George Miller

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Chairman, I yield the remaining time to the gentleman from Illinois (Mr. Davis). (Mr. DAVIS of Illinois asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Tierney).

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from New Jersey (Mr. Andrews). (Mr. ANDREWS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Chairman, I yield 1\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from New York (Mr. Owens), a member of the committee. (Mr. OWENS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2\1/2\ minutes to the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer), the distinguished minority whip. (Mr. HOYER asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Chairman, I yield 2 minutes to the gentlewoman from California (Ms. Woolsey), the ranking member of the subcommittee dealing with Head Start.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Chairman, I yield myself 5\1/2\ minutes. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong opposition to the underlying bill. While we spent a great deal of time in No Child Left Behind to provide for improved student achievement, increased standards and accountability to ask more of State schools and students, this legislation does exactly the opposite. It decreases the standards and decreases the accountability, and it weakens our commitment to quality and it asks less of the States. We should not be experimenting with this program. I appreciate that the gentleman says that 91 percent of these programs were out of compliance, but what he does not tell us is that in that same audit 85 percent of the programs were found to be of high quality. Why were they of high quality? Because of the Head Start standards, the Head Start performance standards and the quality standards. These are the performance and quality standards that Congress after Congress and President after President have worked to continuously improve so that Head Start now is the premier pre-K program for impoverished children in this Nation. There is no State that has a program comparable to Head Start for these children. When my colleague on the other side suggests that these children do not do as well as their peers, he is denying all of the evidence. These children are doing better than their peers. They are not doing as well as middle-class white children in the suburbs, but he does not know of any program that will have these children do as well in the year or two as middle-class white children in the suburbs, but among their peers, among the children in same community who do not get to participate, these children do much better and they accelerate by the end of kindergarten. Head Start works and it performs, and it performs well for these children. But this legislation takes another approach. While the first part of this legislation makes many improvements that we agree with and we support in this bill, the second provision provides for a block grant. It was a wholesale block grant of the entire program that politically was unsustainable. It became an eight-State block program, and over the last few days apparently some people got promises to vote for this bill and they would not block grant their State. There is a commitment to block grants. But what do they do with these block grants? In the block grants they circumvent the standards of performance and quality and education standards and health services and comprehensive services because if they have a block grant, they do not have to meet those standards. It says so in the bill. They will say in their Dear Colleagues, it has to meet or exceed Head Start standards, but in the law, it says it must generally meet or exceed. ``Generally'' is a very important word here because they do not have to comply with the standards. The same is true in accountability, and yet we do this. We weaken these standards. We create this loophole of the block grant, and we do it without any evidence to suggest that that is the answer. The concern is about accountability, the concern is about performance; and we put the children into a system for which there really is no accountability or performance. Nothing requires a showing that the system that will be created is better than the current Head Start system, that the program running currently in the State is better than the Head Start system; and yet, we are talking about creating a system where almost as much as 40 percent of the children could be put in that system. That is really not fair to these children because Head Start is their best hope. Head Start is our premier early education program in this country, and that is why it must be protected. And ``protected'' is the right word because this legislation with the block grant is an all-out assault on Head Start as we know it, on Head Start as it performs and Head Start as it delivers for these children and these families and their educational opportunity. Can it be improved? Of course it can be improved, and what every President and every Congress on a bipartisan basis, Republican and Democratic administrations, year after year, time after time, they have continuously improved this program. I have been on this committee for 29 years, and we have continuously approved this program every 3 to 5 years. That is why it is the premier program. That is why it gets the results it does. Now what happens here? For the first time, we essentially see a partisan assault on that bipartisan coalition that has led to that continuous improvement of this program, that has led to these comprehensive services for these children. And these services are terribly important. Terribly important. Health screening, vision, dental care. What will you get under their block grant? You will get a referral to a service. You may not get the service. You may get to stand in line. You may get put on a waiting list, but you do not necessarily get the service for mental health screening and general health screening and nutrition and health education, all of which we know in terms of child development of these impoverished children is terribly important. But, finally, let me say this. There is something else going on in this bill that is the first in 35 years. When they capped the expenditures in the outyears, when they changed such sums as necessary, under which every President and every Congress has expanded the participation in the Head Start program, there is not enough money for inflation. So in the third year, we find that some 5,000 to 10,000 children at a minimum are going to have to stop attending Head Start because of the capped authorization. I appreciate all of the money we have put in Head Start under President Clinton's leadership, under this Congress, the Republican leadership, that we have done over the last 8 years; but that comes to a grinding halt in this legislation. That is why this bill should be rejected, and later we will hope that the substitute will be accepted by the Congress; and then we can continue the process of continuing to improve America's premier education program for pre-K impoverished children. Mr. Chairman, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, the most troubling part of this debate for me is that with the trade agreements that we have signed, and no one discounts the importance of trade to this country and to the world economy, that we continue to see that Americans subsidize this trade policy with the loss of their good-wage jobs. We are told time and again, as we were just recently this week, in the Wall Street Journal that those jobs are not coming back. This is not a question of losing your job in recession because of a slow economic time in manufacturing and then you get called back to your workplace. You are not going to get called back because your job has left the country. We said at the beginning of this trade debate some 15 or 20 years ago that the low-paid jobs, the not-so-good jobs were the jobs that would go overseas and because of increased trade and because of our intellectual capacity and our ingenuity that Americans would get the good jobs, that the hot, heavy, dirty jobs would go overseas, the low-wage jobs would go overseas. But now what we see is that, in fact, middle-class jobs are leaving America to go overseas and in many instances what I am certain people would consider the high-wage jobs, as we were told again in the Wall Street Journal this week, are going overseas. $60,000-a-year software- writing jobs, computer engineering jobs are being sent overseas where they can be done for $5,000 a year. It is just an economic swap. You simply have a job that you have here in California or Minnesota or Florida and you decide that this job you are paying for, as IBM did, you paid $60,000 for this job, you can have it done in India for $5,000; and that is simply an economic equation and it makes a lot of sense. It is just not very good for middle America. These trade agreements continue to be an assault on middle America. What I do not understand is why we insist that that be the case. Because I think it is clear that we can have expanded trade, we can open up markets, we can open up markets for American products and services and talent and at the same time hold onto these jobs. What we now see is in every industry those high-wage jobs are being traded in for low-wage jobs. It is true in steel. It is true in the automobile industry. You say, well, that is old-fashioned jobs; that is an old- fashioned industry. No, what is old-fashioned about those industries is they had middle-class jobs. You could buy a house, you could buy a car, you could send your kid to school. That is what was old-fashioned about them. And even on the cutting edge of technology, in the steel industry or the automobile industry, they are being sent overseas, even from other countries. We are doing it in insurance and financial services and computer engineering and software-writing. The point is this, that the first generation of this trade agreement was we wanted to open up Chinese markets so we could sell into the Chinese market. Now what we see is the next generation of cutting-edge technology and cutting-edge countries not just from the United States but from all over the world that are going to China for the purposes of exporting. Those are jobs that are leaving here. Those are middle-class jobs. That is the assault on middle-class jobs. As long as we do not rise up and give workers the right to organize in other countries, then it is a fiction. It is a fiction that somehow we are going to protect American jobs.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. I yield to the gentleman from California.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. The question is, from what platform will those automobiles be made? The gentleman is suggesting that they are going to be made in Detroit and shipped to Chile. I am suggesting, no, it is more likely they are going to be made in Argentina or they are going to be made in Mexico or they are going to be made in Germany than they are going to be made in the United States. I appreciate that they will have access to the automobile market.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. If I could take back the balance of my time, the point is the fastest-growing group in the United States, the fastest-growing organization is unemployed Americans looking for jobs.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. I thank the gentleman from Arizona for withholding on his point of order so we may make our points. I am most concerned with this amendment with respect to the sections dealing with labor, the issues of forced labor and exploited child labor, and the right to associate and to bargain collectively. Those are all determinations that would be made in the countries that we signed the agreement with. To suggest that somehow we cannot conduct free trade, that we cannot conduct trade with countries in Central America and South America, or anywhere in the world; that if those people have the right of freedom of association, or they have a right to collective bargaining, that that would destroy the trade agreements. Yet, we have seen a country like Cambodia that now has a textile agreement, that has the ILO poor labor standards in it. We see American companies flocking to Cambodia to do business there, because, in fact, they find those poor labor standards provide a value added. They find out now that when they come under attack for the processes in which they use to manufacture their goods, they have the ability to refer them to the ILO. It has been settled and many of them have escaped jeopardy because they had done nothing wrong, but there was a neutral forum to do that. The Cambodian Government finds, as I said, that this is a value added for them. What are they doing? They are allowing people in a country that just a few short years ago was considered a killing field, they are allowing people to freely associate, to collectively bargain, to form the union, and to develop the workers' rights in accordance with that proposition. That is all we are asking. We are not asking them to take American labor union agreements, the American labor collective bargaining standards, but we are allowing people to freely associate and to participate. And the fact of the matter is, it can work because if you do not do that, then what you simply do is develop what has been written about the first generation of globalization, and that is the incredible exploitation, the incredible exploitation in the Third World countries as we open them up for trade for purposes of manufacturing where the benefits are not shared, the benefits are not derived in those societies, and that has got to stop. Not only is that unfair competition for American workers, but it is exploitative competition for the people in those countries. Why is it that when banana pickers try to get together in Ecuador, they are beaten by the police? Their houses are set on fire. They are beaten outside the place of their employment. Their families are intimidated. That is fair trade? That is the treatment that we want to bring to people? We do not want to suggest that these people are entitled to more? You can buy 10 pounds of bananas for 99 cents, so that somehow we can justify that? No. This is about whether or not over a long period of time if these people have these rights and they are enforceable, they will have the ability to freely associate, to collectively bargain, to get rid of forced labor, to get rid of child labor. And that would be the American market being used for the best of purposes to leverage these people into a better life and a better standard of living.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time; and I rise in support of this amendment. My colleagues want to argue that somehow to cut the public out of the process, to provide a public process that is discretionary is somehow going to help in the planning of our forests. Well, we passed a bill here to deal with fire. My colleagues want to keep talking about fire, but somehow they do not want to pass the bill. We sent it to the Senate. I do not agree with every provision in it, but where is the Senate bill? The fires are burning, we have a bill to address that, but now my colleagues want to use fire as an example to gut these regulations. We know what happens when the Forest Service does not involve the public or does not involve the scientists. We had a policy that almost destroyed the forests, either because they mindlessly cut down the forests and destroyed watersheds and destroyed streams, or they mindlessly did not deal with the forests and we built up such fuel loads that we lost them to catastrophic fires. Now, as a result of a public process, because communities are involved, individuals are involved that live in the area, organizations that know about this and scientists who care about this, we have a comprehensive planning proposal that deals with these forests. These forests are not simplistic. These are complicated, huge watersheds and ecosystems, and that is what we have learned from the scientists. Now my colleagues want to throw the scientists out of the room and treat these forests and treat these watersheds and treat these ecosystems somehow in a simplistic fashion. There is more to a forest than just the treatment of the fuel load. There is more to the habitat protection. There is more to the species protection than that. That is why these regulations are in play. What the Bush administration is suggesting is that we just take a simplistic approach; and that if we take a simplistic approach, the first thing we will want to do is to cut the public out of the process. Well, the people in the communities that are impacted by these forests have a stake in it, they have an economic stake, they have a life-style stake, they have a standard of living stake, so they are concerned about those forests. But it would be much easier to cut them out of it. It should be in the direction of the forest manager as to whether he wants to let them in at this point or that point or the next point in the process. Public participation is not a luxury. It is a right in this country. It is important to developing good policy. And that is why we should support the Udall amendment.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong support of this amendment by the gentleman from New Jersey. What the bill seeks to do, as many have already stated, is to overturn two comprehensive studies about the harm that snowmobiles do to the park. The fact of the matter is that those decisions were made in an arbitrary fashion. While they identified the least environmentally damaging alternative, they chose not to take it. They chose not to take it because their intent from the very beginning was to overturn the rule and to provide access for the snowmobiles. Not only did they provide access, but they increased the level of access. The fact of the matter is the National Park Service has made its finding that these impair and harm the parks. They cause harm to the individuals who are working in the park at that time. We ought not to overturn that. To bring up these coaches from the 1950s is not to deal with the issue in an honest fashion. The fact is that there are new coaches that were on order, they have been put on hold because of the change in the rules, and we ought to protect the parks by bringing people in to enjoy the parks, to see the parks, to experience the parks, but do it in a manner which is environmentally compatible with the best interests of the parks. That is the fiduciary relationship that the Secretary of the Interior has on behalf of the parks and on behalf of the American people. It is not to introduce this source of pollution in an unlimited fashion.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. I yield to the gentleman from Washington.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time, and I thank him for all of his work on this bill and to the chairman of the committee for all of their time and effort to bring this bill to the floor. But I do want to say how disappointed I am with this legislation in terms of its treatment of the conservation spending and the conservation accounts. As previous speakers have noted, these accounts were created based upon a bipartisan agreement and an agreement to fund them when we had under consideration the CARA legislation, which was really designed to redeem the promise that this government made to the people of this country that, in exchange for offshore oil drilling, we would create an account, the Land and Water Conservation Account, and those monies would be used for the acquisition and protection of public and local lands, stateside land and water conservation for State and local governments to acquire land and communities to acquire land, and the Federal account for Federal lands. That was the agreement. There were overwhelming votes in the committee on a bipartisan basis; there were overwhelming votes on the floor of the House. The Committee on Appropriations responded with the funding of these accounts, and now we see that those accounts were savaged. This was a promise. This was an account that was created for the acquisition of these lands, both federally and locally. That account has several billion dollars in it in surplus, and yet we see what happens; those accounts were taken down from $450 million on the Federal side and $450 million on the state side. It is just unacceptable, because what do these Federal dollars do at the local level? They attract corporate money, they attract foundation money, local people make contributions. The fastest-growing organizations in the environmental movement are land trusts where communities come together to try to protect the natural assets of their communities, to protect the values in their communities, to create open space so that people can enjoy a quality of life. That is what those Federal dollars do. They are all matched at the local level. Now we see instead of $450 million, we are going to have around $100 million. It is breaking a promise. It is breaking a promise with the people of this country. We tried to offer, the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey) and the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Dicks) were going to offer an amendment; but it would not be made in order to restore the funding for those accounts. And those accounts should be restored in toto. Maybe what we should do is we should object to every suspension bill where a Member of the Republican Party is asking to acquire additional land. I sit on the Committee on Resources; and we pass bill after bill where Members of the other party want to acquire land, another 10 acres, another 20 acres, move the boundary east, west, add to this national park, add to this wilderness area. Why do they do that? Because the communities they represent want this done. They are responding to the desires of their constituents. And now instead of $450 million being available, there will be $100 million. If the Republicans dislike the program this much, they should not put in any more requests. There should at least be enough money in this bill to fund the Republican requests for land acquisition. That ought to be the minimum.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Chairman, that was his promise during the campaign, and it was his promise after he was elected. He was asked by the supporters of CARA in the campaign. I hate to say this, but he endorsed the bill and the concept and the money before the Democratic nominee did. He was out there saying this is important. Why? Because he understands this is community-driven. This is the best in our Federal system. Local people have these needs; they have raised local money. The Federal Government provides a catalyst from an account that was set aside specifically for that purpose. The gentleman has done an incredible job on these conservation accounts over the last several years, but now all of a sudden it looks like they just got in the car and drove over the cliff on this one. We will see who puts in the requests for the dollars. So no more Federal land, and yet bill after bill is passed out of the Committee on Resources, and then the Committee on Appropriations is supposed to fund it.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman for yielding me the time. I rise in strong opposition to this rule, and I would ask Members to vote against the previous question so that we could have an opportunity to vote on the Obey-Dicks amendment which would restore the $570 million that has been cut from conservation spending in this country. I also rise to say that I would oppose the Boehlert amendment that would restore $95 million to these programs. The Boehlert amendment simply is an endorsement of these cuts. It simply is an endorsement of the cuts. We were spending $450 million on Federal land and water conservation programs per a bipartisan agreement and the support of this President of the United States. If my colleagues vote for the Boehlert amendment, we are down to $130 million on State land and water conservation, a primary driver of open space and conservation programs and habitat protection and the protections of the community values, $450 million after these cuts. Even with the Boehlert amendment, that is only $118 million. We are talking about a massive loss of opportunities for local communities to protect and provide for the conservation of land around those communities for public use, for the use of their citizens, because these dollars are matched by private dollars, by local dollars, and they drive these acquisitions. The Boehlert amendment is simply an endorsement of a policy that is now just wreaking havoc with that bipartisan agreement, with that promise made by this Congress that we would once again start using those moneys coming into the Land and Water Conservation Fund from offshore oil drilling to protect the natural assets of this country and our local communities. That is why we have got to vote against the previous question and the rule. Because if we voted for the Obey-Dicks amendment, then we would keep the promise that we have made. We have made that with business organizations, we have made that with conservation organizations, we have made that with restoration organizations, we have made that with communities, that these were community values where the Federal Government would help out. All of that is devastated by this legislation, and we cannot buy into an endorsement of that by buying an amendment that simply puts just a few dollars back into these accounts while these accounts initially in this bill get slaughtered by the appropriations provided in this committee.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Chairman, I would just say it is interesting, they talk about everything except this amendment. This amendment does nothing to prohibit the Secretary from expanding overtime to those who may not now be required, but what it does not do is it does not let the Secretary strip 8 million workers who currently get overtime of that overtime pay, including the half a million first responders that go out on Orange Alert. Under this regulation, many of them will lose overtime for those long hours that they spend guarding the national security of this country. That is what the regulations do. That is what this amendment prevents. It does not keep anybody from expanding into overtime.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Chairman, let me just say, once again, the gentleman from Ohio tried to suggest that this is going to create two classes of people. This just protects everybody who gets overtime today gets overtime tomorrow. They say if you get hired tomorrow, well, let me tell you in the Bush economy, nobody is getting hired tomorrow. People are getting laid off tomorrow. Okay. They are not getting hired, so that is not an issue. Secondly, let me say for first responders, you are talking about people from homicide detectives, you are talking about EMT, the people we expect to respond to these sites, to firefighters. So many first responders wrote objecting to this amendment that the Department of Labor sent out a letter and said, that is not our intent. They said, then exempt us from the regulation. They said we will not do that. So it is not their intent to include them, but they will not take them out of it. You are talking about half a million first responders who will go out on Code Orange and will get no protection of overtime pay. Your party, your choice, your vote.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Chairman, earlier this year the Bush administration initiated a process that is going to take hundreds of millions of dollars of hard-earned pay out of the pockets of American families. For years these men and women, among them first responders like firefighters, police, nurses, emergency workers, have long qualified for overtime pay when they worked more than 40 hours a week. For most of those men and women, that overtime pay is not spare change or for frivolous spending. It is essential family income necessary to pay the mortgage, to feed their children, to pay college education and to save for retirement. Overtime is not a luxury. It is a necessity for many American families, because tragically millions of our American families cannot survive economically on working only 40 hours a week. In fact, many workers who earn overtime derive 25 percent of their annual income from the extra hours on the job. But what would the Bush administration do? The Bush administration wants to exclude employees from ever being eligible for overtime by playing with the definitions of eligibility. According to one study, that would take away the overtime from almost 8 million people who today are qualified. All our amendment does is say you cannot take it away from people who today are qualified. You can expand it, as the Secretary says she wants to do. You will work, but you will not get the overtime pay under this rule. Congress did not approve it. In fact, we have not even had a hearing on the overtime rule, not a minute's worth of debate. The Republicans say they dispute the findings of the Economic Policy Institute study. Well, let us have a hearing and talk about it before we penalize millions of American families. Now, this amendment we are debating allows us to have that review. The Obey-Miller amendment tells the Secretary not to issue any regulation that would deprive anyone of their existing overtime pay. This is an opportunity to show America where we stand. If you defend the right of people to continue to earn the wages that they have earned to avoid suffering precipitous loss in income for doing the exact same job they have been doing for years, then you will vote for this amendment. There is a reason they are trying to cut overtime pay through the bureaucratic administrative rule instead of coming to the Congress and changing it in the open light of public debate. That is because they do not want the debate. They do not want to defend what they are doing. Today you will have to defend what the Department is doing because the Department of Labor is threatening millions of dollars worth of income to working American families. It is not enough that this administration and this House have presided over the loss of 3 million private sector jobs since 2001. It is not enough that the administration and Republican leadership in this House have forced millions of working Americans to remain in poverty by refusing to consider, even consider, raising the minimum wage. Is it not enough that they have denied unemployment compensation for millions of people who could not find jobs because of the desperate state of the economy? Is it not enough that they deny working families a fair tax cut, including the child tax credit, while showering hundreds of billions of dollars on wealthy Americans? Now, let me ask you this: Is it really necessary now to assault even those people who still have a job today, who have a job, who are working overtime, who need the overtime pay, that they would come along now with this administrative rule to strip them, to strip them of that overtime pay when they work long hours at difficult jobs and time away from their family, and they do it at the request of their employer? This is not this abstract case. Janice Murphy, who is an equipment specialist for the Navy's ship systems engineering in Philadelphia, 29 years of experience, but under this regulation, because she has all of that experience, she would be ruled as somebody having on-the-job training, learned professional, so she would not get overtime pay as she does today. Diane Flock, a nurse at Florida Medical Center in Ft. Lauderdale, talks about how she organizes the nurses at the Florida Medical Center because they would be denied overtime because they would be defined out of it. Now, she has been a nurse there for many years, but she has organized the other nurses, and she has petitioned the Congress to have a debate on this matter, and that is what we are doing. I would urge Members to support the Miller-Obey amendment.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman for yielding me this time. I want to say there are no two people more committed to education of our young children than the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Obey) and the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Regula). And the budget that we are presented today, or the funding that we are presented today, in this legislation is not of their doing. That decision was made a long time ago when the decision was made to provide for the tax cuts to go out and borrow $2 trillion and give it away in tax cuts, and the result is that we do not now have a sufficient amount of money to fund the promises that were made by this administration, by this Congress for the education bill of leaving no child behind. I am very proud to have been one of the four primary cosponsors of that legislation, to be one of the architects of that legislation. I believe that the reforms that we are asking to come about in that legislation are changing education in America, are giving children who never had an opportunity before, children who were lost in the system, an opportunity. But that legislation is the most significant reforms of the Federal role in elementary secondary education in 35 years. Constantly, as we met and talked with the President of the United States, we talked about whether or not if we did the reforms would we have the resources, and we were assured we would have them. But today is when the rubber meets the road because today this is the appropriations bill. This is when we decide the real money that we will spend, and of course what we now see is the money that was promised in Leave No Child Behind is not in this legislation. It is not here for teacher professionalization, it is not here for title I, it is not here for after-school, all of which are key components to improving the educational experience and the success of America's children, especially America's poor and disadvantaged children. We make it a keystone of this legislation, and it is a key to improving education and that is that we have a qualified teacher in every classroom within 4 years; and yet, of course, we see here that the funding is not available. Just yesterday the Republicans promised an additional $300 million for the Ready to Teach Act and yet the money for current teachers for professionalization is not in this legislation. It is short over $200 million, $240 million that would go to taking those thousands of teachers who are not presently certified, qualified to teach the subjects they are teaching, and get them certified and get them qualified so they can teach our children what they should be learning and our children will have an opportunity to learn it. This appropriations bill, because of the budget decisions made by the Republicans and the administration, is a series of broken promises, promises made by the President of the United States when he signed this legislation, promises made by this administration and made by this Congress to America's parents, to America's children, to our schools, our school districts, that we would provide the resources to carry out these reforms, the annual assessment of children, the determining of which children are doing well and which need additional help. All of that is now threatened by the failure to provide this funding. It is not enough to say we double the funding in past or we tripled the funding in past. This is a brand-new game. It is a brand-new game based upon these very significant, important reforms. The fact of the matter is there was a bipartisan agreement reached on the money that was necessary to carry out these reforms, and now we are reneging on that, and yet we are continuing to ask school districts to go forward with these reforms. We are continuing to ask school districts to make sure that every teacher is qualified, but we are not going to provide the resources to do that. We have here the smallest increase in the past 8 years in education. Yes, it is an increase, but the question we should ask, just as we ask in many other parts, is is it sufficient to get the job done as the American public expects? The fact of the matter is this provision in education funding in this legislation is not sufficient to do that. It is not going to provide the outcomes that we want for America's children. It is going to leave millions of children behind to a substandard education, trapped into results of that substandard education, and the loss of economic opportunity in America's society.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I offer this amendment, along with the chairman of the committee, the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Boehner). This is to provide loan forgiveness for those teachers who specialize in teaching reading. Just last week we saw the scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress that were released by the Department of Education, and the scores obviously show that we have a long way to go. While the scores of fourth-graders were up slightly, the scores of eighth-graders were stagnant, and the scores for high school students were actually down. This is not acceptable, but I think it does demonstrate that in some areas we are making progress. I think we also understand that one of the basic tenets of the Leave No Child Behind was that good, qualified teachers in areas of specialties were an absolute cornerstone to the success of this legislation. All of the data suggests to us that where a child is exposed in succeeding years to well-qualified teachers, those children do much better than the children who receive teachers who may or may not be qualified to teach the subject matters. This legislation to provide loan forgiveness goes a long way in helping us to provide the incentives not only to attract individuals to teaching, but also to make sure that we have a chance to retain those teachers for a period of 5 years. As many Members have said, after 5 years, if the school districts are doing the other things they should be doing in terms of supporting these teachers and providing other efforts at retention, and providing professional development, making sure that teachers are not isolated throughout the school year, that they have a chance to talk with their peers and learn the skills of teaching and learn what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong, then those individuals will tend to stay. It is not just about money, but, clearly, these teachers also have to make a rational decision about their futures and their careers. This effort to give loan forgiveness to teachers who specialize in math and science and reading, to provide over $17,000 of loan forgiveness over 5 years, I believe, can be very helpful to the retention of those teachers and to the attraction of those individuals to the teaching profession. I believe this amendment is consistent with the idea that we are trying to do these in the areas of high need, where extra specialization is necessary, and to make sure that we start to develop a corps of individuals who are properly qualified to teaching. Obviously, reading, whether you are going to be studying math or science or social studies, or whatever else you are going to be doing throughout your educational career, the ability to read is going to determine how successful you navigate your education as an elementary school student, as a high school student, and later, perhaps, as a college student. The ability to read is also identified by employers as a concern as to whether or not employees are flexible enough to learn additional skills as they move through a career and as jobs change so that they are able to adapt. So this investment in these reading specialists, I think, goes a long way toward improving this legislation, and I believe will be very helpful to school districts who are trying to focus on the requirements and the incentives in the Leave No Child Behind on trying to improve reading at the earliest grade levels. One of the objectives of everybody on the committee is to improve the ability of young people to read so that they can learn to read, and then, as Secretary Reilly used to say, read to learn. We want to accomplish that. It is also clearly the goal of the President in this bill with the sections that he pushed very hard for on reading and reading readiness in this legislation. And so I would urge my colleagues to support this amendment. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I yield myself the balance of my time. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Kildee) for managing both of these bills on the floor today and for his contributions to this legislation. I want to thank the gentleman from California (Mr. McKeon), the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Boehner), the gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Wilson), and the gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Isakson) for all their cooperation on this legislation. I think these bills are consistent with what we have been saying about the importance of teachers in the classroom. I think they finally put some resources in place to help those individuals who want to become teachers and who want to remain teachers, and I would urge passage of this amendment. Finally, I would say when we see a young child who can read and master these strokes, it is a wonderful feeling. I was very happy when I saw that my granddaughter was actually excited because Harry Potter was almost 800 pages. She was worried that it might be only 300 to 400 pages, but she was excited that the latest book was almost 800 pages so she could rip through it and read it. To see that kind of excitement on a child's face who is comfortable with reading is something that we hope for all of our Nation's children. Hopefully, this amendment will provide a little bit of help to do that.

Mr. GEORGE MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I offer an amendment.