion draft. Our goal is to hear from a wide range of experts on government and management. I look forward to reviewing new ideas that will enhance the value of the Commission's work. For example, I intend to recommend that the Commission focuses on the enormous potential benefit of ``E- government.'' The Commission should consider how government can be restructured to promote the innovative use of information technology. American citizens increasingly expect services and information to be provided electronically through Internet-based technology. While the federal government is working to take advantage of the opportunities technology presents to do its job better, more needs to be done to fully integrate these capabilities and to offer services and information to Americans in a more accessible and cost-effective way. I look forward to working with Senators Thompson, Brownback, Roth and Voinovich on this important legislation.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to explain my vote on Senator Hollings' proposal to amend the Constitution to allow Congress and the States to impose reasonable limits on contributions and expenditures made to support or oppose candidates for elected office. In this case, I believe that the high threshold I have established for supporting a constitutional amendment--that it address a significant threat to the Republic or some egregious wrong--has been met. This amendment addresses an unfortunate fact whose truth has become more and more apparent in the past several years: money and the never ending chase for it are threatening the integrity of our political system and jeopardizing the essence of our democracy. Although money has always played a role in American politics, its impact became overwhelming during the last few election cycles. Political fundraising and spending during the 1996 campaign was 73 percent greater than during the 1992 campaign, and there is no reason to believe we won't break that record in 2000. We are all intimately familiar with the time and resources we need to spend to raise that money, and with the numerous questionable events and actions that were spurred by the money chase during the last Presidential election. Most of those events and actions, I have sadly concluded, were legal under our current campaign finance laws. But that does not mean they were not wrong. I think they were. By ensuring that we will be able to put a limit on the amount of money spent in political campaigns, this constitutional amendment would help restore a sense of integrity--and of sanity--to our campaign finance system and to our democracy. Much of the debate over this proposed amendment centers on what some call its threat to the principle of free speech. That, of course, is a principle we all hold dear. But I say, Mr. President, that free speech is not what is at issue here. Free speech is about the inalienable right all of us have to express our views without government interference. It is about the vision the Framers of our Constitution enshrined in that most important of documents--a vision that ensures that we in Congress will never compromise our American birthright to say things and offer opinions even when those opinions are unpopular or discomforting. But that simply is not at issue here, Mr. President-- absolutely nothing in this amendment will do anything to diminish or threaten any American's right to express his or her views about candidates running for office or about any problem or issue in American life. What would be threatened by this proposed Constitutional amendment, Mr. President, is something entirely different: the ever increasing and disproportionate power those with money have over our political system. As everyone in this chamber knows, the spiraling costs of running for office require all of us to spend more and more time raising money and more and more time with those who give it. We are all far too familiar with events or meetings with elected officials attended only by those who could afford to give $5,000 or $10,000 or even $100,000--sums of money that are beyond the capacity of the overwhelming majority of Americans to give. That, Mr. President, is threatening a principle all of us hold just as dearly as the principle of free speech: the principle of democracy. That sacred principle guides our Republic--it promises that each person has one vote, and that each and every one of us--rich or poor--has an equal right and an equal ability to influence the workings of our government. As it stands now, Mr. President, it is that sacred principle that is under attack and that sacred principle that promises to remain under attack unless we do something to save it. And that something, I submit, is campaign finance reform. I, for one, believe that most of the campaign finance reform we need can and must be done even without this Constitutional amendment. The Supreme Court, after all, has made quite clear in its decisions that even under its view of money as being equivalent to speech, the Constitution still allows Congress to impose restrictions on the amount that can be contributed to campaigns and parties. This, in my view, means that we have no excuse not to act right now to stop the massive soft money contributions that pose the biggest threat to our system. It is important that we not use the First Amendment as a shield against change because it is clearly constitutional to limit and regulate contributions to political campaigns--including soft money. What it appears we cannot do under the Supreme Court's rulings is limit the amount of money we and others spend in the course of campaigns unless we adopt convoluted legislation geared toward complying with the Supreme Court's view that money is speech. I think that the need for reform is so great that it is worth accepting convoluted legislation, but I also think that we should act now to vote for this amendment and so ensure that in the future we will be able to properly regulate campaign spending, thereby controlling the amount of money spent in American political campaigns. Mr. President, nothing less than the future of our democracy is at stake here. Unless we act to reform our campaign finance system, people with money will continue to have disproportionate influence in our system, people who are not even citizens of the United States will try to use money to influence our government's decisions, the American people will continue to lose faith in our government's institutions, and the genius of our Republic--that it is our citizenship, not our pocketbook, that gives each of us equal power to play a role in our country's governance--that genius will be lost. Mr. President, it is for that reason that I have concluded that this is one of those rare constitutional amendments that is worth supporting. Our current campaign finance system poses an egregious threat to our Democracy. Big money donations, endless spending and the proliferation of anonymously-funded and often inaccurate attack ads all have had an extraordinarily corrosive and distorting affect on our political system and on the citizenry's view of its role in our Democracy's decisions. I frankly can think of few threats to the Republic greater than one that throws into doubt the integrity and well-functioning of our democratic decision-making process.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to offer a new plan for Federal education spending to refocus our national education policy on helping states and local school districts raise academic achievement for all children, putting the priority for federal programs on performance instead of process, and on delivering results instead of developing rules. In broad terms, the public Education Reinvestment, Reinvention, and Responsibility Act--better known as the ``Three R's''--calls on states and local districts to enter into a new compact with the federal government to work together to strengthen standards and improve educational opportunities, particularly for America's poorest children. It would provide states and local educators with significantly more federal funding and significantly more flexibility in targeting aid to meet their specific needs. In exchange, it would demand real accountability, and for the first time consequences on schools that continually fail to show progress. From my visits with parents, teachers, and principals over this past year, it is clear that we as a nation still share a common love for the common school, for its egalitarian mission, for its democratizing force, and for its unmatched role in helping generation after generation rise and shine. Unfortunately, we are asking schools to do more than they were designed to do, to compensate for disengaged parents and divided communities--for instructing teenage girls on how to raise their children while they try to raise the GPAs, to nourishing the bodies and psyches of grade-schoolers who often begin the day without breakfast or affection, to policing school halls for guns and narcotics. At the same that schools are trying to cope with these new and complex stresses and strains, we are demanding that they teach more than that have ever taught before in our history. The reality is that in this high-tech, highly-competitive era, there are fewer low-skilled industrial jobs available, and a premium on knowledge and critical thinking, meaning it is no longer enough to provide some kids with just a rudimentary understanding of the basics. Employers and parents alike with better teachers, stronger standards, and higher test scores for all students, as well as state-of the art technology and the Information Age skills to match. It is a tribute to the many dedicated men and women who are responsible for teaching our children that the bulk of our schools are as good as they are, in light of these intensifying pressures. But the strain is nevertheless building, and with it serious doubts about our public schools and their capability to meet these challenges. Just this fall the Democratic Leadership Council, of which I am proud to serve as chairman, released a national survey showing that two-thirds of the American people believe our public schools are in crisis. I was surprised by that high percentage, which may be skewed somewhat by lingering shock over the growing incidents of school shootings. But we must admit that our public schools are not working for a lot of our kids. And, as a result, I believe that our public education system is facing an enormously consequential test, which will go a long way toward determining our future strength as a nation. It is a test of our time whether we can reform and in some ways reinvent our public education system to meet these new demands, without compromising the old ideals that have sustained the common school for generations. For us to pass this test, we have to first recognize that there are serious problems with the performance of many public schools, and that public confidence in public education will continue to erode if we do not acknowledge and address those problems soon. While student achievement is up, we must realize the alarming achievement gap that separates minorities from Whites and low-income students from their more affluent counterparts. According to the state-by-state reading scores of fourth-graders on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the achievement gap between African American and White students grew in 16 states between 1992 and 1998. The gap between Hispanic and White students grew in nine states over the same period of time. We must also question whether our schools are adequately preparing our youth to enter the global economy when, in international students, U.S. 12th graders score below the international average in mathematics and science compared to 21 other nations. We also have to acknowledge that we have not done a very good job in recent years in providing every child with a well-qualified teacher, a critical component to higher student achievement. We are failing to attract enough good minds in the teaching profession--one survey of college students in 21 different fields of study found that education majors ranked 17th in their performance on the SAT. We are failing to adequately train enough of these aspiring teachers at education schools--in Massachusetts last year, to cite one particularly egregious example, 59 percent of the 1,800 candidates who took the state's first- ever certification exam flunked a literacy test that the state board of education chairman rated as at ``about the eighth-grade level.'' And, we are failing to deliver teachers to the classroom who truly know their subject matter--our national survey found that one-fourth of all secondary school teachers did not major in the core area of instruction, and that in the school districts with the highest concentration of minorities, students have less than a 50 percent chance of getting a math or science teacher who has a license or a degree in their field. With that said, we also have to acknowledge that while more money alone wont solve our problems, we cannot honesty expect to reinvent our schools without it either. The reality is that there is a tremendous need for additional investment in our public schools, not just in urban areas but in every kind of community. Thousands of crumbling and overcrowded schools to modernize. Two million new teachers to hire and train. Billions in spiraling special education costs to meet. We also have to recognize the basic math of trying to raise standards at a time of profound social turbulence that we will need to expend new sums to reach and teach children who in the past we never asked to excel, and who in the present will have to overcome enormous hurdles to do so. I believe any child can learn--any child--and that has been proven over and over again in the best schools in both my home state of Connecticut and in many of America's cities. There are in fact plenty of positives to highlight in public education today, which is something else that we have to acknowledge, yet too often don't. I have made a concerted effort over the last few years to visit a broad range of schools and programs in Connecticut, and I can tell you that there is much happening in our public schools that we can be heartened by, proud of, and learn from. There is the John Barry Elementary School in Meriden, Connecticut, which was singled out by the U.S. Department of Education as a Distinguished title I School for its work with disadvantaged students. Like many urban schools, Barry has to contend with a high-poverty, high-mobility student population, but through Reading Recovery and other interventions, Barry has had real success improving the reading skills of many of its students. There is the Side by Side Charter School in Norwalk, one of 17 charter schools in Connecticut, which has created an exemplary multiracial program in response to the challenge of Sheff v. O'Neill to diminish racial isolation. With the freedom that goes with its charter, Side by Side is experimenting with a different approach to classroom assignments, having students stay with teachers for two consecutive years to take advantage of the relationships that develop, and by all indications it is working quite well for those kids. And there is the BEST program, which, building on previous efforts to raise teacher skills and salaries, is now targeting additional state aid, training, and mentoring support to help local districts nurture new teachers and prepare them to excel. In this regard Connecticut is far ahead of most of the country in adapting its teacher quality programs to meet today's challenges--setting high performance standards both for teachers and those who train them, helping novices meet those standards, and holding the ones who don't accountable. The result is that Connecticut's blueprint is touted by some, including the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, as a national model for others to follow. A number of other states, led by Texas and North Carolina, are moving in this same direction--refocusing their education systems not on process but on performance, not on prescriptive rules and regulations but on results. More and more of them are in fact adopting what might be called a ``reinvest, reinvent, and responsibility'' strategy, by (1) infusing new resources into their public education systems; (2) giving local districts more flexibility; and (3) demanding new measures and mechanisms of accountability, to increase the chances that these investments will yield the intended return, meaning improved academic achievement for all students. This move to trade flexibility for accountability, and to focus on performance instead of process, is not the definitive answer to passing the test I outlined earlier, of adapting our public schools to the rapidly-changing environment around us. There are obviously other parts of the equation, none more important that parental involvement. Everything we know from research indicates that an engaged parent makes a crucial difference in student achievement, particularly in terms of reading, and we have to do more to get parents to play a more active role in their children's learning. But when it comes to improving the delivery of public education, the reinvestment and reinvention approach is the best solution I have heard yet, and probably our best hope for extending the promise of equal opportunity into the new century. In Congress, our opportunity now is with the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Today, nearly $15 billion in Federal aid flows through ESEA programs to states and local education authorities, and other educational entities annually. While this constitutes a minute fraction of all the money spent on public education each year, it is still a lot of money, and past experience shows that Federal money has a habit of influencing local behavior. If we can reformulate the way we distribute those additional dollars, and peg our national programs to performance instead of process, we can go a long way toward encouraging more states and local school districts to reinvest and reinvent public education, while taking more responsibility for its outcomes. Unfortunately, Congress seems more interested in being an agent of recrimination. We spend most of our time positioning ourselves for partisan advantage rather than trying to fix serious problems. We reduce a complicated issue to a simplistic multiple choice test, forcing a false choice between more spending and programs, or block grants and vouchers. And, the answer we are left with is none of the above. Mr. President, I am pleased to join my colleagues Senators Bayh, Breaux, Graham, Kohl, Landrieu, Lincoln, and Robb in introducing this groundbreaking legislation that signifies that there is a better way, a third way to address education reform. It builds on the progress many states have already made through the standards movements. It calls for streamlining and consolidating the maze of programs under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act into five goal-oriented titles, each with more money and fewer strings attached, and all of them geared toward encouraging innovation, promoting what works, and ultimately raising academic achievement for all students. We would concentrate our efforts on closing the achievement gap between the haves and have-nots, fostering English proficiency for immigrant children, improving the quality of teaching for all children, promoting choice and competition within the public system, and stimulating innovative and high performance educational initiatives. We would ask the states to set performance standards in each of these areas, and in exchange for the new funding and flexibility we provide, we would hold states accountable for delivering demonstrable results. We would reward success and, for the first time in the history of ESEA, punish chronic failure. We agree with our Democratic colleagues that we need to invest more resources if we want to meet the new challenges of the new century, and prepare every student to succeed in the classroom. That is why we would boost ESEA funding by $35 billion over the next five years. But we also believe that the impact of this funding will be severely diluted if it is not better targeted to the worst-performing schools and if it is not coupled with a demand for results. That is why we not only increase Title I funding by 50 percent, but use a more targeted formula for distributing these new dollars to schools with the highest concentrations of poverty. And that is why we develop a new accountability system that strips federal funding from states that continually fail to meet their performance goals. We also agree with our Republican colleagues that federal education programs are too numerous and too bureaucratic. That is why we eliminate dozens of federally microtargeted, micromanaged programs that are redundant or incidental to our core mission of raising academic achievement. But we also believe that we have a great national interest in promoting broad national educational goals, chief among them delivering on the promise of equal opportunity. It is not only foolish, however, but irresponsible to hand out federal dollars with no questions asked and no thought of national priorities. That is why we carve out separate titles in those areas that we think are critical to helping local districts elevate the performance of their schools. The first would enhance our longstanding commitment to providing extra help to disadvantaged children through the Title I program, while better targeting $12 billion in aid--a 50 percent increase in funding-- to schools with the highest concentrations of poor students. The second would combine various teacher training and professional development programs into a single teacher quality grant, increase funding by 100 percent to $1.6 billion annually, and challenge each state to pursue the kind of bold, performance-based reforms that my own state of Connecticut has undertaken with great success. The third would reform the Federal bilingual education program and hopefully defuse the ongoing controversy surrounding it by making absolutely clear that our national mission is to help immigrant children learn and master English, as well as achieve high levels of achievement in all subjects. We must be willing to back this commitment with essential resources required to help ensure that all limited English proficient students are served. Under our approach, funding for LEP programs would be more than doubled to $1 billion a year, and for the first time be distributed to states and local districts through a reliable formula, based on their LEP student population. As a result, school districts serving large LEP and high poverty student populations would be guaranteed federal funding, and would not be penalized because of their inability to hire savvy proposal writers for competitive grants. The fourth would respond to the public demands for greater choice within the public school framework, by providing additional resources for charter school start-ups and new incentives for expanding local, intradistrict choice programs. And the fifth would radically restructure the remaining ESEA and ensure that funds are much better targeted while giving local districts greater flexibility in addressing specific needs. We consolidate more than 20 different programs into a single High Performance Initiatives title, with a focus on supporting bold new ideas, expanding access to summer school and after school programs, improving school safety, and building technological literacy. We increase overall funding by more than $200 million, and distribute this aid through a formula that targets more resources to the highest poverty areas. The boldest change we are proposing is to create a new accountability title. As of today, we have plenty of rules and requirements on inputs, on how funding is to be allocated and who must be served, but little if any attention to outcomes, on how schools ultimately perform in educating children. This bill would reverse that imbalance by linking Federal funding to the progress states and local districts make in raising academic achievement. It would call on state and local leaders to set specific performance standards and adopt rigorous assessments for measuring how each district is faring in meeting those goals. In turn, states that exceed those goals would be rewarded with additional funds, and those that fail repeatedly to show progress would be penalized. In other words, for the first time, there would be consequences for poor performance. In discussing how exactly to impose those consequences, we have run into understandable concerns about whether you can penalize failing schools without also penalizing children. The truth is that we are punishing many children right now, especially the most vulnerable of them, by forcing them to attend chronically troubled schools that are accountable to no one, a situation that is just not acceptable anymore. This bill minimizes the potential negative impact of these consequences on students. It provides the states with three years to set their performance-based goals and put in place a monitoring system for gauging how local districts are progressing, and also provides additional resources for states to help school districts identify and improve low-performing schools. If after those three years a state is still failing to meet its goals, the state would be penalized by cutting its administrative funding by 50 percent. Only after four years of under performance would dollars targeted for the classroom be put in jeopardy. At that point, protecting kids by continuing to subsidize bad schools becomes more like punishing them. I must address another concern that may be raised that this is a block grant in sheep's clothing. There are substantial differences between a straight block-grant approach and this streamlined structure. First, in most block-grant proposals the accountability mechanisms are vague, weak and often non-existent, which is one reason why I have opposed them in the Senate. Our bill would have tangible consequences, pegged not just to raising test scores in the more affluent suburban areas, but to closing the troubling achievement gap between students in poor, largely minority districts and their better-off peers. This leads me to another way this bill is different. Unlike many block-grant supporters, I strongly believe that we have a great national interest and a national obligation to promote specific educational goals, chief among them delivering on the promise of equal opportunity, and that is reflected in our legislation. While it makes sense to streamline and eliminate as many strings as possible on Federal aid, to spur innovation and also to maximize the bang for our Federal buck, it does not make sense to hand over those Federal bucks with no questions asked, and thus eliminate the Federal role in setting national priorities. That is why, in the restructuring we have developed, we have maintained separate titles for disadvantaged students, limited English proficient students, teacher quality, public school choice, and high quality education initiatives, all of which, I would argue, are critical to raising academic achievement and promoting equal opportunity. And that is why of the more than $6 billion increase in annual funding I am proposing, $4 billion would be devoted to title I and those students most in need of our help. It is a fairly common-sense strategy--reinvest in our public schools, reinvent the way we administer them, and restore a sense of responsibility to the children we are supposed to be serving. Hence the title of our bill: the Public Education Reinvention, Reinvestment, and Responsibility Act, or the Three R's for short. Our approach is humble enough to recognize there are no easy answers to turning around low- performing schools, to lifting teaching standards, to closing the debilitating achievement gap, and that most of those answers won't be found here in Washington anyway. But it is ambitious enough to try to harness our unique ability to set the national agenda and recast the federal government as an active catalyst for success instead of a passive enabler of failure.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise today to offer a new plan for Federal education spending to refocus our national education policy on helping states and local school districts raise academic achievement for all children, putting the priority for federal programs on performance instead of process, and on delivering results instead of developing rules. In broad terms, the public Education Reinvestment, Reinvention, and Responsibility Act--better known as the ``Three R's''--calls on states and local districts to enter into a new compact with the federal government to work together to strengthen standards and improve educational opportunities, particularly for America's poorest children. It would provide states and local educators with significantly more federal funding and significantly more flexibility in targeting aid to meet their specific needs. In exchange, it would demand real accountability, and for the first time consequences on schools that continually fail to show progress. From my visits with parents, teachers, and principals over this past year, it is clear that we as a nation still share a common love for the common school, for its egalitarian mission, for its democratizing force, and for its unmatched role in helping generation after generation rise and shine. Unfortunately, we are asking schools to do more than they were designed to do, to compensate for disengaged parents and divided communities--for instructing teenage girls on how to raise their children while they try to raise the GPAs, to nourishing the bodies and psyches of grade-schoolers who often begin the day without breakfast or affection, to policing school halls for guns and narcotics. At the same that schools are trying to cope with these new and complex stresses and strains, we are demanding that they teach more than that have ever taught before in our history. The reality is that in this high-tech, highly-competitive era, there are fewer low-skilled industrial jobs available, and a premium on knowledge and critical thinking, meaning it is no longer enough to provide some kids with just a rudimentary understanding of the basics. Employers and parents alike with better teachers, stronger standards, and higher test scores for all students, as well as state-of the art technology and the Information Age skills to match. It is a tribute to the many dedicated men and women who are responsible for teaching our children that the bulk of our schools are as good as they are, in light of these intensifying pressures. But the strain is nevertheless building, and with it serious doubts about our public schools and their capability to meet these challenges. Just this fall the Democratic Leadership Council, of which I am proud to serve as chairman, released a national survey showing that two-thirds of the American people believe our public schools are in crisis. I was surprised by that high percentage, which may be skewed somewhat by lingering shock over the growing incidents of school shootings. But we must admit that our public schools are not working for a lot of our kids. And, as a result, I believe that our public education system is facing an enormously consequential test, which will go a long way toward determining our future strength as a nation. It is a test of our time whether we can reform and in some ways reinvent our public education system to meet these new demands, without compromising the old ideals that have sustained the common school for generations. For us to pass this test, we have to first recognize that there are serious problems with the performance of many public schools, and that public confidence in public education will continue to erode if we do not acknowledge and address those problems soon. While student achievement is up, we must realize the alarming achievement gap that separates minorities from Whites and low-income students from their more affluent counterparts. According to the state-by-state reading scores of fourth-graders on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the achievement gap between African American and White students grew in 16 states between 1992 and 1998. The gap between Hispanic and White students grew in nine states over the same period of time. We must also question whether our schools are adequately preparing our youth to enter the global economy when, in international students, U.S. 12th graders score below the international average in mathematics and science compared to 21 other nations. We also have to acknowledge that we have not done a very good job in recent years in providing every child with a well-qualified teacher, a critical component to higher student achievement. We are failing to attract enough good minds in the teaching profession--one survey of college students in 21 different fields of study found that education majors ranked 17th in their performance on the SAT. We are failing to adequately train enough of these aspiring teachers at education schools--in Massachusetts last year, to cite one particularly egregious example, 59 percent of the 1,800 candidates who took the state's first- ever certification exam flunked a literacy test that the state board of education chairman rated as at ``about the eighth-grade level.'' And, we are failing to deliver teachers to the classroom who truly know their subject matter--our national survey found that one-fourth of all secondary school teachers did not major in the core area of instruction, and that in the school districts with the highest concentration of minorities, students have less than a 50 percent chance of getting a math or science teacher who has a license or a degree in their field. With that said, we also have to acknowledge that while more money alone wont solve our problems, we cannot honesty expect to reinvent our schools without it either. The reality is that there is a tremendous need for additional investment in our public schools, not just in urban areas but in every kind of community. Thousands of crumbling and overcrowded schools to modernize. Two million new teachers to hire and train. Billions in spiraling special education costs to meet. We also have to recognize the basic math of trying to raise standards at a time of profound social turbulence that we will need to expend new sums to reach and teach children who in the past we never asked to excel, and who in the present will have to overcome enormous hurdles to do so. I believe any child can learn--any child--and that has been proven over and over again in the best schools in both my home state of Connecticut and in many of America's cities. There are in fact plenty of positives to highlight in public education today, which is something else that we have to acknowledge, yet too often don't. I have made a concerted effort over the last few years to visit a broad range of schools and programs in Connecticut, and I can tell you that there is much happening in our public schools that we can be heartened by, proud of, and learn from. There is the John Barry Elementary School in Meriden, Connecticut, which was singled out by the U.S. Department of Education as a Distinguished title I School for its work with disadvantaged students. Like many urban schools, Barry has to contend with a high-poverty, high-mobility student population, but through Reading Recovery and other interventions, Barry has had real success improving the reading skills of many of its students. There is the Side by Side Charter School in Norwalk, one of 17 charter schools in Connecticut, which has created an exemplary multiracial program in response to the challenge of Sheff v. O'Neill to diminish racial isolation. With the freedom that goes with its charter, Side by Side is experimenting with a different approach to classroom assignments, having students stay with teachers for two consecutive years to take advantage of the relationships that develop, and by all indications it is working quite well for those kids. And there is the BEST program, which, building on previous efforts to raise teacher skills and salaries, is now targeting additional state aid, training, and mentoring support to help local districts nurture new teachers and prepare them to excel. In this regard Connecticut is far ahead of most of the country in adapting its teacher quality programs to meet today's challenges--setting high performance standards both for teachers and those who train them, helping novices meet those standards, and holding the ones who don't accountable. The result is that Connecticut's blueprint is touted by some, including the National Commission on Teaching and America's Future, as a national model for others to follow. A number of other states, led by Texas and North Carolina, are moving in this same direction--refocusing their education systems not on process but on performance, not on prescriptive rules and regulations but on results. More and more of them are in fact adopting what might be called a ``reinvest, reinvent, and responsibility'' strategy, by (1) infusing new resources into their public education systems; (2) giving local districts more flexibility; and (3) demanding new measures and mechanisms of accountability, to increase the chances that these investments will yield the intended return, meaning improved academic achievement for all students. This move to trade flexibility for accountability, and to focus on performance instead of process, is not the definitive answer to passing the test I outlined earlier, of adapting our public schools to the rapidly-changing environment around us. There are obviously other parts of the equation, none more important that parental involvement. Everything we know from research indicates that an engaged parent makes a crucial difference in student achievement, particularly in terms of reading, and we have to do more to get parents to play a more active role in their children's learning. But when it comes to improving the delivery of public education, the reinvestment and reinvention approach is the best solution I have heard yet, and probably our best hope for extending the promise of equal opportunity into the new century. In Congress, our opportunity now is with the upcoming reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Today, nearly $15 billion in Federal aid flows through ESEA programs to states and local education authorities, and other educational entities annually. While this constitutes a minute fraction of all the money spent on public education each year, it is still a lot of money, and past experience shows that Federal money has a habit of influencing local behavior. If we can reformulate the way we distribute those additional dollars, and peg our national programs to performance instead of process, we can go a long way toward encouraging more states and local school districts to reinvest and reinvent public education, while taking more responsibility for its outcomes. Unfortunately, Congress seems more interested in being an agent of recrimination. We spend most of our time positioning ourselves for partisan advantage rather than trying to fix serious problems. We reduce a complicated issue to a simplistic multiple choice test, forcing a false choice between more spending and programs, or block grants and vouchers. And, the answer we are left with is none of the above. Mr. President, I am pleased to join my colleagues Senators Bayh, Breaux, Graham, Kohl, Landrieu, Lincoln, and Robb in introducing this groundbreaking legislation that signifies that there is a better way, a third way to address education reform. It builds on the progress many states have already made through the standards movements. It calls for streamlining and consolidating the maze of programs under the Elementary and Secondary Education Act into five goal-oriented titles, each with more money and fewer strings attached, and all of them geared toward encouraging innovation, promoting what works, and ultimately raising academic achievement for all students. We would concentrate our efforts on closing the achievement gap between the haves and have-nots, fostering English proficiency for immigrant children, improving the quality of teaching for all children, promoting choice and competition within the public system, and stimulating innovative and high performance educational initiatives. We would ask the states to set performance standards in each of these areas, and in exchange for the new funding and flexibility we provide, we would hold states accountable for delivering demonstrable results. We would reward success and, for the first time in the history of ESEA, punish chronic failure. We agree with our Democratic colleagues that we need to invest more resources if we want to meet the new challenges of the new century, and prepare every student to succeed in the classroom. That is why we would boost ESEA funding by $35 billion over the next five years. But we also believe that the impact of this funding will be severely diluted if it is not better targeted to the worst-performing schools and if it is not coupled with a demand for results. That is why we not only increase Title I funding by 50 percent, but use a more targeted formula for distributing these new dollars to schools with the highest concentrations of poverty. And that is why we develop a new accountability system that strips federal funding from states that continually fail to meet their performance goals. We also agree with our Republican colleagues that federal education programs are too numerous and too bureaucratic. That is why we eliminate dozens of federally microtargeted, micromanaged programs that are redundant or incidental to our core mission of raising academic achievement. But we also believe that we have a great national interest in promoting broad national educational goals, chief among them delivering on the promise of equal opportunity. It is not only foolish, however, but irresponsible to hand out federal dollars with no questions asked and no thought of national priorities. That is why we carve out separate titles in those areas that we think are critical to helping local districts elevate the performance of their schools. The first would enhance our longstanding commitment to providing extra help to disadvantaged children through the Title I program, while better targeting $12 billion in aid--a 50 percent increase in funding-- to schools with the highest concentrations of poor students. The second would combine various teacher training and professional development programs into a single teacher quality grant, increase funding by 100 percent to $1.6 billion annually, and challenge each state to pursue the kind of bold, performance-based reforms that my own state of Connecticut has undertaken with great success. The third would reform the Federal bilingual education program and hopefully defuse the ongoing controversy surrounding it by making absolutely clear that our national mission is to help immigrant children learn and master English, as well as achieve high levels of achievement in all subjects. We must be willing to back this commitment with essential resources required to help ensure that all limited English proficient students are served. Under our approach, funding for LEP programs would be more than doubled to $1 billion a year, and for the first time be distributed to states and local districts through a reliable formula, based on their LEP student population. As a result, school districts serving large LEP and high poverty student populations would be guaranteed federal funding, and would not be penalized because of their inability to hire savvy proposal writers for competitive grants. The fourth would respond to the public demands for greater choice within the public school framework, by providing additional resources for charter school start-ups and new incentives for expanding local, intradistrict choice programs. And the fifth would radically restructure the remaining ESEA and ensure that funds are much better targeted while giving local districts greater flexibility in addressing specific needs. We consolidate more than 20 different programs into a single High Performance Initiatives title, with a focus on supporting bold new ideas, expanding access to summer school and after school programs, improving school safety, and building technological literacy. We increase overall funding by more than $200 million, and distribute this aid through a formula that targets more resources to the highest poverty areas. The boldest change we are proposing is to create a new accountability title. As of today, we have plenty of rules and requirements on inputs, on how funding is to be allocated and who must be served, but little if any attention to outcomes, on how schools ultimately perform in educating children. This bill would reverse that imbalance by linking Federal funding to the progress states and local districts make in raising academic achievement. It would call on state and local leaders to set specific performance standards and adopt rigorous assessments for measuring how each district is faring in meeting those goals. In turn, states that exceed those goals would be rewarded with additional funds, and those that fail repeatedly to show progress would be penalized. In other words, for the first time, there would be consequences for poor performance. In discussing how exactly to impose those consequences, we have run into understandable concerns about whether you can penalize failing schools without also penalizing children. The truth is that we are punishing many children right now, especially the most vulnerable of them, by forcing them to attend chronically troubled schools that are accountable to no one, a situation that is just not acceptable anymore. This bill minimizes the potential negative impact of these consequences on students. It provides the states with three years to set their performance-based goals and put in place a monitoring system for gauging how local districts are progressing, and also provides additional resources for states to help school districts identify and improve low-performing schools. If after those three years a state is still failing to meet its goals, the state would be penalized by cutting its administrative funding by 50 percent. Only after four years of under performance would dollars targeted for the classroom be put in jeopardy. At that point, protecting kids by continuing to subsidize bad schools becomes more like punishing them. I must address another concern that may be raised that this is a block grant in sheep's clothing. There are substantial differences between a straight block-grant approach and this streamlined structure. First, in most block-grant proposals the accountability mechanisms are vague, weak and often non-existent, which is one reason why I have opposed them in the Senate. Our bill would have tangible consequences, pegged not just to raising test scores in the more affluent suburban areas, but to closing the troubling achievement gap between students in poor, largely minority districts and their better-off peers. This leads me to another way this bill is different. Unlike many block-grant supporters, I strongly believe that we have a great national interest and a national obligation to promote specific educational goals, chief among them delivering on the promise of equal opportunity, and that is reflected in our legislation. While it makes sense to streamline and eliminate as many strings as possible on Federal aid, to spur innovation and also to maximize the bang for our Federal buck, it does not make sense to hand over those Federal bucks with no questions asked, and thus eliminate the Federal role in setting national priorities. That is why, in the restructuring we have developed, we have maintained separate titles for disadvantaged students, limited English proficient students, teacher quality, public school choice, and high quality education initiatives, all of which, I would argue, are critical to raising academic achievement and promoting equal opportunity. And that is why of the more than $6 billion increase in annual funding I am proposing, $4 billion would be devoted to title I and those students most in need of our help. It is a fairly common-sense strategy--reinvest in our public schools, reinvent the way we administer them, and restore a sense of responsibility to the children we are supposed to be serving. Hence the title of our bill: the Public Education Reinvention, Reinvestment, and Responsibility Act, or the Three R's for short. Our approach is humble enough to recognize there are no easy answers to turning around low- performing schools, to lifting teaching standards, to closing the debilitating achievement gap, and that most of those answers won't be found here in Washington anyway. But it is ambitious enough to try to harness our unique ability to set the national agenda and recast the federal government as an active catalyst for success instead of a passive enabler of failure.

Mr. LIEBERMAN

Mr. LIEBERMAN. Mr. President, I rise this afternoon to speak with my colleagues about the justifiably increasing concern among the American people about the increasing price of gasoline and other fuels. The fact is that our gas pumps are fast turning into sump pumps for American pocketbooks. Just 2 days ago, the Energy Information Administration pegged the average current retail price for a gallon of gas at $1.54. That is the highest level in a decade for this time of the year. Unfortunately, this is not the end of it. Prices are expected to soar beyond this height in the months ahead. In fact, the Energy Information Administration is projecting an average price of more than $1.80 a gallon of gas by Memorial Day, the start of the summer driving season. That is, in and of itself, according to experts on oil pricing to whom I have spoken, an optimistic assessment. It is predicated on the promises of several OPEC nations that they will raise their production of oil after their March 27 meeting and thus lower the price of crude oil. There are very reputable analysts of oil markets who are saying the average per gallon price of gasoline will go to $2 and in some places as high as $2.50 a gallon this summer. Ouch. That is not only unprecedented but will have a disastrous effect not only on individual businesses and consumers, particularly those of more modest average means, but it will, I am afraid, have a disastrous effect on our economy, setting off a vicious cycle of prolonged oil price increases, an increase in inflation rates, corresponding hikes in interest rates, and a stall in the historic run of economic growth we have had over the last several years. Another consequence of oil price increases, as we unsettlingly saw yesterday, could be significant declines in the stock markets. I understand the decline yesterday was attributed not just to oil price increases but also to the report from Procter & Gamble that they would be reporting lower quarterly profits than were expected. But oil price increases are part of it. Not surprisingly, yesterday crude oil trading on the New York Mercantile Exchange rose $1.95 to $34.13 a barrel, which is the highest level increase since November 1990--the highest level increase in a decade. I trust that my colleagues are hearing from their constituents, both individual and business, as I am, with complaints ever more vociferous about the strain this price spike in gasoline is putting on their family and business budgets. As these energy and transportation costs continue to climb, the cries for help will also increase. The squeeze is now being felt across the country, but it constitutes for us in the Northeast the second chapter of this current sad story of energy pricing since, as I know you know, Mr. President, the State of Connecticut and the entire Northeast was particularly hard hit by a prolonged price shock in home heating oil, which more than doubled in a space of months the amount people in our region of the country were paying. So this jump now in the price of gasoline represents what might be called a ``double energy pricing whack.'' Last week, on Thursday, several Members of Congress in both parties were invited to the White House for a meeting of the President, Secretary Richardson, Secretary Summers, and others in the administration to discuss these matters. It was a spirited discussion and one that represented a very good exchange. I say to my neighbors and constituents in the Northeast that the most encouraging part of the discussion to me was the receptivity of the administration to an idea that my colleague from Connecticut, Senator Dodd, and I put forward to create a regional home heating oil reserve-- not crude oil as in the Strategic Petroleum Reserve we have now but home heating oil which could be used in cases as the one we just experienced in the Northeast when there was what I consider to be an artificial rise in price based on the OPEC cartel limiting supply in what is, after all, a critically necessary commodity--fuel. It would allow this reserve to immediately put out at times such as this in the future an amount of home heating oil, distillate product-- it could go for diesel fuel as well, where price increases have so hurt truckers--to raise supplies so that the price could decline to a more balanced point. Work goes on and discussion goes on. This idea could be a model in energy shortages in other regions. Some regions dependent on propane, for instance, might create similar reserves that could be used to effect when artificial prices create dramatically increasing prices. I look forward to continuing those discussions with the administration. At a minimum, if we can do something between now and next winter, it will give people and businesses in the Northeast some comfort--I apologize for the metaphor--but a kind of security blanket, if you will, so that next year, if OPEC again reduces supply, they will have the home heating oil at reasonable prices to heat their homes and businesses. Let me turn now to the gasoline price increase which is now going across the country and has very significant ramifications for our economy overall. My apologies to Ernest Hemingway. I ask, For whom does the gas pump toll today? I say the answer is, It tolls for us--not just that we are paying it, but it should remind us once again of the debilitating dangers of our dependence on foreign oil, reminding us that our consumers and our economic security are being held hostage by the decisions of the OPEC producers as they are in this case following their own interests, but it is not in our interest. No matter how great a country we are--the strongest country in the world, the most successful economy with the greatest standard of living--we have put ourselves in a position where a small group of nations, because they control this commodity--oil--that is so vital to us, can hold us hostage. So the President has to send the Secretary of Energy and others, basically, pleading with these oil-producing countries that are supposed to be our friends and allies to get reasonable and to increase the supply so that they fill at least the two-million-barrel-per-day gap between supply and demand on world oil prices. I hope as we face this crisis, though, we will take steps to declare--as we have been saying now for two decades, but to do it hopefully with some meaning, greater meaning--energy independence, and to do so by tapping in more vigorously to the supplies of energy over which we have some control, such as natural gas and oil, where that is possible within our own domestic control. Mr. President, I think we have to more aggressively try to convert and develop supplies of energy in our control. We have to more aggressively support conservative efforts and development of renewable, cleaner sources of energy. We have to be prepared to invest and continue to support even more aggressively some of the pioneering, pathbreaking work being done in the automobile industry to develop high-fuel-efficiency vehicles. Very exciting work is being done, and we can help with further support in the development of fuel cells as a renewable clean source of energy. The truth is, no matter how strong, innovative, entrepreneurial, and how great our increases in productivity are in this country, until we invest more into the energy that drives our economy, we are going to be subject to being effectively brought to our knees and having our markets and our bank accounts follow down in that direction. Another item discussed at the meeting with President Clinton and Secretary Richardson last week, advanced by my colleague and friend from New York, Senator Schumer, Senator Collins of Maine, and others, was, in this crisis, to be prepared to either swap or draw down the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, in which there is now approximately 580 million barrels of oil owned by the taxpayers of the United States, and put some of that at this critical moment into our economy as a way to fill the gap between supply and demand, and, frankly, as a way to let our friends at OPEC know that, though our resources are limited, they are not meager and that we are prepared to contend with their artificial inflation of oil prices. I report these developments to my colleagues and say I believe that the President, at least, is keeping the option of using oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve on the table. No commitments were made, no decision was made either about that or a final decision made about the strategic heating oil reserve for our region that I discussed earlier. I appreciated the discussion and I appreciated the active and, obviously, concerned interest that was expressed by the President at the meeting last week. I look forward to continuing those discussions. I hope we can do it in a spirit of reason and balance and not in a spirit of panic because our economy has been stalled and our markets have been essentially attacked and have fallen as a result of this shortage in oil supply, based on the actions of an oil cartel, OPEC, which hurts the United States because of our continuing dependence on foreign oil. I yield the floor.