Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. I am sorry. I thought we had voted on it.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words. I would like to speak in support of the Payne amendment. Mr. Chairman, we have heard a number of pedagogical considerations here which are interesting, but they avoid the real problem. The problem is money and the resources necessary to make a schoolwide program succeed. My colleagues are taking away some of the money. We move from 75 percent down to 50 percent, and now we want to move from 50 percent to 40 percent. So 75 percent to 40 percent is a radical move. My colleagues oppose going all the way down to 25 percent; that would be even more radical. But we have already made a radical move going from 75 percent to 40 percent, and my colleagues are jeopardizing the success that they claim that these schoolwide programs have achieved. The program and the law was designed to reach the poorest children in America. The formula is driven by individual poverty; children who qualify for free lunches, that determines the amount of money one gets in a district. If one has a situation where one can play with the formula and take a school that only has 40 percent poverty and make it eligible, then one would be diluting what goes to the school that has the 75 percent poverty where we have already reduced the funding down, based on a 50 percent level of sharing. The public concern for education is at an all-time high right now. Almost 90 percent of the voters have declared that more government assistance for education is their highest priority. In response to this overwhelming concern for the improvement of education, Title I is presently our only really significant program. But instead of providing leadership to increase the funding of Title I and increase the scope of Title I so that we can get more children in, we are going to follow the leadership of the Republican majority; we are going to seize funds from the poorest youngsters and spread it out to the more fortunate ones in the other schools. Why do we not have an increase of funding and let all of the new money be divided between these new schools that will be qualified under the 40 percent? Why do we not respond to the public concern that we need to do more for education, not less? We are not going to do more by taking what we have already and spreading it out. Marie Antoinette said, if the people have no bread, let them eat cake. What we are saying is that the loaf of bread is too small, but instead of getting more bread, we want to divide the loaf up into crumbs and distribute the crumbs more widely. To distribute the crumbs more widely may get a lot of political pluses because one can go back and say to their constituents that they had no Title I funds before, but look now, we are doing something about education. We brought you some funds that you did not have before. But we took them from some other place. We took them from the poorest, and we spread it out. The original law was designed to help the poorest. That, I do not think, is a way to proceed in response to the public cry for more help with education. That is Robin Hood in reverse. What we have been doing all along, and the pattern here in the Congress under the Republican leadership is to do just this, spread it out. Ed- Flex was a beginning, straight As is coming after this, either today or tomorrow. Straight As is all about wiping out any Federal control with the money after it goes down to the local level and that means you do not have to have 40 percent or 25 percent, but just spread it out. I yield at this point to the gentlewoman from North Carolina (Mrs. Clayton).

Mr. OWENS. Did we vote on that already?

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, what amendment are we on?

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I have a parliamentary inquiry.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, tonight we are seeing the naked fist of the Republican education philosophy. The education guerilla warfare is over. This is a full scale invasion under way at this point. The tanks are in the streets, the dive bombers are in the air, and the big guns are booming. The Republican objective is the obliteration of the Federal role in education. That is what this is all about. Couple this bill with the fact that there is an appropriations bill floating around which has skipped over the House of Representatives and some kind of conference is taking place and it is coming back to us with deep cuts in the budget of the Department of Education as well as cuts in many of the innovative programs that have been proposed and passed in the last few years, and you will understand that this is part of a larger, grand design. Straight A's means total destruction. Ed-Flex and Teacher Empowerment were probes; they were probes to establish beach-heads and to get us sucked in. But this is it. Straight A's tells the full story. Now, we were criticized a few moments ago. Somebody said we have not even read the bill. Well, we know what came out of committee, and we know what the debate in committee was like. I understand there has been a drastic change because the extremism of the bill that came out of committee was too great to be digested even by the Republican majority. So we have a cutback, and 10 percent is being proposed, but it does not matter. It is a juggernaut into the Federal role in education. This is it. As my colleagues know, if we pass this, then it is all over in terms of Federal role. It would just be downhill from here on. Straight A's is the beginning of a final solution to what the Republicans perceive to be the Federal nuisance in education. I do not know why that irrational perception persists, that the Federal Government is the problem. How can the Federal Government be the problem when the Federal Government only provides 7 percent of the funds? If it only provides 7 percent of the funds, it only has 7 percent of the power. Ninety-three percent of the power resides with the State and local governments to make decisions about what happens with our schools, and if our schools are in bad shape, if education needs improvement greatly because over the years things that should have been changed and were not changed, things that should have been happening did not happen, it is the State and local governments that have to be blamed. The Department of Education has played a limited role, and it should continue to play that role. Specific language of this bill is almost irrelevant. It is the real intent, because the overriding intent is what is really dangerous. It destroys the checks and balances between the Federal Government and the State and local government. What is wrong with having a Federal role which is only 7 percent of the power and decision-making to help check the power and decision-making at the State and local level? For years and years the State and local governments had full reign on what happened in elementary and secondary education, and we drifted backwards steadily. Where would we be in this high-tech world as we are moving toward a cyber-civilization? Where would we be if we strictly had the old State and local government participation only? Many of the most important innovations and the most important things that have happened in State and local education have been prompted, have been stimulated, by the small participation that we have had from the Federal Government. What is wrong with shared power? Why are we obsessed with not having the Federal Government participate in sharing the power and decision-making about education? We are ignoring the opportunity, as my colleagues know, for some real changes here. A few minutes ago the speaker said that change is being proposed and we do not want to go along with change. Well, this is destructive change. This is change in the wrong direction. What we are ignoring is the opportunity right here to make some constructive and some creative changes. We ought to be talking about where we are going toward this new cyber-civilization in the next millennium. We ought to be talking about what we need to do to bring our schools up to par, to be prepared to provide a full-scale education to every youngster, not just in reading and writing and arithmetic, but also in computer literacy. We ought to be talking about how we are going to maintain leadership in the world where we are now the leading computer power, and our economy is way ahead of all the other economies because of our computerization, and that, as my colleagues know, that stroke of genius, collective genius, we should be proud of and build on it. But instead of building on that, we come with the old cliches about the Federal Government has no responsibility in education because, after all, the Federal Constitution, the Constitution has nothing about Federal responsibility for education. The Constitution says nothing about Federal responsibility for roads or highways. As my colleagues know, the Morrill Act, which established the land grant colleges, there is nothing in the Constitution that said they should do that, but thank God they did, that we have a system of land grant colleges which allowed agriculture to blossom and we become the agriculture power that we are in the world. The transcontinental railroad, the Federal Government, the Constitution, said nothing about building railroads, but the Federal government paid for the building of transcontinental railroads. The GI bill, which allowed every GI who wanted to go to school, to higher education, to be able to get an education after World War II, Constitution did not say we had to do that. The Constitution does not dictate what is in the interests of the American people. It is the Members of Congress; it is their vision, their foresight that has to guide where we are going, and right now we ought to be going toward an omnibus bill for education which looks at all aspects of it and comes forward in what we need to go into this cyber-civilization that we are going into, what kind of education do our kids need, not this quibbling about getting the Federal Government out of education. It is childish, it is juvenile, but it is dangerous, it is very dangerous.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Madam Chairman, I move to strike the requisite number of words, and would like to associate myself with the remarks of the rest of my colleagues. (Mr. OWENS asked and was given permission to revise and extend his remarks.)

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Madam Speaker, I rise in protest of a rule which limits the debate on the most important education bill that we will have in the next 3 or 4 years. This is a reauthorization of Title I, which is the core of the Elementary and Secondary Education Assistance Act. They have chosen to break up the Elementary and Secondary Education Assistance Act in small parts. But this is the part that is most important. Why do we have to have a limited debate if we are not busy doing many other constructive things here? Why cannot we have an open debate and let every Member have a chance to speak who wants to speak? I think that this is an issue that probably every Member of Congress should go on record on. The American people have made it quite clear that they think education is of utmost importance. Recent polls have just continued to reaffirm what the old polls have been showing us for years. The ABC News and Washington Post poll, which was released on September 5, 1999, said that improving education was the top issue when people were asked to list 15 issues of great importance. Improving education was listed by 79 percent as number one; handling the economy was 74 percent; managing the budget, 74 percent; handling crime, 71 percent; Social Security was 68 percent, in fifth place compared to education. Education, in the minds of the public, both the Republicans and Democrats and Independents, clearly they see with their common-sense vision that this is the most important issue right now that we should be addressing. They do not make an issue out of whether the Federal Government should do it or the State government or the city government. In their common-sense wisdom, they understand that all levels of government are involved already. They probably understand that local governments and State governments have the greatest responsibilities and contribute the greatest amount of money, but they want the Federal Government to be involved still. They said also that, among the education priorities--this is the National Public Radio, Kaiser Family Foundation, Kennedy School of Government survey, which was conducted September 7, 1999--they said that among the education priorities within that category, fixing rundown schools is number one. Ninety-two percent said that we should fix rundown schools first; reducing class sizes was number two, 86 percent; placing more computers in the classroom, 81 percent. My colleagues know that the people have spoken. Why do we only have 6 hours for the amendments and 2 hours for the general debate? Why do we not come and respond to the people? They are saying this is most important. They did not talk about any F-22s, and they did not say we should go search for billions of dollars to keep the F-22s in testing or engineering. They said education is number one. If education is number one, then why not spend all the time we need to discuss it? There are some basic items which we now must come to grips with. People are still running around saying that the Federal Government is not responsible for education; therefore, the Federal Government should play a limited role; the Federal Government should not get into school construction; the Federal Government should not do this. We play a limited role, and we want to increase the Federal involvement threefold, fourfold. We still would be playing a limited role. The Federal Government expenditures for education now is about 7 percent. Most of that goes to higher education. If we increased it by up to 25 percent, it is still a 25 percent Federal role, 75 percent State and local government. State and local government clearly are responsible primarily, but why not have more of the Federal role? All taxes are local. They begin at the local level. The taxes that come to Washington come from local areas. We manufacture money in the mint here, but that money represents the wealth that has come up from the States. So my plea on the rule is that it should be an open rule that really gives all the time necessary. Every Member was allowed to speak, I remember, when we had the debate on the Gulf War. It was a matter of war and peace, and they felt we should all be able to express ourselves. This is a matter of the peace for the future. The key to the peace for the future is education, starting with education in America. We are ahead of everybody else. We should stay ahead of everybody else. But we need a great pool of well-educated people. That pool is going to have to come from the poorest people. The middle-class sons and daughters are already committed. They are going to be the doctors and lawyers and Wall Street bankers. They are not going to be information technology workers. They are not going to be the people who do the sheet metal work. I went to the sheet metal work training center, and they have more computers in the sheet metal training center than they have in the schools. They now use computers to do the sheet metal work. Everything is driven by computers, and they need people who have a basic education. The Army and the Navy, they need recruits who have some aptitude for handling high-tech weapons. Everything needs education, and we should spend the time talking about how we, as a Congress, are going to respond to the public's call for more help with education.

Mr. OWENS. Madam Chairman, I would like to join in the celebration of bipartisanship on this bill. However, I think it is too early to celebrate, and we have to look at the context in which this bill is being offered today. It is being offered in a context where we have already this year passed an Ed-Flex bill which set the stage for giving a great deal of power and decision-making authority to the governors. Tomorrow or next week, we are going to be considering something called a Straight As bill, which is going to wipe out most of what we say today about the Title I concentration on the poorest youngsters in America. Within this context, we have to consider what we are doing today. When they move today to take the first step as sort of a guerilla, beachhead action, we are going to reduce the concentration required of poverty youngsters in a school from 50 percent to 40 percent, and this bill is just the beginning. This bill looks like a status quo bill with just a few innovations here and there, and a little increase, but it is setting the stage for something very different. I would certainly be quite happy if we could leave it up to our leadership on the Committee on Education and the Workforce. The people there have the institutional memory, and they have the dedication to education. We could do a great job if we did not have these overriding forces of the majority of the Republicans here who are pushing still to minimize the role of the Federal Government in education. One way or another they are going to do that, and the stage is being set today for the block grant. By reducing the thresholds from 50 percent to 40 percent, that is the first stage, and then the Straight As bill will come along and it will push out the decision- making of the Federal Government to a great degree and hand it over to the States. We are moving toward a block grant rapidly. The Senate, the other body, has a bill which is probably going to lead up to that block grant and move us in a direction that we do not want to go. I have several amendments that I will introduce later dealing with innovative programs which I think we should undertake at this time. This should not be a status quo bill. At a time when the United States is at peace and with unprecedented prosperity, we should be taking a great leap forward in education. This bill, which is going to be our reauthorization for 5 years, ought to be an omnibus-cyber-civilization education program to guarantee the brain power and leadership that we need in our present and for our expanding and future digitalized economy in a high-tech world. This Congress should take that step now. At the heart of this kind of an initiative, we should set the important revitalization of the infrastructure of our schools. That is, we should have a major program in this bill. It is germane. It is possible that in this bill we could have a program for school construction. I will be introducing an amendment which calls for a 25 percent increase in the Title I funding for health, safety and security improvements in infrastructure. I will also introduce an amendment for training paraprofessionals. That is the best source of teachers, and we have a shortage now and one that is going to get worse. The source for new teachers is paraprofessionals. Also, I will offer an amendment for an increase to train and develop staff for technology. We should not be content with the status quo. We should not accept the leadership outside of the Committee on Education and the Workforce which wants us to do the least possible and to turn over the role and authority of the Federal Government to somebody else. We should push for what the American voters demand, and that is a major innovative, creative approach to the improvement of education.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we are, I hope, nearing the end of the first session of the 106th Congress, and there are some people who say that probably the end of October we might end the session; but from what I hear today, it may be close to Thanksgiving before we get out of here. Either way, it is a most regrettable session; it is a tragic comedy that ought to end as soon as possible. One of the most regretful parts of this session is that the Republican majority that is in charge of the Congress is not listening to the American people. We as politicians always are accused of holding our fingers in the air to see which way the wind is blowing and shaping our actions and our policies in accordance with public opinion. It is very interesting that this is a year when, in very important areas, we are not listening to the people when we should be. I am not saying that we should always follow public opinion; I think a representative government means that they expect some judgment to be exercised by those who are elected and sometimes their conscience and their knowledge and their vision may conflict with the opinion of the masses; but in general, we should always be listening. And when there is a conflict, we should certainly try to work towards some kind of compromise, some kind of merging of our own opinions with those of the majority. We pay a lot of money for polls and both parties and individuals rely heavily on focus groups and all kinds of devices to find out what people are thinking. But we have a situation now where it is quite clear on several major issues exactly where people are, where the majority is, and this Republican majority refuses to listen. Of course I am told that if the Republican majority wants to shipwreck that first session of the 106th Congress, or maybe the next session too, and we come to a situation where their conflict with the majority of Americans is so great until the democratic process will go into action, and it will throw them out of office. We should not worry as Democrats; we should be happy that there is such confusion and such day-to-day trivializing of the processes of the Congress. Everyday we have stupid bills that really do not mean very much and are a waste of time. In our committees, instead of meeting issues head on, we are dancing around them and camouflaging the real intent of the majority on these bills. Currently we have a situation of that kind in the Committee on Education and the Workforce as we seek to reauthorize the Title I portion of the Elementary and Secondary Education Assistance Act. I am sure many other committees are finding the same tactics where we do not address reality, we trivialize the process by playing around the edges and we are proud of not doing anything. This is a no-commitment Congress. Some people have often used the joke that when Congress is out of session, the Republicans say it is good for us not to be around because we only do harm when we are here. Well, I think that worse than doing harm is to not address the issues at hand and to do nothing, sins of omission are the sins of the 106th Congress. It is a shipwreck Congress as we come closer to the close of this first year. It seems that matters are growing worse each day, not better. We might say that maybe we had a high point last week where we did vote on the HMO Patients' Bill of Rights, the Patients' Bill of Rights that would allow people to have some kind of leveraging as they deal with the health maintenance organizations. Well, we finally came to a point where we got a vote on the floor. We got a long debate, and there were attempts to poison the bill with substitutes and even now, there are attachments to the bill which place the HMO Patients' Bill of Rights bill in some jeopardy, but at least it has been accomplished, finally. But what took so long when so many Americans have made it quite clear that they wanted something done about reining in the HMOs. They wanted this Patients' Bill of Rights very badly. Do we always have to reach the point where 80 percent of the people are for something before we can get some action by the Republican majority here in the House? Why must it take 80 percent before they realize that there are political dangers in not doing anything, so finally they yielded and we were able to get a Patients' Bill of Rights, flawed as it may be, passed out of the House and it is now going into the conference process with the other body, and the other body has a bill which is quite different and weaker, and we must watch closely to see that the Patients' Bill of Rights, the heart of the matter, is not sabotaged and rendered impotent. It is very important that with all of the kinds of experiences that we now have, all of the anecdotes that can be told on either side, both Republicans and Democrats, if one is a Congressperson, one is constantly being assailed with stories of the HMOs and our failure to do anything to combat the abuses that HMOs are guilty of. So it is something that had to be done. The focus groups told us, the polls told us; but it took us a long time to get there. I am happy to see that in certain places there is movement ahead of the Congress and we will have to run to catch up, but I think that there is such a strong impetus to have justice in the area of health care that we are going to get it by and by. It just takes too long. The democratic process should not take so long. I understand that California, in California today or yesterday, the governor signed a bill where California now has a standard, a fixed standard for nurse and patient ratios. In nursing homes and hospitals, we have to have a certain number of nurses in ratio to the patients that is reasonable so that the patients will get a reasonable amount of care. Governor Gray Davis, Democratic governor of California signed that bill. I want to congratulate the people of California, congratulate the legislators out there for moving forward on correcting a major abuse that HMOs have caused as a pressure to bring down the cost of health care, the amount of money that they pay the hospitals for health care. They have forced hospitals into situations where they have cut back on personnel, often personnel that is vital to the health and safety of the patients. We should not tolerate that. There are elements in the Norwood- Dingell bill which deal with standards, deal with protection, access to services, emergency care; a number of very direct approaches which rein in abuses that are known to have been practiced by the health maintenance organizations. Most important in the Norwood-Dingell bill is the provision for the suing of HMOs. We can take an HMO to court and sue, which nobody is recommending a large number of court suits. But if the power to sue is there, then it establishes a whole different environment that patients operate in, and it is very important to keep that provision in there. So we can applaud that finally, after begging, after pleading, after pushing, after the public opinion polls kept rising, we were able to get some action on the floor. We have a bill that is going through a process now which has to be watched closely, but I hope it is progressing. The fact that the House and Senate now have to go into conference and come out with a bill that both Houses can live with and the President will sign is a good sign. We are much further along than we were, I assure the Members, before we passed that bill last Thursday. Prescription drug benefits are not dealt with in this bill. This is to deal with reining in HMOs. There are some items in there related to prescriptions and how HMOs must handle prescriptions. There are some efforts to cut abuses by health maintenance organizations in the case of prescriptions, but we have not addressed the issue of providing prescription drug benefits for people who are on Medicare. There is a need to be able to let every American share the benefits of modern science. There is a need to be able to make certain that no person goes sick or is in pain unnecessarily. If we have the drugs, if we have the medication which can ease pain, can improve health, then the fact that a person has no money should not be a barrier to the use of those modern miracle drugs. I think that there are some situations where various ailments or diseases are quite rare and unusual, and the production of the drugs and medications necessary to treat them is very costly. They deserve special treatment. But there are a large number of drugs which are designed to deal with commonplace ailments. Diabetes is an ailment which afflicts millions of Americans. There are medications for diabetes which everybody should be able to have access to. Some of them are a bit expensive, and expensive is a relative term. If a widow is on a small pension and social security and has to pay her rent and food, et cetera, what is expensive to that widow might seem rather inexpensive to some others of us who are healthy and still working and have good salaries. But why should the person who needs it most and the people who are most frail, who are the eldest people, the people who have declining incomes, in many cases, or no incomes, do without? In too many instances, I have had people tell me, I could not keep taking my medication. I could not maintain the drugs that I needed because I just did not have the money. It was a matter of either I eat or I take my medications, and I had to stay alive. Some of those same people, we do not find them around after a few months because the drugs they take are vital to their health, or they become much sicker as a result of not being able to take drugs that are beneficial to the prevention or the retardation of certain kinds of advancing ailments, so they get very sick, they go the hospitals and they are charity cases. They must be taken care of in a much more expensive setting than would be the case if they were allowed to have prescription drugs. I am on several prescription drug bills. I am happy to say that we have colleagues who have proposed remedies, and the President has certainly proposed an initiative that will begin to deal with the problem of the denial of prescription drugs to persons who are in need of these drugs. I am on a bill that the gentleman from Massachusetts (Mr. Frank) has to require the Secretary of Health and Human Services to submit to Congress a plan to include as a benefit under the Medicare program coverage of outpatient prescription drugs, and to provide funding for that benefit. I am on another bill that the gentleman from New York (Mr. Engel) has, which is a bill to amend title 18 of the Social Security Act to provide for the coverage of outpatient prescription drugs under Part B of the Medicare program. The gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Cardin) has a bill. I am certainly on a bill with our colleague, the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott). In his bill, of course, he covers all prescription drugs, because that is a single-payer bill, H.R. 1200. I just want to take this opportunity to say that H.R. 1200, the single-payer bill sponsored by the gentleman from Washington (Mr. McDermott), is still very much alive as a piece of legislation. We continue to reintroduce it. I am on that bill. I am on a bill with the gentleman from Rhode Island (Mr. Kennedy), with the gentleman from Vermont (Mr. Sanders), a bill to require persons who undertake federally-funded research in developmental drugs to enter into reasonable pricing agreements with the Secretary of Health and Human Services, and for other purposes. Some might have seen some of these exposes that have appeared on television in the last few months of what the drug situation is with respect to the United States as a principal creator and manufacturer of modern drugs. We have a situation where we are charging our citizens far more for those drugs that are created in this country than citizens of other countries are being charged. We do not have to go all the way to Europe, just go next door to Canada or next door to Mexico, and we will see tremendous price differences between the drugs, important prescription drugs, that are being sold in Canada and in Mexico versus the price we pay here. Many of these same drugs have been developed as a result of basic biology and chemistry, research that has been done in American universities financed by the taxpayers of the country, and have been done in our institutes of health. There are studies and all kinds of things we do to enhance the production of important, modern drugs. But we are, as citizens, forced to pay enormous prices, far more than people in other countries. This is unacceptable. This is a reason to get angry. We cannot dawdle here in the Congress and let this continue to go on. We need to come to grips with the fact that our people, our citizens who in many cases have financed, partially financed, the development of important, modern drugs, are being charged enormously excessive rates for the use of those drugs. That is more unfinished business. The public says they want something done about this. The polls say we need to do something about it. The people have spoken, but nobody is listening. The Republican majority is not listening to the American people. Some folks in New York State, for example, have made a joke out of the fact that the First Lady, Hillary Clinton, is considering running, exploring a possible run for the Senate. She has announced for several months now that she is on a listening tour. She is not running, she is on a listening tour. They made fun of that and thought it was very funny, that it is a new twist, and people like to play with it. But I think it is a very good idea, to have every American elected official start out by listening. It is a very important part of our activity. We pay a lot to get to the point where people are talking to us through our polling, through our focus groups. It is a vital part of the operation. No political campaign goes forward without polls and without attempting to measure the opinion of the public. So we know that they want prescription drug benefits. We know they want a bill of rights for health maintenance organization patients. We know this very well, so why is the Republican majority refusing to listen to the American people? We have some areas where the public has no opinion or no particular concern where there is a great deal of activity here in Washington to spend their money, to spend the taxpayers' money. The other side likes to talk about taxpayers' money being wasted on food stamps and WIC programs and Medicare and programs that benefit people, but they are very much involved in the effort to revive the F-22. The F-22 is an airplane that may be a miracle airplane. It may be able to do all the things, one day, when they get through with the research and testing. The F-22 may be a miracle airplane able to do wonders, but it costs billions of dollars to manufacture F-22s. They are trying to work out a situation where they can get it through the testing stage and we will build $50 to $60 billion worth of F-22s. Why do we need $50 to $60 billion worth of F-22 fighter planes when we have very good planes that are far superior to any planes manufactured anywhere in the world? Why do we need another super super fighter plane? But there is a great deal of discussion underway about what can be done to save the F-22, how can we develop a rationale to spend billions of dollars to develop this plane that is manufactured mostly in Marietta, Georgia, the home district of our former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Mr. Gingrich? What can we do to revive the F-22? The public is not asking for the F-22. In no poll, no focus groups will we hear people crying for more F-22s. I marvel at the way the majority, the Republican majority, gets stuck and stays in one rut. I was looking through my records and found that on March 14 of 1995, that is 4 years ago, more than 4 years ago, I commented on the F-22 and the folly of pursuing money for the F-22 at a time when the Republican majority was proposing to save money by cutting back on school lunches. I think about a month later in April I talked about, the Nation needs your lunch, where the Republican majority was saying to schoolkids, we have a budget crunch. We need your lunch. We have to cut back on school lunches in order to make certain that we balance the budget. That same Republican majority was at that time very much pushing the F-22. I am going to go back and read from March 14, 1995, what I said: Mr. Speaker, I would like to make one more plea for justice. I want to again beg the leadership of this Congress to abandon its reckless demolition of the programs that have helped to make America great in the eyes of the whole civilized world. The way we as a Nation have treated the least among us is the vital ingredient of our greatness. This is a plea for honest decision-making. Yes, there is waste in government and it must be removed, but school lunches and summer youth employment programs are not wasteful. These are the government programs that work. These are the programs that are still very much needed. The CIA is not needed at the level of $28 billion a year, which they admitted was at least that much in 1995. The farm price supports for rich farmers are no longer needed at the level of $16 billion a year. We do not need another Sea Wolf submarine, and we certainly do not need to spend billions of dollars for F-22 fighter planes. The F-22 enterprise in Marietta, Georgia, represents a long-term, overwhelming pork barrel. For this same amount of money, we could double the number of jobs in the civilian sector, creating infrastructure and services that are needed. The F-22 is Republican pork. In the Federal budget, this is a huge hog that deserves to be slaughtered. My point is that the F-22 in 1995 was on no list of public opinion at a high level demanding that we build F-22s. In 1999, it is even less desirable than it was in 1995. Yet we are going ahead, not listening. We are not listening to the public when they say they want a Patients' Bill of Rights, we are not listening to the public when they say, we want prescription drug benefits. We are not listening to the public when they say, we want school construction, an increase in the minimum wage. They are not listening, but they are trying hard to put together a program to maintain the F-22 in 1999. In 1995, I did a little poem for them that went as follows: The F-22 for pork, not for me and you. The F-22, toys for skies blue, Empty of any enemy crew. The F-22, jobs for just a few. The F-22, rich Georgia stew, Pork, pork, pork, not for me and you. Off the orphans, starve the kids, Save the contracts, roll out the bids. Bully the poor, be a high-tech dog, Eat the best meat high on the hog, For the peach, who gives a hoot? The F-22 pork is now the Georgia State fruit. Pork, pork, pork where they grow, the F-22, that is the speaker's hometown, too. The F-22, pork, pork, pork not for me and you. The F-22, mostly manufactured in Marietta, Georgia, the home of former Speaker Newt Gingrich, and there are still people who are working day and night to put together a plan to keep that F-22 flowing at the cost of billions of dollars. Nowhere is the public asking for more F-22s. We are spending a great deal and amount of time to do the things that nobody wants done, except a small special interest few, but we are ignoring some other big issues. While we dawdle here in this 106th Congress and do not pay attention to anything of great importance, the era of prosperity and relative peace in the world, which has given us time to focus on important vital matters, is being whittled away. We should be dealing with the fact that in this era of peace, we should invest more funds in ways to keep peace going, not in F-22s and other war machines that are really outdated. Where is the next contact likely to come from? Probably between India and Pakistan. Every day some new development takes place way over there between two very highly populated countries that have been at each other for quite awhile, mainly over the issue of Kashmir. The Pakistani government was overthrown today. There was a coup. The elected government, elected by a majority of the people, was overthrown by the Army. Pakistan has had a long history of military rule; and whenever the military rules, they only go backward. They have a lot of economic problems at this point, and they are likely to get worse. Why is the Pakistani Army in charge now? Because the elected prime minister, a person chosen by the people, decided to dismiss the chief of staff of the Army, the chief of the Armed Forces. The chief of the Armed Forces is the person rumored to have caused a major upheaval a few months ago when he marched without the knowledge of his government, without the knowledge of the prime minister, of the approval of the elected officials that went into Kashmir beyond the line of demarcation and caused a crisis with India. That blunder is the kind of blunder that could lead to a situation where we would inevitably be drawn in, not that we could do much to solve the problem. In that place, it is not so easy to have a bombing campaign which would bring whoever is right and wrong, and it is not clear who is right and who is wrong, to the table. In that situation, there may be two recent nuclear powers, I will not say amateur nuclear powers but they certainly are recent. There is a recent acquisition, recent testing of nuclear bombs. If they start throwing bombs at each other then the atmosphere is polluted, the winds are blowing, who anywhere in the world is going to be safe from the kind of radiation fallout? Who anywhere in the world will be safe from the kinds of things that would permanently be done to the environment as a result of some kind of even a small-scale nuclear war between Pakistan and India? So we ought to be studying ways to deal with making peace in the world. And Pakistan, India, and Kashmir ought to be one of those places that we are focusing attention on. We have focused very little of our energy and attention on that region. If the same kind of energy and attention that we focus on the Middle East was focused on that area, we might have gotten close to a solution by now. Not that we have done too much in the Middle East. We just need to do as much to deal with the world's second most populous nation, India, and a very densely populated nation of Pakistan. There is a territory called Kashmir, and it lies between India and Pakistan. And years ago when I was still in school, India promised that it would allow self-determination for the people of Kashmir. That has been on the agenda for all of these years and still no plebiscite, no vote has been allowed under the supervision of the United Nations or some kind of outside objective observers, which would allow the people of Kashmir to make a determination as to what they want to do, whether they want to become part of India or part of Pakistan, or become independent. India says, no. The focus of the world is on the gun-happy army of Pakistan. Yes, that is a problem. Pakistan must find a way to control its own military. On the other hand, the situation is exacerbated by the fact that India over these years has refused to allow a plebiscite where the people can vote their own destiny. We applauded, we were very happy when finally East Timor was allowed to vote and overwhelmingly the people of East Timor voted to be independent. As a result of that, of course, they paid a heavy price because in a very few days the Armed Forces, disguised as guerrillas and local militia, exacted a heavy toll in terms of lives and property; but it went forward. Troops from Australia are there now, and people who like to put down military interventions and say they are never good, I think the people of East Timor, a very small nation of less than 500,000 people, welcomed the entry of the Australian and other troops under the United Nations command to help bring some justice there. Well, we hope we never have to send troops to Kashmir, and I doubt if it will be so easy to do that. Why are we not working on some peaceful solutions to that problem right now? Why are we not working on peaceful solutions to the problems in a large number of places in the world? Why do we not spend some money on our peace academy? We have a peace academy. Most people have never heard of it. There is an organization with a very tiny budget that does things in the name of promoting peace. Our peace academy really ought to be as large as our military academies, if we are serious. We have West Point. We have the Naval Academy. We have the Air Force Academy. We have the Coast Guard Academy. We have the War College. We have numerous places where we are still training some of our best minds for war, for old fashioned war, violent war, but we have no places where the Federal Government is investing significant amounts of money to train people for peace. So I mention this because the folks who are here pressuring to find billions of dollars for the F-22 are off course. They are certainly not listening to the American people. I think if it went to the American people, common sense would set a different agenda. They would say, what is being done to promote peace? How are we investing to promote peace? And that would go forward. We are not listening, though. We are not listening to those who want to see justice in the world with the least costly means, and that is through a process of peaceful negotiations. In Kosovo, there are some people who have said that it would not have gotten as bad as it was if we had given the peace process, the nonviolent approach, more resources; and they are probably right, but that is a matter of hindsight now. There are a lot of situations in the world where as a matter of foresight we ought to be investing more heavily in peace, but we are not listening. The Republican majority is not listening to the American people. They are not listening. On the HMO bill of rights, they were not listening. They are not listening on prescription drug benefits. They are not listening on the minimum wage bill. We have a minimum wage bill now which Members of the House of Representatives have signed a discharge petition for because under normal circumstances we could not get the bill to the floor. Now that large numbers of members have signed and we also know that a considerable number of members of the majority, of the Republican Party, are willing to vote for a minimum wage bill, finally we hear rumors that there is going to be some movement on a bill which would merely raise, merely raise wages from $5.15 an hour to $6.15 an hour in a two-year period, fifty cents a year over a 2-year period. Considering the fact that we have unprecedented prosperity in this Nation, our CEOs, corporate heads, are making salaries higher than ever before, some of their salaries dwarf the budgets of small countries, we are in a situation where the majority, the Republican majority, will not listen to the American people who say it is only fair, only fair that we increase the minimum wage so that the people on the very bottom are able to begin to make their work count for more. People who are making minimum wage, a family of four who lives in poverty, they are still below the poverty line at this point if they are making a minimum wage. Let us raise it over a two-year period by one dollar. Republicans have a counterproposal. The leadership of the majority of the Republican Party has not committed themselves, but there are proposals to raise it 25 cents per year over 4 years. The unprecedented prosperity that we enjoy now is not enough to make them sympathetic toward a 50 cent increase per year, but it appears that finally they are going to listen to the point of yielding to a minimum wage bill being placed on the floor, if they can exact a high price for business. There may be some compromise coming. I think it is important. It is important to people in my district. New York is one of the States with large numbers of people who are still making only the minimum wage, and we need to help those people who are working get better rewards for their work. The welfare reform bill is coming to a point now where the limits are going to be kicking in, and more people are going to be thrown off welfare, certainly some mothers of young children, and they need to have jobs out there that at least pay $6.15 an hour instead of $5.15 an hour. The Republicans are not listening, but I think we have reached the 80 percent point, at least 80 percent of the American people are saying we think that it is only fair that there be an increase in the minimum wage. What the Republicans are proposing in the area of programs that help the people on the bottom the most are across the board cuts at this point. We have the appropriations process, which is creeping forward. I said this, this first year of the 106th Congress, is a tragic comedy. It is tragic that certain vital things are not getting done. It is a comedy to see the kinds of proposals that keep popping up that they expect us to take seriously. Even the Republican candidate for President has stated that he does not want to be identified with certain proposals that have been made recently. One proposal to cut off the lump sum payment of the wage extension that people get as a result of having worked and not making enough money, they now want to cut that into 12 parts and pay it out on a monthly basis instead of the earned income tax credit being paid in a lump sum at one time. I think the reaction of the Republican candidate for President was he does not want to be any part of an action which attempts to balance the budget on the backs of the poor. I applaud his candor, and I applaud his truthfulness, but that only led to another absurd and very harmful proposal by the Republican majority. Now they are proposing across the board cuts. Let us cut everything drastically. The Health and Human Services bill, which contains most of the programs that benefit the poorest people in America, that was being targeted as the last bill to come out of appropriations, where the highest amounts of cuts will be made. Now they are getting a little more generous and saying we are not going to just make them bear the brunt of the burden. We will have it across the board and all the appropriations bill will be cut and let everybody suffer. At a point in history where we have the greatest prosperity this Nation has ever known, we want to go to the American people and say, we are going to cut title I; we are going to cut Head Start. We are going to cut food stamps; we are going to cut aid to college students. The Pell grants and student work programs, we are going to cut. We are going to cut and say with a straight face that we are being responsible. This is responsible because we need the money in order to put it into a pot for a tax cut, a tax cut for people who are working and earning sizable amounts of money. Most of the tax cuts, the greatest benefit of the tax cuts, would go to the richest people in America. That is responsible. That is listening to the American people. The fact that the polls show that most people have used their common sense and said, look, this tax cut does not make sense, the people who need it most are not getting it, the people who need it least are getting the most, why do we need this kind of tax cut? I am in favor of a tax cut. I am in favor of a tax cut, but we ought to start at the bottom and cut the payroll taxes on the poorest people in America. The biggest increases in taxes over the last decade has been in the payroll taxes, Social Security, and the taxes of Medicare, the taxes that have been imposed on everybody, and poor people have paid the biggest increases. So let us start there and cut the payroll tax first, and then come up and cut the people at the lowest income levels first and keep going so we can give the middle class, which probably suffer the most, because they have enough money to really place them in jeopardy in terms of unfair taxation but not enough to be able to benefit from all the loopholes and the corporate give-aways so they suffer the most. The middle class needs some relief, but that is not the way the Republican majority proposes to handle the tax cut. After they have across the board cuts, their tax cut will not give the money to the majority of the people in America in any kind of significant way. So they are not listening. They are not listening. Eighty percent of the people say this tax cut proposal is no good, but they are not listening. When it comes to education and school construction, that is a high priority. The American people keep demanding it. I have been on the floor time and time again saying that the people want more Federal assistance for education. They want more government involvement at every level. Whether we are talking about the State government or the city government or the Federal Government, they want more government. My people in my district need help. They are tired of situations where the children have to eat lunch at 10:00 in the morning because the school is so overcrowded, and most of the schools in my district there are twice as many students as the school was built for so it is overcrowded from the time they come in in the morning to the time they leave, and the lunchroom cycle has to be arranged so that the lunchroom is not overloaded at any one time. That means that some schools have to have three and four lunch periods. If they have to have three and four lunch periods in order to get the kids in there safely and out, then they have to start having lunch in some cases at 10:00 in the morning. That is child abuse. To make a child eat lunch at 10:00 in the morning is child abuse, but it is going on in large numbers of schools because they see no way out. In the same schools, there are some students being taught in the hallways, some being taught in closets. There are situations where the President's proposed bill to give money for more teachers at the lower grades cannot help us because of the fact that if they get more teachers, they do not have a way to reduce the classroom size because there are no classes. In a first grade class, one teacher cannot be put in one corner of the room and another teacher in the other corner of the room and expect to have any productive teaching taking place. It will not happen. So as we get more teachers in order to reduce the size of the classes, they need more classrooms. It goes on and on and the public says, look, we are tired of it. We want more done about education, and we want specifically to have something done about school construction, school infrastructure, school repair, school wiring, things related to the physical infrastructure. I have been saying this for some time so I guess my credibility in this House would not be that great because one might say I am prejudiced, I am locked into a position. Let us look at the polls that all of us politicians respect. The ABC News, Washington Post poll released on September 5, 1999 says the following: Support for education over tax cuts. We find that improving education and the schools will be very important to 79 percent of Americans when choosing the President next year more than any other issue, more than any other issue. Only 44 percent say cutting taxes is very important, making it 14th out of 15 issues. Do my colleagues want to know what the 15 issues are? The top five issues, according to the ABC News, Washington Post poll released on September 5, 1999 is, one, improving education, 79 percent rank education as the number one issue; handling the economy, 74 percent; managing the budget, 74 percent; handling crime, 71 percent; protecting Social Security, 68 percent. Now, the fact that any one of these made the top five is such that I would not quibble about which is most important, first place or third place or fifth place. Those are top five. Education is always in the top five for the last 5 years. Sometimes it trades places with Social Security and sometimes with crime. Education has always been there. In this poll, 79 percent say improving education is the top issue. What are the lower five of these 15, they are still important issues: Helping the middle class, 61 percent. Handling gun control, 56 percent. Still over the majority feel that handling gun control is important. Handling foreign affairs, 54 percent. Still over a majority, over the 50 percent. Cutting taxes, below the 50 percent. Only 44 percent are interested in cutting taxes. Campaign finance reform, 30 percent. I am sorry to see that campaign finance reform is down there so low, but to make the top 15 is important considering this Nation has more than 250 million people, and all the opinions of different problems and issues to make the top 15 is important. Campaign finance reform is one of the those issues where I think we elected officials, Members of Congress, and others have to move public opinion. We have to explain to the people. We have to use our own set of principles and our own values to help guide public opinion into realization of how dangerous it is not to have campaign finance reform and to have money play such a great role in our democracy. Let me just go a little further on this education issue. When we take the education issue and break it down into parts, the polls show that 80 percent of Americans support at least three education priorities. What are those three priorities? Fixing rundown schools. Ninety-two percent favor fixing rundown schools, 92 percent. Only 7 percent opposed, and 1 percent says they do not know. Let me just say that again. Fixing rundown schools, 92 percent favor, and only 7 percent oppose. Are we listening? Is the Republican majority listening? Is the Democrat minority listening? Are our Democratic leaders listening? Is the White House listening? We do not have in this Congress adequate proposals to address the fact that 92 percent of our people say fixing rundown schools is a top priority. Eighty-six percent say that reducing class sizes is a top priority; 86 percent favor, 13 percent oppose, 1 percent says they do not know. But reducing class sizes, 86 percent favor and 13 percent oppose. Placing more computers in the classroom 81 percent favor, 16 percent oppose, 2 percent do not know. A lot of people will say, well, that is a luxury, computers in the classroom, hookup with the Internet, all this stuff. We need pencils and papers. We need chalk. We have got to stay with the basics. Well, I think the common sense of the American people have run off and left Members of Congress who think that computers, educational technology, hookups with the Internet, all that is not vital to the education of children in 1999 who are going to be in a cyber- civilization tomorrow. They are going to have to take jobs in a world where, if one cannot use computers and use them effectively, there is very little hope for one ever having the opportunity to make a decent living. So placing more computers in the classroom is of vital importance. The common sense of the American people has sensed this. Instincts have told them that this is important. We are privy to all kinds of studies. We know, as Members of Congress, that we are considering another bill to bring in people from outside the country who would fill the jobs and information technology because we have so many vacancies. There is so much pressure from industry here in this country to get more people from the outside to take these jobs. We know that. Most people out there do not know that. But their instincts tell them, their observations at a very low level, without all the benefits of the staff and the studies that we have, say that computers in the classroom are important. In other words, 80 percent of Americans support at least three education priorities: fixing rundown schools, reducing class sizes, placing more computers in the classroom. I think I have just begun to tell my colleagues that the three are inseparable. If we do not fix rundown schools, if we do not create more space, if we do not allow funding for schools to be able to wire for the Internet, and, in many cases, the wiring in the walls will not take, and they have to be rewired, in many cases they have asbestos problems, and that has to be taken care of as a construction issue. So fixing rundown schools is vital in order to be able to put more computers in the classroom. Fixing rundown schools, of course, is obviously vital if we are going to reduce class sizes. In the places where the children have the greatest amount of problems with reading, and where we want to reduce class size in order to be able to give the early teachers the elementary grades, a chance to be able to help kids more, to learn to read, to establish the basic fundamentals that allow them to be successful in school, in those places, they have the worst physical plants, the worst infrastructures. They do not have any classes. They need more classes before they can have reductions in class sizes. We are not talking in New York City this fall about the tremendous shortage of classrooms and the overcrowding. We talked about it last year and the year before. Now the silence is such that one thinks the problem has been solved and resolved. It has not. There is more overcrowding now because there is a great increase in the number of students that have gone into the schools. There is more overcrowding now because children are being held back on the policy of no social promotion. Some children, of course, last year had to go to summer school and had to attend summer school in buildings that were so hot that it was torture for young kids to be in those buildings during the summer because they have no air conditioning, and they have very poor ventilation. Then they found out some of those same kids should not have had to be there because they had passed the necessary tests, and they did not need to go to summer school in order to qualify for advancement to the next grade. There had been an error, an error in the calculation of the test, to show us how blunders place children at risk and make them suffer. The private sector I think was involved in that testing blunder as well as the board of education. But let us put that aside for a moment and consider the fact that there is silence in New York City, a city that had $2 billion in surplus last year and did not spend a penny to help renovate, repair, help building those schools. Not a penny of that surplus went into the schools. There was silence at the State level. The State had a $2 billion surplus, and the Governor vetoed a bill which called for $500 million to help repair schools. The burden should not only be on the shoulder of the Federal Government. We need movement on the Federal Government because, in the process of having the Federal Government move, we hope to stimulate and drag along other levels of government in this process of getting schools built. Why do I think it is so important? Because, as I said many times before, in any religion, the state of the temple, the church, or the synagogue, the way the physical building looks is the beginning of the assessment of the way people feel about that religion. If it is a dilapidated, rundown, neglected building, then nobody is going to take the parishioners seriously about their religion and the way they feel about it, because that symbolism, that highly visible statement of how one feels is there. When one does not take care of school buildings, one sends a message to parents in my community and certainly in inner city communities across the country that we have abandoned the schools. That is almost true. The major leaders of America, the people who are in the power structure, have abandoned public schools in their heads already. Many have overtly done it. Others do not realize yet, but the way they behave, their hesitation, their neglect, their sins of omission means that they have abandoned public schools already. Because if one does not move to build and rebuild the physical infrastructure, then all hope is lost. Parents have no hope when they hear the rhetoric of the Department of Education, of the White House, or the Congress or any Member of the Congress. They hear the rhetoric, but they see the schools collapsing. They see the schools have leaky roofs, crumbling walls. They see the schools have coal burning furnaces. There are still more than 200 schools in New York City that are burning coal and jeopardizing the healthy kids immediately and causing respiratory illnesses among teachers. When though see these things happening, they are correct in not believing that elected officials are serious about maintaining the public school system. Is it any wonder, then, that so many inner city parents, white and black, and certainly a large number of black parents, are opting to support vouchers, more than 50 percent in certain surveys. In a survey that was taken last year, 57 percent of black parents in inner city communities said that they would certainly support vouchers in order to get their kids a decent education. They did not have any faith left in the public school system. That is most unfortunate, but that is a truth I have to stand here and admit. They have given up hope because they realize that their child only has one life and they only go through the process of being educated one time and they cannot afford to wait any longer. They are desperate. But in their desperation, they are turning to a system which will also disappoint them, because all we have done is create a hope in a false institution that does not exist. The private sector cannot handle the millions of youngsters in public schools who need help. There is a large scholarship program that was developed by some millionaires in New York and they put up large amounts of money and a thousand youngsters could be provided with a scholarship which allowed them to go to a private school of their choice. The money that they got as a scholarship would pay half of it. Thousands and thousands are on the waiting list because there are no schools to accommodate all of those young people. There are no private schools that can accommodate it. It would take 20 or 30 years to build a private school system that could accommodate the 53 million children who now go to public schools in America. It is not an answer to the problem. And the parents who have given up hope are only going to have their hopes dashed greatly as a result of this illusion that is being created by people who wanted to destroy public schools to make a point and to prove that the private sector can do it better. If they lose a generation, they are so cold hearted that they do not particularly care what happens to that generation. But that is about what we are facing. A generation will be lost while we try to get in place a private school system to replace a public school system which now takes care of 53 million students. It is most unfortunate. I can only close with the same message that I have brought here before many times. Both parties are negligent in focusing on the principal problem with the education improvement effort. Kids must be provided with an opportunity to learn. As we try to raise standards, as we standardize curriculums, we need to focus on the students themselves and provide them with the maximum opportunity to learn. At the heart of the opportunity to learn is a physical facility. We need a physical facility which can support the opportunity to learn. They need a decent library. They need decent laboratories. They need a clean, safe environment conducive to learning. We cannot go forward unless we address the issue of school construction, school repair, school modernization. The bills that we are supporting in the Democratic Caucus is a bill that I have my name on as a cosponsor is totally inadequate. It is a bill to sell bonds and the Federal Government will pay the interest. It is a commitment of the Federal Government over a 5-year period to $3.7 billion for the school construction situation under a situation where each locality or State will have to vote to borrow money and we will pay the interest on the principal. That is totally inadequate. As would he go into a cyber-civilization, I strongly advise, urge, and plead that all elected officials understand that what would he need is an omnibus cyber-civilization education program to guarantee that the brain power and the leadership needed for our present and our expanding future digitalized economy and high-tech world will be there. At the heart of such a comprehensive initiative, we must set the all- important revitalization of the physical infrastructure of America's schools. These necessary brick and mortar creations will long endure as symbols of this particular set of leadership's commitment to education. It will also serve as practical vehicles for the delivery of a kind of high-tech education required in the 21st century. All of the most brilliant and visionary education achievements of the Clinton administration may be merged and focused through these vital and physical edifices. We have had a net day movement for the volunteer wiring of schools. We had the technology literacy legislation, the community technology centers, the distance learning projects, and the widely celebrated and appreciated E-rate for telecommunications. The lifting of standards, the improvement of school curriculums, and the support for smaller class sizes are also initiatives that require the additional classrooms and expanded libraries and laboratories that school modernization will bring. We are not listening to the majority of Americans. The Republican majority is not listening, and too many other people in other places also are not listening. We need to listen on all of these vital issues, whether it is the HMO bill of rights, prescription drug benefits, minimum wage, the need to fund HHS right across the board with increases instead of decreases, or school construction. All of these are areas where leadership is needed, where the demands right now in a time of great prosperity and peace are that we lay the foundation for a cyber-civilization, and we do that with an education program that is across the board seeking to improve education but starting with the all-important area of construction of new schools.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, there are strong rumors that Actor Warren Beatty may run for President in order to highlight the ``real issues'' facing our great nation. Beatty produced and starred in the movie, ``Bulworth,'' which was a nonsense presentation seeking to ridicule our present political environment. When we listen to the posturing and slogans of the leadership of this 106th Congress it is difficult to distinguish the nonsense on the floor from the nonsense in ``Bulworth.'' Perhaps the political process would benefit from a presidential run by Warren Beatty. He could hold up a mirror for us to see the ``bull'' we tolerate. Welcome Bulworth Bulworth welcome To the Capitol dome For folks full of bull This is your home Manure is splattered Over the Congress floor Bring a shovel Push the grit Out the Chamber door Medicare prescriptions Will bankrupt the nation

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, in order to have continuity on this question of prescription drugs, I would like to yield my first 5 minutes to the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Gonzalez). High Cost of Prescription Drugs

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I would like to begin by thanking the Chair and the staff for extending me the courtesy of holding open the floor for a while. I would like to talk today about two important events that have taken place in the last 20 days. Both of those events, I think, have bearing on the subject of school construction and education improvement. The first event took place on September 10. It was a memorial service for James Farmer. James Farmer was a founder of the Congress of Racial Equality. He died on July 9 of this year. Last year he had been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Clinton. James Farmer was a very special person for me, because I began my career in public service as a member of the Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality. CORE, as it was known nationally, was a very different organization at that time from the CORE we know today. There is no resemblance whatsoever between the CORE of today and the CORE of the civil rights movement time in the 1960s. James Farmer was an individual that I think deserves to be singled out for his special contribution in terms of the techniques of direct action, sit-ins, demonstrations and picket lines. A number of things that became commonplace during the civil rights struggles of the 1960s were attributed to many individuals, but James Farmer was the person who initially started it. By providing a way for individuals to take immediate, direct action, he also inspired the young people of that time to get very much involved. CORE was very much a young people's movement and it spread to the entire civil rights movement. The entire civil rights movement was bolstered by the techniques which were pioneered by James Farmer. James Farmer, of course, lived for a long time after the 1960s and his career took many turns. People tend to forget because of the fact that, in my opinion, he was burned out and left the movement. Knowing what the 1960s were like and being a part of it, I am sure his family suffered a great deal. By the time he left, he had a lot of problems that he had to take care of. He left the movement and went into government, but he must be remembered for the time he was there during the movement and for the pioneering that he did as early as 1942. To sort of sum up what I feel we should remember about James Farmer, I will read the statement that I made at the memorial service that was held on September 10 at the Kennedy center. There were many speakers there who looked at James Farmer's life from many different approaches, but I was most interested in trying to pinpoint what it is that James Farmer did that is relevant now, how is it relevant to the situation faced now in the African-American community, how is it relevant to the situation faced now by African-American parents who are dependent upon the public school system and they are watching a crumbling system, a system that is being abandoned, and they appear to be helpless in the face of what is going on. I contend that we are slowly, by the kinds of decisions we are making or not making, we are abandoning the public school system, and the primary victims of that are the people in the inner cities who happen to be African American and Hispanics. But certainly a large part of the population is African American. The African-American parents have been targeted by people who want to accelerate this process of destroying the public school system. They want to hold up the specter of vouchers as a solution to the public school problem and they are using the discontent and the vulnerabilities of the African-American parent as a weapon. They are taking polls, encouraging African-American partners to speak out in favor of vouchers, and unwittingly many African-American parents and African-American leaders are contributing to the process of eroding support for the public schools. I want to link these two and at the same time link it to the Congressional Black Caucus legislative weekend that just took place on September 16, 17, 18 and 19. The thing that struck me most about the Congressional Black Caucus legislative weekend was the absence of a sense of urgency about education. Education is something that African- American leaders always applaud any kind of education reform and if you make a proposal for improvements, they will applaud that. They generally will go along and endorse any efforts to improve schools, but my problem is that the energy and the effort that is necessary to make this happen is not there behind the endorsements. I saw in the Congressional Black Caucus weekend a situation where only the Congressional Black Caucus education brain trust and two or three other forums, issue forums and brain trusts, focused in on education. In none of the dialogue, in the bigger dialogue at the Congressional Black Caucus prayer breakfast or at the dinner, was there a focus on the emergency nature of the educational situation faced by the African-American community. So what I am doing now is saying to African-American parents and leaders out there in the inner city communities, there is something wrong, I am not certain I know what it is, about the way your leadership behaves on the issue of education. On the issue of education, we do not seem to be able to get any intensity going. We do not seem to be able to get any focused attention over a long period of time. In order to combat that, I am saying to the parents out there and the ordinary people in the communities and the ministers and everybody else, you better not wait for the leadership, the top leadership in the African-American community to stop the process of abandoning the public schools. You better not wait for the top leadership in the African-American community to really take steps to push for the necessary public funding for school construction. The energy is not there. We need to generate the energy from below. Where does James Farmer come in? He is the guy who showed us how little people all across the country can do their own thing, can become their own advocates and do not have to wait until the master planners and the folks who are at the top decide to get around to dealing with an issue. During the civil rights movement, during the 1960s, there was a great deal of activity by parents pushing to improve the schools and people have asked, why is that not happening now, why have parents in the inner city communities gone to sleep? Why are they so chaotic? Why are they so devastated that they cannot respond to what is happening? The atrocities continue in the school systems in the big cities every day and parents do not seem to be able to respond. My first answer to that question is that during the 1960's, the civil rights movement provided leadership for parents, also. The activists in the civil rights movement helped to organize parents. Parents were organized but they were also stimulated to do for themselves and they were handed the tool by people like James Farmer: If you don't like what's happening in the schools, you better go out there and get a picket, line up, you better sit in at the school, you better raise hell about what's going on in order to get the attention of the people who make the decisions. That formula is not obsolete. It is still a formula which is relevant. I hope that as we look at James Farmer's life and pay tribute to him over the next month or so, there things do not last long, people die, we have memorial services, and then they are forgotten. I do not want him to be forgotten. There is a book that has been reissued. His autobiography has been reissued. I would like to commend to people who want to really know what James Farmer is all about to read the book, ``Lay Bare the Heart,'' the autobiography of the civil rights movement by James Farmer, and listen carefully to the basic message he had to offer, that everybody in America has the right and has the opportunity to fight for themselves. Direct action, direct action which is nonviolent. I cannot stress too much that James Farmer came out of the nonviolent direct action movement. Gandhi and the Fellowship of Reconciliation and all the people who have insisted that you can be revolutionary without picking up a gun, you can be revolutionary without resorting to violence, you can be revolutionary by letting yourself become the object of the hatred of the enemy by taking a lot of abuse and by absorbing a lot of the energy of those who hate, James Farmer was a major proponent of that. We know Martin Luther King as a proponent of nonviolence more so because, of course, Martin Luther King mobilized great masses of people and made a mark definitely in terms of the media and history. There are elements of all of James Farmer and the direct action in everything Martin Luther King did. They had the same mentors. Gandhi was a mentor, spiritual and philosophical person that Martin Luther King looked up to as much as James Farmer. As early as 1942, James Farmer pioneered the techniques of nonviolent action against racial discrimination. As the civil rights movement reached its climax in the 1960s, he became its major spark plug and a gyroscope for the struggle. Because of Jim Farmer, the civil rights battle, which was being pursued successfully but slowly in the courts, marched into the streets where the crusade made a greater leap forward. He was the role model for the youth and for the masses who found that through nonviolent direct action every individual had the opportunity to bear witness in the fight for freedom. My last contact with Jim Farmer was at the White House when President Clinton conferred on him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He greeted me then as he has always over the years. He had the same deep voice and hearty manner of a self-confident and reassuring fatherly counselor. Despite the fact that the ravages of disease had rendered him blind and his limbs were amputated, Jim Farmer's great indomitable spirit was still in no way disabled. Jim Farmer was probably the most potent role model of the civil rights movement. The young of the 1960s, the youth of the 1960s, were inspired repeatedly by the Farmer steadfast dedication, by his shining integrity and his overwhelming personal courage. Jim Farmer's willingness to constantly place himself in danger on the front lines made his young troops stand up and cheer. From the segregated swimming pools in northern cities to the burning buses in Alabama, Jim Farmer never retreated from the billy clubs and the tortures of racist terror. He was our super hero in the best sense of the concept of heroism. Jim Farmer inspired ordinary people to take on extraordinary challenges. Unfortunately, the names of thousands who made a difference will never appear in the history books, but the memory of my formative years is electrified by the portraits of Brooklyn CORE members like Oliver and Marge Leeds, Mary Phifer, Elaine and Jerry Bibuld, and Arnold Goldwag. These CORE warriors still stand out in my mind as the bravest and most unselfish people that I have ever known. I served as chairman of the Brooklyn Congress of Racial Equality for 2 years. My first experience in politics was a run for the city council in Brooklyn, under the Brooklyn CORE sponsorship, the Brooklyn Free and Democratic Party we called it, after the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. That was my first foray into politics. We lost badly, Mr. Speaker, but I learned enough to be able to win later on in my second bid for public office. As a confused and anemic present-day movement for economic and human rights struggles to establish some kind of momentum, and we are confused and anemic these days as we attempt to try to begin to address the many problems that are facing the people on the bottom, it is vitally necessary that we properly interpret at this point and that we assimilate the great and unique legacy of Jim Farmer. To achieve and sustain peace with justice, the alloy of political leverage and legal maneuvering must also include the steady pressure of individuals bearing witness through nonviolent direct action. It is still relevant; it is not old fashioned. It is for us, the living, to absorb the James Farmer legacy. The challenge is for us, the living, to utilize that legacy to move humanity forward. In the great complex fabric of our American democracy, the strategies, the tactics, and the instruments for gaining and preserving the fullest measure of our freedom must also be complex, intricate, and dynamically diverse. The power of nonviolent direct action must again be accorded its rightful place in the arsenal for the advancement of human rights. Of the struggle, in the advancement of the struggle, the elements that were there before are still necessary. The courtrooms are very appropriate, the appropriate beachheads in the fight of justice. We still need legal actions in the courts. The halls of city councils and State legislatures and certainly the United States Congress will always be vital battle grounds in our fight for freedom and for human rights, but the picket lines and the sit-ins and the marches, the nonviolent personal confrontations with injustice, wherever it may be, are the initiatives that have been too long neglected. The movement for universal justice and for the opportunity for all to pursue happiness has become bogged down. It is mired in trivia and ineptness. Those who suffer most have retreated into suicidal apathy. They will not even exercise their right to vote. We fought for so long. So many people died, and so many people were injured and humiliated. James Farmer spent many weeks in jail in the South pushing for voter registration. James Farmer was the organizer of the Mississippi Freedom Summer where Chaney, Goodman and Schwerner, three civil rights workers, two white from the North, and one from the South were murdered. Those people were fighting for the right to vote and now have the right to vote, and more than 50 percent of the people do not bother to come out to vote in the African American community. As my colleagues know, these great masses are looking for somebody else to deliver them. They huddle and wait for someone else to fight for them. We need to activate them; we need to let them know that they must fight for themselves. If we return to nonviolent direct action around the grievances that they consider important, maybe we will get them to understand the connection, the vital connection between their vote and their overall welfare in this democratic society of ours. In tribute to the pioneering spirit of James Farmer, it is imperative that we re-examine our present strategy and our tactics and our styles. Especially the leadership of the African American community needs to re-examine our strategy, our tactics and our style. Our tactics have locked out a large number of people who should be allowed to fight for themselves. The fortresses of mega-greed, corporate totalitarianism, and systemic racism must be assaulted with new vigor and with the old diversity of weapons which includes nonviolent, direct action. Jim Farmer's approach guided the sit-ins and the voter registration marches. Few civil rights leaders were beaten, gassed, and arrested as many times or stayed in jail as many days as Jim Farmer. But this bold leader and fighter for civil rights was not a wild and reckless radical. Jim Farmer was not a wild and reckless radical. The freedom rides, the Mississippi Freedom Summer and all other court actions were planned with great concern for the lives of the participants and with a clear focus on a specific segregation or human rights violation target. As part of a five-point procedure Farmer mandated that every action must be preceded by a clear statement of the grievance and an opportunity to negotiate must be provided. Jim Farmer also reflected deeply on the fate of the African American community that was to come. After you broke down the walls of segregation, what would it be like? He was constantly preoccupied with that. Under Farmer's tutelage and inspiration, CORE chapters all over the Nation launched initiatives against slum landlords and inadequate government services. The CORE strategy and tactics extended under Farmer's leadership into community action, into economic develop projects; and finally Farmer also encouraged youthful CORE members to enter the political arena where more than a few of his proteges have carried the action into city councils, State legislatures and the halls of Congress. I consider myself one of Jim Farmer's proteges. The first time I ran for city council and lost, CORE was in dire economic straits, and the national CORE office was broke. They were struggling to meet day-to-day expenses, and because Jim Farmer had encouraged me to run for office, when I went to the office and asked for contributions and some help, I remember he took one of the badly needed $300 away from the planning process to meet the payroll and other expenses, and he gave me a check for $300 from my city council campaign. We lost and lost badly; but as I said before, what I learned in that campaign allowed me to survive and persevere in later runs for public office in the State Senate and in the Congress. So he encouraged youthful CORE members way back then, the late 1960s, to enter the political arena, and more than a few of us. There are many city council persons and members of State legislatures as well as several Members of Congress who are proteges of Jim Farmer. His restless spirit led him into the Federal Government to promote a massive literacy and adult education program. Beyond his monumental courage and overwhelming dedication, James Farmer had an extraordinary vision which decades ago allowed him to see the great challenges of economic development and education which still command our attention today. He was a man of action and a man of thought, a man with a booming voice and a penetrating vision, a man of great humility who was bold and audacious with his courage. He sounded the trumpet that inspired the downtrodden, and it inspired the youth to rise up and march for themselves. He was a rare world-class leader and a great American spirit, James L. Farmer. Mr. Speaker, I enter this portion of my speech in its entirety in the Record: James Farmer--A Great American Spirit As early as 1942, James Farmer pioneered the techniques of non-violent action against racial discrimination. As the civil rights movement reached its climax in the sixties, he became its major sparkplug and a gyroscope for the struggle. Because of Jim Farmer, the civil rights battle, which was being pursued successfully but slowly in the courts marched into the streets where the crusade made a great leap forward. He was the role model for the youth and for the masses who found that through direct action every individual had the opportunity to bear witness in the fight for freedom. My last contact with Jim Farmer was at the White House when President Clinton conferred on him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He greeted me then as he always has over the years. He had the same deep voice and hearty manner of a self- confident and reassuring fatherly counselor. Despite the fact that the ravages of disease had rendered him blind and limbs were amputated, Jim Farmer's great indomitable spirit was still in no way disabled. Jim Farmer was probably the most potent role model of the civil rights movement. The youth of the sixties were inspired repeatedly by Farmer's-steadfast dedication, shining integrity and overwhelming personal courage. His willingness to constantly place himself in danger on the front lines made his young troops stand up and cheer. From the segregated swimming pools in northern cities to the burning buses in Alabama, Jim Farmer never retreated from the billy clubs and torches of racist terror. He was our super-hero in the best sense of the concept of heroism. Jim Farmer inspired ordinary people to take on extraordinary challenges. Unfortunately, the names of thousands who made a difference will never appear in the history books. But the memory of my formative years is electrified by the portraits of Brooklyn CORE members like Oliver and Marge Leeds, Mary Phifer, Elaine and Jerry Bibuld, and Arnold Goldwag. These CORE warriors still stand out as the bravest and most unselfish people that I have ever known. As the confused and anemic present day movement for economic and human rights struggles to re-establish momentium, it is vitally necessary that we properly interpret and assimilate the great and unique legacy of Jim Farmer. To achieve and sustain peace with justice, the alloy of political leverage and legal maneuvering must also include the steady pressure of individuals bearing witness throughout direct action. It is for us the living to absorb the James Farmer legacy; the challenge is for us the living to utilize that legacy to move humanity forward. In the great complex fabric of our American democracy, the strategies, tactics and instruments for gaining and preserving the fullest measure of our freedom must also be complex, intricate, and dynamically diverse. The power of non-violent direct action must again be accorded its rightful place in the arsenal for the advancement of the struggle. The court rooms are appropriate beachheads in the fight for justice. The halls of city councils, State legislatures, and the United States Congress will always be vital battlegrounds. But the picket lines and the sit-ins and the marches; the non-violent personal confrontations with injustice are the initiatives that have been too long neglected. The movement for universal justice and for the opportunity for all to pursue happiness has become bogged down, mired in trivia and ineptness. Those who suffer most have retreated into suicidal apathy. They won't even exercise their right to vote. Great masses huddle and wait for someone else to deliver them. In tribute to the pioneering spirit of James Farmer, it is imperative that we reexamine our present strategy, tactics and styles. The fortresses of mega-greed, corporate totalitarianism, and systemic racism must be assaulted with new vigor and with the old diversity of weapons, which includes non-violent direct action. Farmer's approach guided the sit-ins and the voter registration marches. Few civil rights leaders were beaten, gassed, and arrested as many times, or stayed in jail as many days as Jim Farmer. But this bold fighter was not a wild and reckless radical. The freedom rides, the Mississippi freedom summer, and all other CORE actions were planned with great concern for the lives of the participants, and with a clear focus on a specific segregation or human rights violation target. As part of the five point procedure, Farmer mandated that every action must be preceded by a clear statement of the grievance and an opportunity to negotiate must be provided. Jim Farmer also reflected deeply on the fate of the African American community after the walls of segregation had been torn down. Under Farmer's tutelage and inspiration, CORE chapters all over the Nation launched initiatives against slum landlords and inadequate government services. The CORE strategy and tactics extended into community action and economic development projects. And finally, Farmer also encouraged youthful CORE members to enter the political arena where more than a few of his proteges have carried the action into city councils, State legislatures, and the Halls of Congress. His restless spirit led him into the Federal Government to promote a massive literacy and adult education program. Beyond his monumental courage and overwhelming dedication, James Farmers had an extraordinary vision which decades ago allowed him to see the great challenges of economic development and education which still command our attention today. He was a man of action and a man of thought; a man with a booming voice and a penetrating vision; a man of great humility who was bold and audacious with his courage. He sounded the trumpet that inspired the downtrodden and the youth to rise up and march for themselves. He was a rare world class leader and a great American spirit--James L. Farmer. There were other Members of Congress who were at the tribute for Jim Farmer. The gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Lewis) considers Jim Farmer to be a great mentor of his, and the gentleman from Georgia was with Jim Farmer on the ride, the well-known bus ride through the South to end segregation in interstate transportation. The gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Lewis) was there when the bus was burned. The gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Lewis) was beaten badly on several occasions. The gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Lewis) was in jail in Mississippi with Jim Farmer. The gentleman from South Carolina (Mr. Clyburn), the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, was another person who considers Jim Farmer as his mentor, and I think that it is very interesting that, and there are other people who are Members of Congress who were touched, whose lives were touched by Jim Farmer. I hope that those disciples and the people who joined with me on September 10 in the tribute to Jim Farmer at the John F. Kennedy Center will understand my plea tonight, and that plea is that we must change our tactics and our strategy and our style in order to deal with the problems confronting us in education. Mr. Speaker, to bring these pieces together, let me just quickly repeat what I am trying to do tonight is to make a linkage between the memorial service for James Farmer which highlighted his contribution to our great American civilization and the relevance of Jim Farmer's legacy to current problems that we face; and no problem is more important in the African American community than the problem of education. As my colleagues know, I cannot repeat too often the fact that survival of the African American community is dependent on a number of factors, but if we do not have a great improvement in the systems which educate our children all over the country, we are not going to survive; we are not going to be able to deal with the complexities of a modern cyber-civilization. We cannot keep falling behind at the rate that we are falling behind, and I can document that we are falling behind at a rapid rate. It may not be as bad in some of the schools and smaller cities across the Nation. In fact, I am a native of Memphis, Tennessee, and I often tell people that when I went to school in Memphis, Tennessee, in the 1950s and the 1940s, we had a school system at that time which was segregated, but the segregated school system that I went to was superior to the New York City school system right now, and that is not an exaggeration. The New York City school system is steadily declining, steadily getting worse; and you can document this easily. The reading scores, the math scores, they document it in one respect, but you can look at the fabric of the system where every year more and more children enter the system which has 1.2 million children, 1.2 million children in the system. We have 1,200 schools. We have more than 60,000 teachers. It is a huge system and in that system the majority of those schools are overcrowded. At least a fourth of those schools have twice as many students as the school was built for. Large numbers of those schools are forcing children to eat lunch at 10:00 in the morning because they have to have a cycle. They have to cycle the kids through the cafeteria. There are so many youngsters, in order to cycle them through the cafeteria some of them have to eat as early as 10:00 in the morning. Some have to eat lunch as late at 1:30. It is ridiculous and it is child abuse but it is systematic. It is going on in so many schools that they do not think of it as child abuse anymore. The New York City school system, in order to save money, 10 years ago they started forcing out the most experienced people, the most experienced supervisors and principals, superintendents, not so much superintendents but principals and assistant principals and teachers. They were given buy-out incentives. They were encouraged to leave the system. They could get more money and they would doctor it so they would get an upfront amount. It was so lucrative until thousands of teachers left the system; supervisors, principals left the system. An operation cannot be run with inexperienced people. I do not care how brilliant they are. It may be that our schools of education, our business management schools, wherever we get principals and assistant principals from, they are doing a great job. I do not see that from my individual experiences with these principals and assistant principals, but maybe. No matter how well educated they are, anybody who has ever been in an administrative position knows that there are some things we learn from experience that we can only learn from experience. If a system is robbed of the experienced people, the damages can be calculated that are going to be done. So 10 years ago, we started this raiding of the system. Even now it goes on because of some notion that the mayor of the city and the chancellor of the school system, we have a chancellor who is over all this, and then we have superintendents of 32 districts, it is a big bureaucracy, the chancellor and the mayor have decided they want to beat the principals into submission. They want to take away tenure. I think that is a good idea, that principals should not have lifetime tenure, that as managers and executives they ought to measure up and be able to deal with their performance and if their performance is not up to par, they lose their jobs like anybody else. So tenure ought to be taken away. The way the system works, the legislature would have to act to force the principals to do this. The legislature refuses to do this. The principals in the bargaining process will not give up their tenure. So we have been in a stalemate for almost 2 years. For 2 years we have had a situation where the principals are frozen into a situation where they cannot get raises. The contract is such that they cannot get raises for the principals. The people under them, the people under them who are teachers, have gotten raises. There are some experienced teachers in schools who now earn more than the principal because of the fact that they have been frozen. With all of these principals frozen in place, many of them have decided to retire. The process of taking away the experienced people is accelerated. The New York Times had an editorial last week which said it is time for the chancellor and the mayor to accept a compromise. There ought to be some kind of compromise because if the principals are frozen, and they are more and more disgruntled and see that their position is being eroded not only in terms of their pay relevant to the pay of the teachers under them but also their authority, they are resigning and moving to the suburbs where there is a great demand for experienced educators. They are not losing. We are losing. There are schools all around New York City. There are schools across the river in New Jersey. There is a demand for experienced educators, good or bad. Maybe they are not so good. Maybe they are holding on to tenure because they believe that a performance review system would jeopardize them in some way, but they are not having problems getting jobs. So we are further eroding the leadership, the management of the system, by holding on to this negotiation position that the city, through the mayor and the chancellor, have. The New York Times is right. It is time to compromise. We compromise everywhere. In Detroit, the automobile companies would not hold out forever. If they are missing sales of cars and if the competition is getting ahead of them for various reasons, strikes and collective bargaining procedures are always subject to some kinds of compromise. So we need to compromise on that issue. The parents who sit and watch this chaos are getting more and more disheartened. When a survey is taken, they say we would like vouchers. If a parent is asked do they think the public school system has any future, is it really going to be able to improve, does their child have a chance of really learning enough to qualify to go to college, the parents have decided with all of this chaos going on, 52 percent of them right across the country in the urban centers say we would prefer vouchers to the public school system. I do not doubt that survey. I do not doubt the fact that that is an honest survey. The people who say that is happening, I know why. They have given up. The parents have given up. They have been sold a bill of goods about what the solution is because if we were to try to transfer large numbers of children into the private school system if vouchers were available, if there were publicly financed vouchers, the private system is not able in any way to take the public school students. We have 53 million children in America who go to public schools. The private school system has been steadily about 10 percent of that for years. There is no way we can solve the problems of education for the parents in the inner city communities or anywhere in America by just shifting the children from the public school system to the private school system. So they are being sold a bill of goods. They are being told that they can raise part of the money themselves. Scholarships and vouchers, private scholarships, have been made available to a large number, but people who are in gross poverty cannot take $1,500 as a scholarship, and given the fact that they are struggling to put food on the table be able to pay the rest of the tuition on an ongoing basis. I know. I have met many of the parents who already are saying, I struggle. I raised the first tuition payment, but we are falling further and further behind. We are going to have to take our kid out of the private school and put him back in public school. Large numbers are shifting back to public schools because of the fact that they cannot go the extra mile. Poverty is not understood by the leadership. I was born poor, and I know what it is all about. The extra money is not available for $1,500 in tuition a year; and anybody who has ever had a child in a private school knows it is far greater than that. My children were in private schools in pre-school. They were in public schools all their elementary and secondary school life, but as pre-schoolers they went to a private school. We had to pay the tuition and raise money all year long. There are various ways in which the private schools are asking parents to contribute more money and to help raise money and usually the contribution, a large part of the contribution, is not raised in selling tickets and stuff. It comes out of your pocket, and the pressure to put more and more in is there. So the private schools, with all due respect to the people who want to advocate vouchers, it would take 30 or 40 years to replace the present system with a private school system, even if there was full support from the government and full support from the private sector. The experiments that are going on now are totally inadequate in terms of the amount of money that the private sector is willing to make available to parents and we are going to see a collapse of most of those efforts because the poverty is too great to help the people who need the help the most. Why am I dwelling on this? The message has to go to the African- American leaders. The people who were at the Congressional Black Caucus weekend are the leaders. People come from all over the country. I do not know how many thousands we had there. I think we had 5,000 people at one dinner. So these are teachers and these are lawyers and these are doctors. These are the people who provide leadership in our communities, and ministers, and they were not focused on this problem. They have not gotten the message that underneath them our communities are crumbling because of the poor education system. New opportunities are being created at the level of higher education. I welcome and I congratulate Bill Gates who announced less than 10 days ago that he is going to provide a billion dollars for scholarships not to poor but minorities, African-Americans, Hispanic-Americans, Native Americans, a billion dollars over a 20-year period. They estimate they will be able to supply 1,000 scholarships per year for 20 years. These are extraordinary scholarships that they are offering. They are going to pay for the whole 4 years all expenses of the student for 4 years, minus any scholarships that the student was able to get otherwise. Basically, there cannot be a better deal than that; all expenses paid for 4 years and a thousand students are going to be able to benefit from that each year. In my district, the first question that came to my mind, how many of the youngsters here will be able to qualify for those scholarships? There is a simple process for selecting. Part of it is the recommendation of the principal of a high school. Part of it is a grade average and part of it is the score on the test. When it comes to the scores on the test, there is going to be a real problem because the kids in my district are consistently scoring low in reading and low on math. When they get to high schools and the SATs they also score very low. Why do they score low? Because the system is crumbling. A survey was done 2 years ago which shows that most of the junior high schools in my district and districts like mine, where the bulk of the African- Americans and Hispanic children go to school, that is two-thirds of New York, in two-thirds of New York districts there are no teachers in junior high schools teaching math and science who majored in math and science in college. There are no teachers in junior high school. The high school teachers complain greatly about the lack of preparedness of students when they get to high school, and in high schools most of the high schools have trouble keeping physics teachers. In many of the high schools, there are some high schools who have not seen a physics teacher in a long time who majored in physics in college. That is the kind of emergency situation we are in. Physics teachers, science teachers are in shortage all over the country but we have a situation in New York where we have high schools that are the best in the world, there are three or four high schools that consistently score high on any national exams, they win the Westinghouse contest and all the national science contests, there are four or five schools that do that, high schools, but the majority of our students do not go to those schools. They do not have access to that kind of education with respect to science. So no matter what Bill Gates does or a number of other corporate benefactors do, and more and more they are entering the arena and trying to encourage more and better education by minorities, they see this pool of people who have to fill the gap and fill these vacancies in information technology, a number of other places where vacancies are more and more evident, probably no more so than information technology. The world of the computer and the world of cyber civilization we are going into will come to a halt if we do not have more people coming out of our higher education institutions that are competent to fill those jobs. What we have now is that large numbers of the white middle class youngsters have computers in the home. They are exposed to computer education in school but those are not the youngsters who are going to become the information technology experts. Those are the young people who are going to become doctors and lawyers, professionals. They are going to move on and the large gap is going to still be there for the information technology professionals who make less than doctors and lawyers but they will be able to make a good living. We have to have a pool, a vast pool, to draw from in order to fill the positions that are constantly being made available and will be more and more available as time goes on. In order to do that, the public schools are the only place we can turn to, unless we seek temporary solutions that are very dangerous. We have voted in this Congress for one of those temporary solutions. We voted to lift the immigration quota for professionals. I think it is 90,000 people now and they are coming back to ask for more legislation to increase the quota to bring in more information technology specialists from India, from other foreign countries, English-speaking countries in particular but others. There is going to be a vast number coming in from outside who will not stay to contribute to our economy for very long. They will not pay into Social Security and keep Social Security healthy in the future. It is a dangerous way to operate, to ignore the natural working population and not develop that population, that workforce, and call on foreign reserves and foreign resources. That is very dangerous. So I am very upset and would like to have African American leaders look to the spirit and the example of Jim Farmer. Let us get involved. Let us tell the people out there they have to get involved. The parent-teachers associations, the churches, they have to get involved specifically to deal with the problems of their own school. If one is an inexperienced principal, there is probably chaos there that somebody needs to watch, somebody needs to highlight, in order for the people in charge, the superintendents, the mayors to step in and end the chaos. There are no books, no supplies, which is the case in many cases; we should deal with that. Most of all the problem of the physical decay of the schools poses a direct danger. Large numbers of schools that have coal burning furnaces in New York City pose a direct danger. We have a large asthma problem, an asthma epidemic. Part of that epidemic is contributed to by the schools that need to change the furnaces. We need money for that in the construction and modernization fund. At the Congressional Black Caucus, we did have some efforts to try to make a breakthrough on this. One of those events I held on September 17, and it was designed to send a message to the parents out there in the various neighborhoods, all the parents in the inner city communities. The message is: Do not give up hope. Do not abandon the public school system or contribute to the abandonment of the public school system by seeking solutions that are not real solutions. Vouchers are not a solution. We would like for them to know that they have help. I had a press conference which I call a ground-breaking press conference. I was attempting to bring together and did bring together people from the labor movement and people from the private sector, corporate sector. We had contractors as well as unions who appeared at this ground-breaking press conference to proclaim their unity with us and let the vulnerable and discouraged black parents out there know that we have powerful allies in an attempt to get school construction on the agenda here. We have an announcement that the surplus is bigger this year than it was contemplated, which means that the projections for the surplus over the next 10 years are probably going to be pretty close to what has been stated. I have a bill which talks about a 5-year commitment of $110 billion for school construction. I am going to amend that bill to change it to make it a 10-year commitment of $110 billion because we are talking about 10-year scenarios. We have a tax bill which is a 10-year scenario for $792 billion. I think we ought to put on the table a 10-year scenario for school construction for $110 billion. This will be money that is directly appropriated to every State in accordance with the number of school-aged children in the State, a fair distribution formula to deal with the modernization, wiring. Sometimes schools are in pretty good shape, but they need security measures. Whatever the infrastructure, the physical infrastructure needs, this funding of $110 billion over a 10-year period would provide. Many people say, well, that is too much. It is outrageous. Well, I think we have got a scenario where a trillion dollars is on the table for the next 10 years, and we are going to take $792 billion of that and propose that for taxes. The President agrees there should be some tax cuts. It will not be $792 billion. It may be $300 billion. There is going to be a tax cut of some magnitude. Let us have, at the same time, on the same table, in the same package a rational, reasonable, adequate package for school construction. So at this press conference, commitments were made by the labor community, by the contractors. We have the Nat LaCour of the American Federation of Teachers; Joel Parker of the National Educational Association; Vincent Panvini of the Sheet Metal Workers, Director of Governmental Affairs of Sheet Metal Workers; Paul Parker, the Executive Director of the Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors; Bill Bonaparte. Bill Bonaparte is the National Electrical Contractors Association. The private sector people who want to be involved are enormous: Starla Jewell, the Executive Director of the National Community Education Association; Michelle Kavatelle, the director of the America Online Foundation; David Keane, the Associate Director for Government and Labor Relations of the Mechanical Contractors Association of America; and Mary Filardo, the Executive Director of the 21st Century School Fund. At this press conference, they all pledged to join me in sending this message to the African-American parents that they have friends, they have allies who are powerful. They are not alone. Do not give up. Do not abandon the public school system. At this press conference, we have pledges of help that will come from these people in various ways. We agreed to launch, on November 16, the date for the national education funding support date a campaign which will go for a year. Our motto is simple: ``Build schools.'' The motto of ``Build Schools'' will be the motto for a whole year, starting national education funding day; instead of funding support day, we want to make it a funding support year. So we are going to launch a campaign in November that will go right through to next November; and the motto is: ``Build schools.'' The year 2000 is the year we want to make a breakthrough. Why the year 2000? Because it is apparent that in the next few weeks here we are not going to see a what I call an in-game negotiation. The President and the Congress will not negotiate that projected 10-year surplus. That will be negotiated as we approach the election of the year 2000. It is going to happen next year. We can plan and strategize, and we have the advantage. The message should go out that the parents, not only the parents in the African-American community, but the communities out there in general believe that the Federal Government should do more in aid to education. They believe that the Federal Government should provide help in the area of school construction. The polls are on our side. We need to remember that. We need to mobilize and crystallize the sentiment and focus it so that they will understand that it is not enough to appropriate pennies for school construction. Right now we have zero in Federal involvement. We need to move to a significant Federal involvement. There is time to do that starting now. The commitment was made to have a campaign that will go all the way to the spring of 2000. In the spring of 2000, we have pledged to have a ``Build Schools'' conference where all of the same partners who came together on September 17 at the ground-breaking press conference, all those same partners will act in solidarity to promote and to sort of increase the momentum for school construction. We define victory as any breakthrough that gets Federal dollars into the school building pipeline. That means that H.R. 1660, the bill that comes out of the Committee on Ways and Means is certainly a breakthrough. It is a tax credit provision sponsored by the gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel). It has received the endorsement of the full Democratic Caucus which launched the motion to discharge. I am a cosponsor on that bill. But it also means H.R. 1820, the bill that I have sponsored which calls for $110 billion over a 5-year period. We are going to change that now to a 10-year period. Most of the initiatives that we are going to undertake relate to activities which are designed to mobilize the African-American community. I held this press conference. I called in these leaders of labor and the private sector at the beginning of the Congressional Black Caucus legislative weekend, because I wanted to send the message not only to the people out there in the communities, the parents and the community leaders, but I wanted to send a message to my fellow caucus members. We are not doing enough. In the spirit of James Farmer, we should seize the initiative and come to grips with the problem of school improvement, education improvement. At the heart of that is a physical facility. If one has a religion, and the temple, the church, the physical facility is allowed to crumble and decay and obviously be neglected, then it sends a message to all that the people who are advocates of that religion, the heritage of that religion are not serious. Ethnic cleansing in Yugoslavia became a bloody, burning, nasty set of atrocious activities that made the whole world want to vomit. Thousands have been confirmed as murdered and the estimates continue to climb. The Serbs attempted to drive out the Albanians in obvious and crude ways. African-America cleansing in America is moving forward to a far less alarming but more subtle and certain manner. It is moving forward in a far less alarming, but more subtle and certain manner. Listen. African-American cleansing. One can destroy the education for the children of a group, and one can destroy the group without firing a single shot. In a complex world today, people can be destroyed by the act of refusing to provide a relevant education for their children. The present movement toward the abandonment of the public school system greatly endangers the survival of the African-American community. We are going to be reauthorizing Title I of the Elementary Secondary Education Assistance act this week. This Wednesday it is scheduled for the calendar. It is one more series of attempts to abandon the public school system that has to be fought. Education is critical for survival. The oppressed South African blacks clearly understood this truth when they rebelled against Bantu Education. The famed uprising at Soweto was led by school children who understood that they were being systematically crippled in their classrooms. In America, there is no official conspiracy to intellectually deform African-American children. But benign neglect, bureaucratic bungling and the savage inequalities like the one described by Jonathan Kozol, accidentally accomplish the same devastating results. The current emphasis on privatization and vouchers, coupled with education budget cuts and the refusal of both Republicans and Democrats to support meaningful school modernization and construction appropriations by the Federal Government will produce a massive Soweto- like impact in the large cities where the majority of African-American youth live. In too many local education agencies, the schooling process is already merely a ceremony. Routinely assumptions are made that black students cannot emerge from the standard 12-year education regiment with a level of accomplishment which enables them to cope with present- day occupational and personal management challenges. School systems go through enough motions to justify the economic activity which finances teachers salaries, custodial personnel, supplies, equipment, and administrative bureaucracy. But in too many instances, they are content not to focus on the end product and what they are achieving there. The current acceleration of this minimal, of fraudulent education process as a result of less resources and highly visible decaying infrastructure has produced an unrecognized crisis for African- Americans. In full view, the commitment to meaningful public education is steadily being withdrawn by elected officials. New York City had a $2 billion surplus, and not a penny was spent on trying to refurbish, renovate, or build any new schools. New York State had a $2 billion surplus, and they refused, and the Governor vetoed a $500 million proposal for school repair. So at the local level, we have a steady withdrawal of support for public schools. The clearest reflection of this danger is this brick and mortar disaster. Crumbling school buildings send a loud message stating that pedagogical and administrative infrastructure is also collapsing. If the buildings are collapsing, then do not expect much to be happening inside them. There is no commitment in there either. A total abandonment of public education in America is a possibility. While private alternatives are shuffled around, a generation of students could be lost. More than African-American children of course would be placed at risk by this public policy blunder. The education of all children of working families who cannot afford private schools is at stake. But I appeal, especially to the African-American leadership to get moving. In the spirit of James Farmer, come to grips with the problem, focus on it as being the number one survival problem in our municipalities. In the spirit of James Farmer, the leadership has to shun or understand that there are no headlines out there for people who work in the vineyard trying to improve schools and trying to get funds for school construction. They have to understand that right out from under them, while they think that they are leaders, right out from under them, the people who matter most, our constituents, are discouraged. They feel vulnerable. They feel abandoned. I want to end with a few quotes from Jim Farmer, and I do this in the spirit of urging that the leadership of the African-American community, starting with my colleagues in Congress, remember Jim Farmer as a man of action and a man who provided the opportunity to act for the people who were suffering. Jim Farmer, after the attacks on the Freedom Riders said, ``When dogs bite in Birmingham, we bleed everywhere.'' Evil societies always kill their consciences. The NAACP is the justice department, the Urban League is the state department, and Corps members are the nonviolent marines. ``The time is not for jail-going and bleeding heads, but for long- range planning and sophisticated strategizing. There will be fewer demonstrations and more celebration. Our Nation deceives itself with the fiction that the task is complete and racism is dead and all is well. The myth surrounds us that America has suddenly become color blind and that all that remains is our economic problem. No greater lie has ever been told, and the tellers of it, if they have eyes to see and minds to think, must know it.'' That comes from the epilogue of the James Farmer book, which I mentioned before, Lay Bare The Heart. ``Our Nation deceives itself with the fiction that the task is complete and racism is dead and all is well. The myth surrounds us that America suddenly has become color blind and that all that remains is our economic problem. No greater lie has ever been told, and the tellers of it, if they have eyes to see and minds to think, must know it.'' African-American leaders are the people who ought to know it, and we urge them very much to open their eyes.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, we have just returned from recess and we are about to enter the closing chapters of the first session of the 106th Congress. The end of the first session will only take us halfway. We can continue, and there are probably some things that will continue, but we have a full plate here. There is a great deal of speculation about exactly what is going to happen with the appropriations bills and the fiscal plan which now is made more exciting by the fact that there is a surplus. After we lock the box and keep the Social Security funds in place, we still have a projection of a 10-year period of a trillion dollar surplus, and that has led to some radical proposals by the Republicans with respect to tax cuts, and that has certainly charged the atmosphere. I am interested in continuing the dialogue on education. I think that we are in danger of making a great blunder if we do not use this great window of opportunity to do something dramatic to improve education in America. There is a need for a greater commitment from the Federal Government which now only is responsible for about 8 percent of the total expenditure on education. We need more federal support for education. There are a lot of things that have to happen to improve education in America, but one of the things that has to happen is that we must have more federal support. The Federal Government is where the money is. The Federal Government's money is not made here in Washington; it all came from the local level, so it belongs to the people out there in the States and in the localities. This is no reason why we cannot resolve to use funds from the Federal Government to help solve and resolve some of the overwhelming problems that we are facing in education. We can still win the war for education support. The status of legislation here at this point does not preclude some major development taking place either before we end this session, or certainly before we end the 106th Congress in the fall of the year 2000. Let us take a look at where we are at this point. As far as education funding is concerned, we are in bad shape. A number of appropriations bills have been stalled, and we have only passed two; but the education appropriations bill, the Labor-HHS appropriation is further behind than any of the other appropriations in the process. It has not even gotten out of the subcommittee yet. The appropriations bill for education, it seems, is being used as a scapegoat; and it will be the last one out there, and it will have the greatest amount of reductions. I am not on the Committee on Appropriations, but the rumors are that for the overall Labor, Health and Human Services and Education appropriations, the cut may range as high as 35 or 40 percent. And certainly education is in danger of a 15 to 20 percent cut if we follow the present process whereby there are budget caps. But they are not following budget caps on some appropriations bills. They are leaving the last ones to take most of the burden of the cuts. So education is in deep trouble at this moment in history. But I think we can still win the war. What I want to talk about tonight is how the American public and public opinion, the common sense of the voters, still is a determining factor here. We need to hear that and know that. All of the polls still continue to show that the American people place education as one of the top priorities, either priority number one or priority number two, in terms of federal assistance, or the use of federal resources to help solve problems. They expect us to do something. They are concerned. And their common sense is correct. Their common sense is on target. But what they need to know is that there are a set of rules being followed and a set of maneuvers underway that will lead to inevitable cuts in education if those rules are followed. The President is right when he says that not only do we face cuts in this present year, in the present appropriation, but in the bigger scenario that the Republicans have staked out, if they go ahead with a gigantic tax cut of $790 some billion dollars over a 10-year period, then the mechanics of that tax cut dictate that there must be increasing cuts, escalating cuts in education. It would be the greatest blunder this Nation has made since it was first established if we were to fall into that pattern where a tax cut and the momentum of a tax cut makes it absolutely necessary that there must be cuts in the resources that the Federal Government allocates for education. The Republicans have made it clear that they do not care about education at all. They ejected the portion of their tax bill that could have covered a few of the problems with education construction. We should not have, in my opinion, a great deal of authority invested in the Committee on Ways and Means to deal with education, but it so happens that that was the only vehicle that the administration felt they could utilize. So in the Ways and Means bill, through the Tax Code, the only initiative that is on the table to help with school construction in Washington, is H.R. 1660, the bill sponsored by the gentleman from New York (Mr. Rangel), and a bill which incidentally is backed by the overwhelming majority of the members of the Democratic caucus and by some Republicans. H.R. 1660 is in the process of a discharge petition. And I understand that more than 190 Members have already signed the discharge petition for H.R. 1660, and it is projected that we are going to get above 218 to sign that discharge petition for this school construction bill via the Tax Code. That is a process by which the Federal Government will pay the interest on money borrowed by the States and the localities for school construction. It is a good beginning. It moves from zero to proposing that the Federal Government authorize the borrowing of up to $25 billion over a 5-year period and the Federal Government would be responsible, through tax credits, for paying the interest on the money borrowed, which is expected to come to about $3.7 or $4 billion. Close to $4 billion of federal commitment would be involved in that kind of approach. Now, that is the approach that is the pragmatic thing in the present playing field. The President and administration do not see any other way to move forward and start a process of involving the Federal Government in school construction. And if we have to accept the present playing field, the budget caps and the restrictions on the budget process that were there before we found we had a surplus, then that is a good move. I certainly am a cosponsor of H.R. 1660, one of the persons who signed the discharge petition. I think we should go full speed ahead and try to make the discharge process add up to a discussion on the floor of H.R. 1660. That is what is acceptable now on the present playing field. Beyond the present playing field, though, we have a new scenario. I mean, in addition to the consideration of this year's appropriation and maybe next year's appropriation, we have the majority of Republicans projecting 10 years' worth of expenditures due to the fact that they have estimated that the budget surplus will continue and over a 10-year period, even after we subtract the portion of the surplus that relates directly to Social Security, we will have close to $1 trillion in surplus over a 10-year period. They are projecting that they should go ahead and plan to use that money primarily for a tax cut, more than $790 billion over a 10-year period. If we go into that kind of scenario where we are talking about 10 years and we are talking about an umbrella of a trillion dollars, then I think that we need another additional proposal on school construction. And that proposal is the proposal that I have set forth in H.R. 1820. That deals with $110 billion. I am going to revise H.R. 1820 soon and take out the 5-year provision which is in there now. It is $110 billion over a 5-year period. And in order to make it harmonize and fit the scenario that the Republicans have set forth, I will make it a 10-year bill, $110 billion over a 10- year period and have it be the direct appropriations, of course, in accordance with a number of school-aged children in each State. Each State would be allotted money based on the number of school-aged children. The money could be used for construction of new facilities, for repair of existing facilities, for wiring to allow for technology in the schools, for construction related to security, and for the elimination of health threatening conditions and elimination of unsafe conditions. So it would be a bill with great flexibility allowing each State to take the appropriation that it receives on the basis of the number of school-aged children and apply them in the areas of greatest need for their infrastructure problems. I think probably every State and certainly probably every school district also has some problems with infrastructure that would be helped by such a bill. As I said before, this is a scenario for the larger playing field, the 10-year, trillion-dollar surplus playing field. So H.R. 1660 we will support and should support if that is going to be the name of the game. If it is going to be within the confines of the present budget making and appropriation setting process, yes. But if we are going to move to the 10-year scenario and we are going to have $794 billion on the table for a tax cut, then we need on that same table to have $110 billion for school construction. Or even if we are going to have $300 billion, which some say may be the compromise, $300 billion, $400 billion for a tax cut, we still need a substantial comparable approach and a comparable amount for school construction. And I will talk in a few minutes about, among all the education reform items, why school construction is definitely the most important. Public opinion has made it quite clear that they do want us to address the education problem with more than lip service and rhetoric, they want more than sound bytes on television, they do want some resources to be applied to the problems. We have had in the last month or so several reports on new public opinion polls relating to education. And it is consistent, in fact, it is increasingly the public outcry, the public demand for the action on the part of Government with respect to education. Recent polls show that people are willing to spend money, the majority of people are willing to pay more taxes if necessary to get some movement on the establishment of an education program that is suitable for the 21st century, an education proposal, an education system that fits with the coming cybercivilization that we have with great demands for people who have intellectual capabilities and are well-trained. And the only way we get them is through the process of education. In addition to these public opinion polls that have been cited recently, there have been several other related developments or reports related to education which I think are very significant. The New York Times had an article on ``The Digital Brain Drain'' on Thursday of last week, September 2. The New York Times article reads ``The Digital Brain Drain.'' There are so many computers and so much interest in computers now at the college level and the high school level that there is little interest in the hard sciences. We have criticism now of computers becoming more dominant as far as students are concerned with respect to their choices as to what they want to do in life or what they want to study, if they do not have to study chemistry and they do not want to bother with chemistry and they do not want to bother with physics. This article by Claudia H. Dorsch in the New York Times laments the fact that the interest in hard sciences is waning, definitely declining, decreasing. One man, Jim Ivy, it starts fears that his son Jonathan, a freshman business major at Pennsylvania State University, will graduate from college without ever having taken a chemistry course. Mottville High School, a New Jersey school, did not require chemistry and his advisors at Penn State says he can skip it there, too. On and on they go to talk about how young people are choosing to focus on computer and computer science being where it is at and biotechnology and physics and a number of other areas are suffering already and are likely to suffer more. We have more foreign students in graduate schools. The number of people who are studying sciences in graduate school has declined, the number of Americans has declined to the point where the number of graduate level students who are foreign is greater than the number who are American in our graduate schools science programs. Now, my answer to this is that what this is saying is that, in our increasingly complex society, where more and more demands for people with intellectual capabilities, whether it is science, law, medicine, whatever it may be, the pool is too small. What we are really confronting here is the fact that the number of young people who are graduating from high school and going to college is so small that we have to take a scarcity approach and pit one profession against the other, one field of study against the other. If the pool was larger, if we were keeping pace, then an education system that was preparing an adequate number of students to go into college more and more because we are going into a cybercivilization where scientific competence and learning are required to a much greater degree than ever before, let us recognize it and put the emphasis in our resource allocation on education to get more youngsters into the pool. Now, to get more youngsters into the pool who are going to go to college and study science, computers, or English or math, we need people right across the whole spectrum. So we need people in social sciences so that they can help keep our society on course. Science will not save us. We have just seen that one of the superpowers, the two great superpowers of the world, the Soviet Union, very proficient in science. They almost beat us to the moon. They certainly beat us into outer space. They have right now, as they had before, the capability of delivering nuclear warheads anywhere in the world with their vast rocket power. The scientists and the engineering capability of the Soviet Union was astounding. But the whole nation collapsed. Why did it collapse with such brilliant scientists and systems that were able over a short period of time relatively to produce a very sophisticated technical and scientific society? It collapsed because something was missing. So we do not want to have educated people, the people who are our leaders who come out of the colleges, who are only proficient at sciences, whether it is computer science or chemistry or physics. They must also, right across the board, we must have a supply of people who are competent and able to lead us politically and socially. So the pool needs to be enlarged. We need to maximize the number of youngsters who flow up from elementary school to high school, from high school into college, and from college into grad school and life-long learning, in the case of most of us, for the future. In order to do this, we have to begin at the lowest level. President Clinton's proposal for more teachers to the classroom in order to decrease the ratio of pupils to teachers and have fewer pupils in a classroom for teachers at the lowest levels will mean that the youngsters will be more likely to learn to read. Because whatever we do in chemistry or physics or computer science, however we may change the classroom in terms of the addition of new technology, it all begins with reading. If kids cannot read, then they will not be able to survive, they will not be able to benefit from all of the additional education accouterments that we add. They must know how to add. They must know how to do the basic math. They must get the basics at a very early age. And we cannot touch the system at the top or doctor the system at the top and hope to get the kind of results that we need. We need to have the entire system in motion. So we need to improve education in every way. And the President's proposal for more teachers to the classroom, $1.2 billion, is on target. We need much more than that, however. Because in order to get smaller classrooms, we need more than the addition of teachers, we need the addition of some more classrooms. We condition teach a first grade class with one teacher at one side of the room and another teacher at another side of the room. It will not work at lower levels. It may work at higher levels you can have two classes in one room. I recall when I went to school at Shelby County schools, a very poor area, certainly the segregated schools for African-Americans were quite squeezed and the 7th and 8th grades were in the same room, 7th grade on one side and 8th grade on the other. And we made do. If we had been younger levels, I do not think we would have ever been able to have order on one side while there was complete order on the other side and have been able to move in some kind of constructive way with a room full of young children. I do not think it is possible. We need more classrooms if we are going to have smaller sizes. We need classrooms that do not send a message to children. We cannot take the kids into the hall, as I have seen in a number of schools, where they have got them at the end of a hall because there is no place to put them. In some cases they are in closets that have been enlarged, storage rooms that have been enlarged. And people have said that it is not happening, but there have been some converted restrooms. Boys and girls restrooms have been converted and used as classrooms in some schools. It is that bad. School is about to start in New York City, and there will be more crises in terms of finding a place to have these youngsters sit. Finding a place to sit now is more complicated by the fact that we have a new policy which everybody from one end of the Nation to the other has applauded, ``no more social promotion.'' I do not subscribe to slogans like that, but that slogan has caught on and everybody seems to believe it is true and it is positive. ``No more social promotion'' means we have a lot of youngsters sitting in schools and would have gone on to another school from elementary school to junior high school, but with ``no more social promotion'' they are sitting there in seats that already are scarce. And we are going to have more of a problem because we do not have a construction program to go with it. I contend that if we really want to improve education, at the heart of improving education is a school modernization construction program. That is the role that the Federal Government can play best because that is where we need the most resources. That is where localities are stretched out and cannot meet those demands. Let us face it, even in the parts of the country where construction has the lowest cost, it still costs quite a bit to build our schools. And certainly in the areas that are poorest they have deteriorating schools because they have not had the funds to keep them going in many cases and, therefore, there is some help needed from the Federal Government. Even in areas like New York City and New York State which have surpluses, it ought to apply those surpluses more to school construction and we ought to put pressure on having the State and the city apply part of their surpluses to school modernization and construction and the people of the State and the people of the city ought to wake up and demand that. The Federal Government still needs to help. They can never meet the demand with the amount of surplus, even if they applied the entire surplus to school construction and modernization. So we need to send a message to all the people in the education family, to the children, the teachers, the administrators, that we really care about education because we are going to deal with the problem that they cannot deal with and that is give them a safe, healthy, conducive place to study. This is just one of the developments that I wanted to note. The digital brain drain where we are talking about how horrible it is that computer science now competes with physics and chemistry and how our scientific endeavors, research capacity is going to suffer greatly because so many people are being taken out of the hard sciences, natural sciences, to go into computer science, I think this is a very sad. There is a very good article that brings to our attention a major problem but the problem here is not that computer science is mean and computer science is conducting raids on the other scientists, the drama, that kind of nonsense we do not need. What we need to understand is that we need a larger pool of people from which all of the sciences and the nonsciences draw their students. We need more students in college. We need more students who pass the SAT tests. We need more students who are able to take us into this new cyber civilization. Another article appeared in the New York Times, the same day. Calculators throw teachers a new curve, Thursday, September 2. This article talks about students reprogramming powerful math aids to play games and maybe get a leg up on the SAT. Well, computers are being utilized in the most advanced classes via calculators and doing all kinds of things not just with the usual basic calculations but with equations and drawing graphs and all kinds of utilizations of the calculator to advance the students' education to solve problems, and many schools are now allowing these calculators to be used during the tests, and I think some plans are being made for the national tests to also allow calculators to be used. The thing that struck me about the article, it is a long article and a very positive article about how young people are able to master these computers and come up with such original and creative ideas, but what caught my attention most was an inset article by Jennifer Lee, which talks about some schools cannot afford hardware and training. And the fact that the digital gap between those who are rich enough to be able to have the kind of school technology that is most up-to-date and most relevant because it can connect up with the Internet, it can do all the things that the most up-to-date computers and technology can do, these schools cannot even afford the calculators. It points out that some parents are now complaining about the fact that calculators are being used in the classroom; their youngsters cannot afford them and they are placed at a disadvantage. A number of government and foundation grants are now available to help schools purchase calculators, and other forms of technology, but hardware in the poorest schools may be only a part of the problem because they find that they do not have the teachers and the software that can utilize the hardware that other schools have available. So it is again another aspect of the digital divide between the poorest schools and the more well to do schools with respect to being able to afford the modern instruments that can improve their education and enable them to pass the necessary requirements to move on to college and to qualify for all of these many professions that need new scientists and new information technology workers. It is important to note that in a speech that President Clinton made at Olney, Maryland, yesterday, he pointed out the fact that he had visited one school and that they told him that the school could not utilize the computers and the technology that they had because when they hooked it all up it started blowing fuses. The wiring for the school was inadequate and could not accept the modern technology. We are back to the major problem of infrastructure, the great need for construction, school construction, and the need for the Federal Government to be involved in carrying school construction forward. What are our chances? Why do I say that we can still win the war for education support; we can still win the war to get a significant appropriation for school construction? I think that even if we had some decision-making in this session of Congress, this first half of the 106th Congress, there is time, if we wake up and understand the power that is out there among the parents and the students, the public opinion is there. On education, we have only the example of politicians and elected officials ignoring the polls. It is an amazing phenomena how we see the polls saying that education is important and we ignore the fact that they keep asking for something more significant than we are giving. Everybody proposes some nickel and dime education program but the public keeps demanding something that is really going to deal with the problem in a more basic way. There are people who say that no major decisions are going to be made about the trillion dollar, 10-year surplus in this session, that we are not going to be able to deal with it; there is too little time; it is going to be carried over to the next session. That gives us more time. I think time is on our side. There are other people who say that we may have some kind of unusual coming together of the White House and the Republican leadership and the Congress and we have a deal made this year. I hope not. I fear any kind of rapid deal, because that tends to leave out public opinion. If public opinion is allowed to operate long enough, if the common sense of the people out there is allowed to stay in play, we are going to win this war for education support. We are going to win this war to get meaningful appropriations for education. We may have a giant omnibus, continuing resolution. The continuing resolution will mean that basic decisions about new programs such as a multibillion dollar tax cut will not be made. It will be carried over to next year. Let it be carried over, and remember that time is on our side. The force is with us. We have truth. We have logic. We have reason. We have so much on our side. It is amazing how blind our leadership is not to understand that school construction is a place where the Federal Government can make the greatest contribution for the improvement of education. So it will be carried over until next year, election year 2000. Next year is an election year. That will be the battle ground. That will be the place where the long-term fiscal plan, the 10-year allocation of $1 trillion will be decided. We will have time to catch our breath. The Republican proposals have kind of overwhelmed us. They proposed a $794 billion tax cut. The Democrats have not countered that with any proposal of substance. We know that our leadership wants a diversified package which will include allocations for Medicare, for education, for a few other programs, but we do not know exactly how much. We do not know whether they are going to be willing to change the formula or change the approach with respect to school construction and place a substantial, adequate amount, on the table for school construction over the next 10 years. We may not see the leadership move unless the public pressures the leadership to come to its senses. Not to use this opportunity to finance school construction on a meaningful basis would constitute one of the most devastating blunders in the history of the Nation. It would be a great blunder for us not to use the opportunity now, while we have a surplus, to strike a blow against our deteriorating infrastructure and a blow in favor of building up that physical infrastructure and sending a message to the school boards and the teachers and the administrators that we care; we care enough to take off their back the problem of the physical infrastructure. Now they should take care of the other problems. Yes, the Federal Government can help with research. They can help with curriculum standardization. They can help with experimentation and the dissemination of information about what works and what does not work. There are a thousand ways the Federal Government can help, but the way it can help most is to foot the bill for a large part of the school construction necessary; give the facility, give the infrastructure, take away that burden from local and State governments totally. They should not have the total burden, but local governments and State governments certainly need to contribute more to school construction and the pressure should be on the national basis and part of the participation of the Federal Government can help to stimulate that. The window of fiscal opportunity is open now. We have a projection of $1 trillion now. If we go ahead and allow that window to close, if we allow a huge Republican tax cut to take place and the $1 trillion to go primarily toward the tax cut, there is nothing left for us in order to deal with the need for education funding and for construction. Education is not just another nondefense expenditure. I think we need expenditures in several areas: Child care programs, social programs, but education is a key because it is investment. It is an investment in the future for the coming generation. Education is going to help us solve the problem of Social Security. The major problem that Social Security faces is that the number of people who will be drawing down their Social Security payments is going to be greater than the number of people working to put payments into the Social Security fund. If we do not get a labor pool out there that is going to fill the jobs that are going to be available, or if we have to fill the jobs with foreigners or we have to contract out and send the work overseas, we do not get the benefit in our Social Security fund for that. Our economy does not get enriched by the salaries that are paid to workers who are in another country. So education is not just another nondefense expenditure. Investment in the future of coming generations is best taken care of via the education route. We cannot allow ourselves to blunder into a situation where we do not provide out of this pool of a trillion dollars a substantial amount of money for education. School construction crystallizes the Federal commitment. It crystallizes the commitment of elected officials for education. It crystallizes the national commitment. If we do something on school construction which is meaningful we can stimulate and accelerate all of the other school improvement efforts out there. Without modernization and construction, we are facing an abandonment of the public school system. A lot of the people who are against a meaningful school construction program are really scheming to have the public school system scuttled. If we do not build, if there are no buildings, we are sending a message that we are abandoning the process. Why should teachers, why should educators, principals, why should even students believe us when we say that education is important if we are going to allow buildings to fall down around them? There are people that advocate vouchers, which is an extreme approach to education reform. I am not going to be so blind as to say vouchers are not a good idea for experimentation. Maybe they can tell us something significant, but I think the vouchers ought to be funded out of private sources. We have enough foundations, enough corporations, who favor vouchers to fund a voucher system. The capacity of private schools in this country right now is very limited. The number of youngsters who are going to private schools using vouchers is so limited until certainly there is enough money in the foundation and corporation world to fund it and let us see how it works via funding from the private sector instead of using public school funds to fund vouchers. To say we are going to experiment with the improvement of education while having vouchers and pull the money out of the public school system and definitely dooming the public school system to continued mediocrity or a struggle to make ends meet, then we are not improving education in an overall way. Part of the experiment requires that we try to make the traditional system work, if possible, so we have something to compare with. What is learned through a voucher program may be utilized in the public school system. Certainly we must realize via common sense and simple logic that most of the 53 million children in America who go to school are going to have to go to public schools for a long time. No matter what kind of legislation Congress passes or the State legislatures pass, there is not a capacity out there to replace the public schools. We are going to have to have public schools for another generation at least, no matter what we do. So improvement of public schools is a necessary part of any serious, sincere reform effort. We must build in 2000, build schools and we will set up a whole chain reaction. I think that we ought to be positive about it and assume that we are going to build in 2000. I have a hard hat here which is part of a campaign that we are kicking off at the Congressional Black Caucus weekend next week to wake up the African American community to the fact that we must play a key role. It is a Congressional Black Caucus weekend. The African American community must provide a leadership role in stimulating efforts to gain more resources from the Government for school construction. There are people who have given up, and there are some public opinion polls, and the Republican majority has certainly brought those to our attention, which say that black parents, African American parents in the big cities in large numbers opt to use vouchers or charter schools. They want to abandon the public school system. They talk about more than 50 percent. So the people who are being used to tear down the public school system certainly ought to be alerted to the fact that there are clear alternatives. I know what is happening. Most of us who are in leadership positions know that African American parents have been disappointed by reforms; they are disappointed by no movement in their schools. Certainly those who are brightest and those who are most concerned about their children become very restless, and they do not believe that there is a real effort to improve public schools, and they have given up. They will take any alternative, charter schools or vouchers. They do not make a distinction, just any alternative to the public school system. Now if we say we are going to not abandon the public school system, and a lot of those problems related to reading, related to counseling and a number of other very difficult problems that for years we have been struggling with, we are going to give you the opportunity, let the educators and the administrators have the opportunity and the resources, because if we are devoting federal funds to school construction and the physical infrastructure, then there are funds available for other programs and other approaches to the local education agency and the local schools. So we ought to build. As my colleagues know, I think that we cannot emphasize it too much. Every elected official, every leader in the African American community ought to identify with the need for school construction, school modernization. We ought to understand that the chain reaction of hope can only be set off if we send a clear message that we are going to do something different in a big way. You know, there is a time when brick and mortar are considerations, are the most important considerations in rallying people. What you do in terms of concrete and bricks send a bigger message and a better message and a more inspiring message than anything else you can do. If you are willing to build, then that is a commitment. Time is on our side. I think we can still win. As I said before, reason is on our side, logic is on our side. When political expediency continues to be blinded to the obvious, then common sense out there among the voters and among the people that have to point the way. We probably have a school facility problem in every district. There is at least one school in every congressional district. So we ought to be able to get the message through to the Members, but it will not happen automatically. You have to be willing to devote time and energy and communicate. We are communicating in one way, through the polls and the focus groups. We have let the Members of Congress know, let the White House know; everybody knows that people want more resources devoted to education. What we have not been able to understand is that the only significant things that can be done, there are some significant things that can only be done by the Federal Government, and the Federal Government needs to accept its role in a very important and expensive proposition such as school construction. We should not think that it is impossible to do this. We are at a point now where we have a proposal on the table by the administration. President Clinton has been called the education president for good reasons. Nobody else in Washington has provided over such a long period of time a comprehensive program for the improvement of education. Whatever the criticism one may have of it, at least there is a comprehensive program and not just an attempt to raid the education coffers in order to give money to the local level under some slogan, a block grant slogan or dollars to the classroom slogan, but no real program based on research, evidence. We have evidence that smaller classrooms make a big difference. We have research to support that, so the thrust of the administration's program is to get more money to school districts to hire more teachers in the early grades. There are other programs, after-school centers. There has been a lot of attention paid by this administration; they paid a lot of attention to the fact that you need new technology. They led the movement. The President himself and the Vice President led the movement to wire schools with volunteers when nothing else was working. The E-rate is a result of this administration standing fast and insisting that the telecommunications law be followed and interpreted in the most generous way possible. So we have the E-rate. There are a number of things that this administration has done that we can applaud, but it has not gone far enough, and the playing field has changed. If you are now dealing with a trillion dollar surplus over a 10-year period, then let us have a program for that 10-year scenario. Let us have a school construction program for that 10-year scenario. As my colleagues know, there have been times when it seemed that we could not win and things were impossible, and folks have said, as my colleagues know, it is just reckless for you to stand on the floor and ask for $100 billion dollars, $110 billion over a 10-year period. It is impossible. Well, there were days when we faced other impossibilities. In the early days of the 104th Congress, shortly after the Republican majority took control in the days of the Contract with America there were proposals to abolish the Department of Education. We had two former Republican Secretaries of Education come to the House and testify before committees calling for the abolishment of the Department of Education. That was a major item on the agenda of the Contract with America, to get rid of the Department of Education. That same Congress in those years proposed that we cut education drastically. We cut in 1995 a proposal on the table called for almost a $4 billion cut in education programs including Head Start, including Title I. Those are days where things seemed almost doomed in terms of federal, the federal commitment and federal aid to education. But we kept fighting. We fought a good battle in school lunches where school lunches were also cut. There are some people who are worried about protocol, and they say my hat is against the rules; is that what you are saying? Well, I will hold it here; is that all right? We have some arcane rules, and we worry about the wrong things. But the important point was made. We need to understand that school construction has to be pursued relentlessly, and while they worry about where you wear the hat here, any kind of hat, even a demonstration hat on the floor, while they worry about that, let us worry about the real problems out there, and remember that in the darkest days of the 104th Congress when they proposed to cut school lunches, Head Start, et cetera, we kept fighting, we kept fighting. As my colleagues know, as a matter of levity let me just remind you of some of the things that we did to get our message across. We had to sometimes be a little humorous with it. On April 4, 1995, I recall an item I put in the Congressional Record which included a poem about school lunches. It was very serious, and we were very upset about the fact that they were proposing to cut school lunches. You might have forgotten, so let me just read from the item that I entered into the Record in 1995 on April 4. Mr. Speaker, a final word has not yet been said about the Republican swindle of the children who receive free lunches in the schools across our Nation. But the final, most authoritative figures have been established by the Congressional Budget Office. The very conservative but thorough Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the Republicans will capture slightly more than $2 billion from their block granted school lunch program. This will be $2 billion more to go into the tax cut for the rich. See, the present concern about tax cuts for the rich is not the only attempt to give big tax cuts to the rich. We had one before. This is a scenario filled with horror. It conjures up the image of a poster, that poster that was famous during the war where the finger of Uncle Sam was pointed out at you, and it said: I need you. That kind of image is now being conveyed to the children of America. They are saying: this Nation needs your lunch. And I put together a small rap poem that goes as follows: This Nation, the Nation, needs your lunch. Kids of America, there is a fiscal crunch. This great Nation now needs your lunch. To set the budget right, Go hungry for one night. Don't eat what we can save. Be brave. Patriots stand out above the bunch, Proudly surrender lunch. Kids of America, nutrition is not for you. Sacrifice for the rich few. Be a soldier and play dead. The F-22 might rescue you. The seawolf sub might bring some hot grub; Now hear this: There is a fiscal crunch. This Nation needs your lunch. Pledge allegiance to the flag, Mobilize your own brown bag. The enemy deficit must be defeated. Nutrition suicide squads are desperately needed. Kids of America, there is a fiscal crunch. This great Nation now needs your lunch. Mr. Speaker, it is ridiculous for the Republican majority to call for cutting school lunches. Let it happen, and we overcame that. We woke up the American public. It did not happen automatically that we moved from 1995 proposals by Republican majority for a $4 billion tax cut, education cut, to a 1996 position in the closing days of the same Congress where they proposed a $4 billion increase. The difference was public opinion, common sense. The people of America stood up to the nonsense and said education is important, do not abolish the Department of Education, do not cut school lunches, do not cut Head Start. If you come out here and try to run on that kind of platform, you are doomed to defeat. The focus groups and the public opinion polls told the Republicans they were off course, and they did an about face that was 360 degrees. Instead of a $4 billion cut, we got a $4 billion increase, the largest increase in education funding in the last few decades, since the Great Society entered the whole area of elementary and secondary education. So we have difficult roadblocks placed in front of us in the past, and we have overcome it. The enemies of education have been forced to retreat in other cases. The E-rate last year, just a few months ago we were fighting the battle of the E-rate. What is the E-rate all about? The E-rate was a promise made by the corporations and telecommunications leaders to help education in exchange for some amazing concessions in the Telecommunications Act of 1996. After they had gotten all these concessions and all the deregulation they wanted, they begin to renege on the agreement; and when the FCC proposed to provide discounted funding to schools and libraries, and that is what Congress had asked them to do, discounted funding, they got opposition from a wide number of corporations and some Members of the House and Members of the Senate, and I came to this floor at that time and made an appeal to the schoolchildren of America. I happened to be speaking early in the evening on that day, so I made a special appeal to children, and between the school children and their parents and all the ordinary citizens who might not have children but have common sense out there, this thing has been turned around. On Sunday, August 15, in a New York Times there was a report which reads as follows: ``Phone fee for school Internet service seems to be too popular to overturn. Phone fee for school Internet service seems to be too popular to overturn.'' Certain corporations were opposing the E-Rate. A simple matter. The FCC passed the regulations which required that money be paid into a fund. It is a universal fund that already exists for other purposes, so they expanded that fund to include money that would go into libraries and schools to pay a part of their costs for telecommunications. Up to 90 percent of the cost would be paid in the poorer schools, but all schools would get about 20 percent. Even the most wealthy schools would get a 20 percent discount. This would help them to continue on an ongoing basis to pay the costs of having technology in their schools. The on-line services, the telecommunications services would be partially paid out of this fund. The FCC proposed $2.4 billion. There was such a hue and cry here in Congress and by the corporations who took them to court, and all the muscle was brought into play behind the scenes. Forget about the American people and school kids who would benefit from this. So much muscle was brought into play that the FCC backed down. They cut the $2.4 billion in half. It became $1.2 billion. They moved for their first funding at 50 percent of the amount that they had originally decided. Well, we appealed to the ordinary people and the children of America to counterattack; and, as a result, this report now says that nobody in high places now is willing to fight the battle against the E-Rate. We raised it back now to $2.25 billion, up from the $1.7 it had been cut down to. I know, because I went with members of the Congressional Black Caucus to the hearing where the final vote was taken to raise it back to the amount of $2.25 billion. That hearing was a great event, where we restored the promise that had been made to the schools and libraries of America. Now they are saying nobody is waging war in any significant way. There are still some court suits being brought. I don't know where MCI is now on this whole matter, but MCI was one of the huge corporations that brought a suit, and I will include for the Record this article. [From The New York Times National, Aug. 15, 1999] Phone Fee for School Internet Service Seems To Be Too Popular To Overturn (By David E. Rosenbaum) Washington, Aug. 14--Two years ago, when the Government imposed a new fee on long-distance telephone companies to raise money for Internet connections at schools and libraries, the reaction from some quarters was ferocious. Republican politicians, assuming that people would be outraged by the extra charges showing up on their phone bills, called it the ``Gore tax'' because Vice President Al Gore had championed the program. Conservative academics accused the Clinton Administration of distorting the marketplace, quietly expanding the Federal role in education and creating a new, expensive entitlement program. The long-distance carriers were quick to put new line items on phone bills identifying the extra charges they were passing along to customers, and they screamed that costs would skyrocket. But the program, officially called the E-rate, has proved to be so popular that even the harshest critics now agree that further complaints are futile. What happened was that pork barrel trumped political, ideological and commercial concerns. In the new school year, 80,000 schools and libraries across the country will have new or improved high-speed Internet access because of the program, and a total of more than one million individual classrooms, in every state and presumably every Congressional district, will be wired. While a tight lid has been imposed on almost all other Government programs, spending for the E-rate, which appears nowhere in the Federal budget, has been increased by one- third to $2.25 billion in the coming school year. That makes it one of the Federal Government's largest education programs--much larger, for example, than the $1.5 billion the Government is allocating this year to vocational and adult education. ``Once you have large sums of money pouring into every school district in the country, it's impossible to turn off the spigot,'' said a lobbyist who has worked against the program. Another opponent of the program, Adam Thierer, a communications policy specialist at the Heritage Foundation, agreed there was no turning back. ``Pork barrel has won out, no doubt about it,'' he said. ``This technology has such appeal,'' Mr. Thierer added. ``If you're against this, you're viewed as being against children. The political dynamic at play here is very powerful.'' In his State of the Union Message in 1996, President Clinton set the goal of connecting every classroom and library to the Internet by the turn of the century. Now, because of the E-rate, it appears as if that goal will essentially be met, and the President often speaks of the success. At a political fund-raiser a week ago in Little Rock, Ark., with Vice President Gore at his side, Mr. Clinton declared: ``Al Gore led the fight to make sure that the Federal Government required all the schools in this country to have affordable rates so that every classroom in the poorest schools in America can be hooked up to the Internet. He did that, and he deserves credit for it.'' Administration officials seize every opportunity to point out the local benefits. In a speech in Houston last month, William E. Kennard, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, said, ``This week we were able to send nearly $12 million to schools and libraries right here in Texas.'' Everyone agrees that schools and libraries should have access to modern technology. Mr. Thierer, for example, said he would not want his children to go to a school that was not connected to the Internet. The controversy has been over whether the way to accomplish the goal is through the back door. The Federal Communications Commission, not Congress, decides how much money should be spent under the E-rate program and who should receive it. And rather than raise the money through general taxes, it all comes from the fee on long-distance telephone service. ``I do not doubt that there is a benefit to wiring our classrooms and libraries today,'' said Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas. ``But to require captive consumers to pay the full cost does not pass the fairness test.'' From the Administration's perspective, the problem is that the Republican Congress would never have approved money directly for Internet connections. The E-rate program grew out of the sweeping 1996 legislation that rewrote the nation's 62-year-old communications law. The measure, a product of countless compromises and tradeoffs, instituted a new era of competition in telephone and data services. One section of the legislation requires telephone companies (and providers of cellular phone and pager services) to pay a fee to the Federal Communications Commission so that all Americans can have access to affordable telephone service and so that schools, libraries and rural hospitals and clinics can receive discounts on telephone service and Internet access. The size of the fee and the exact nature of the services it would cover were left up to the commission to determine. Ever since telephones became a central part of American life early in this century, some telephone users have subsidized others. Businesses have subsidized residential users. Urban customers have subsidized those in rural areas. The affluent have paid more so that poor people could afford telephones. The theory has been that everyone benefits from universal access to telephones, just as everyone benefits from a national highway system and mail service that reaches everywhere in the country. Reed E. Hundt, who was Mr. Gore's prep-school classmate and the F.C.C. chairman from 1994 to 1997, saw the communications law as the path toward the Administration's goal of wiring classrooms and libraries. Under the policy that he developed and that has been followed by his successor, Mr. Kennard, long-distance companies pay a fee of slightly less than 1 percent of their revenue into a universal service fund. Two-thirds of the money raised by the fee is spent on telephone service for rural communities and poor people. The other third, $2.25 billion a year, is earmarked for the E- rate program. This covers 20 percent to 90 percent of the cost of wiring and paying the monthly bills from Internet service providers. The poorer the schools' students or the libraries' neighborhood, the higher the percentage of the cost that is covered. The companies pass along the cost of the fee to their customers. AT&T, for instance, charges residential accounts 99 cents a month. MCI World-com charges customers 7.2 percent of their long-distance bill. Sprint charges 6.3 percent. One- third of this fee pays for the E-rate. The cost of the E-rate program to most consumers is 30 to 40 cents a month--about the cost of a postage stamp, Mr. Kennard frequently says. The program had a rocky start. Faced with criticism in Congress and a report of poor management by Government auditors, Mr. Kennard cut back the financing last year to $1.7 billion from the original $2.25 billion. But across the country, from the biggest cities to the most remote communities the response from schools and libraries has been enthusiastic. Complaints from long-distance customers who are footing the bill have dwindled. Joseph Salvati, coordinator of the E-rate program for New York City public schools, said 7 to 12 classrooms in every school in the city would be wired for high-speed Internet service when school opens for the new year. The city received about $70 million for the program through last June and expects another $70 million in the new school year, Mr. Salvati said Elva Scott, the volunteer librarian in Eagle, Alaska, an isolated community with 500 residents near the border with the Yukon Territory, said her library's grant allowed her to offer residents 30 minutes of free time on the Internet every month and more time at a charge of $3 for every 30 minutes. ``Before this,'' Ms. Scott said, ``we were really out of the loop.'' Republican opponents clearly misjudged the public's willingness to pay a small amount of money to accomplish what is seen as an important social goal. Encouraged by the political support and a new management structure, Mr. Kennard returned in May to the $2.25 billion annual level. His position was bolstered last month when the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit rejected a challenge to the program on the ground that the fee imposed by the F.C.C. was an unconstitutional tax. But in Washington, even the strongest supporters of universal access to the Internet still worry about whether the communications commission should be running a major education program rather than Congress or the Department of Education or the education authorities in the states and cities. ``It's a wonderful program,'' said Patricia Aufderheide, a professor of communications at American University here and the author of a book on the 1996 telecommunications law. ``But it's certainly making education policy in a backward way.'' Mr. Speaker, I think people ought to know that the phone fee for school Internet service seems to be too popular to overturn. Mr. Speaker, I will also enter into the Record another entry that I made on July 17, 1998, in the Congressional Record already. I think it is time to look at it again. It is called ``The Massacre of the E-Rate Continues.'' At that time I thought some humor would help wake children up to what was really going on. It is called ``The E-Rate KILLER.''

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I was unavoidably absent on a matter of critical importance and missed the following rollcall votes: On the amendment to H.R. 2606 by the gentleman from Colorado, Mr. Tancredo, regarding the reduction of funding for international organizations, specifically UNESCO, I would have voted ``nay.'' On the amendment to H.R. 2606 by the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Paul, to prohibit the use of funds in the bill for international population control or family planning activities, I would have voted ``nay.'' On the amendment to H.R. 2606 also by the gentleman from Texas, Mr. Paul, to prohibit the export-import bank, the overseas private investment corporation or the trade and development agency from entering into new obligations, I would have voted ``nay.'' Finally, Mr. Speaker on final passage of H.R. 2606, the foreign operations appropriations, I would have voted ``yea.''

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I rise in opposition to this rule, but I welcome the opportunity to discuss the platforms of the two parties in respect to the lives of working people and what kinds of programs we would like to offer for working people. One party is clearly against working families and they express it in many ways. This particular piece of legislation has a symbolic significance far beyond what you see written on the paper. It is one part of an overall attack by the majority Republicans on working families. I think the President has made it clear in his message on this bill what we are about here today and it is pretty simple. The administration has written that it strongly opposes enactment of H.R. 987, a bill that would unnecessarily delay the Occupational Safety and Health Administration's issuance of a protective standard on ergonomics until the National Academy of Sciences has completed a second study of the scientific literature regarding musculoskeletal disorders and ergonomics. I think that it is very clear that what the Republican majority is saying is, let the workers suffer, let the working families suffer. Six hundred thousand people are affected yearly by these work-related musculoskeletal disorders, but it does not matter, let the workers suffer. They are only working families. We are Republicans. We care only about the upper income and we want to spend our time getting benefits out to them in the form of a massive, $794 billion tax cut over 10 years. I would like to see all of the Members come to the floor and use this opportunity. I think we may have about 3 hours to discuss the working families of America and which party really represents them and their welfare. Let them suffer for another 2 years, that is what the immediate concrete message is. So what? We have had studies. The studies clearly show that there is a cause and effect. The new studies that the NAS will be attempting and continuing to undertake relate to intervention strategies. How do you intervene to prevent these disorders. How do you intervene to lessen the impact of the kinds of unhealthy working conditions in the workplace? They want to go on gathering evidence and data which can go on forever and that is the way that any scientific gathering of evidence should take place. But why make the workers wait before you issue standards and you begin the process of intervening to lessen the impact of the injuries? The Republicans say, let them wait. Small businesses and even big businesses are going to suffer because the amount of workmen's compensation payments will continue to go up. It is around $20 billion a year now, related to these various disorders, and there have been many successful attempts by businesses to install ergonomic standards and to take steps to deal with the ergonomics of the workplace which have benefited the businesses as well as the workers. By preventing OSHA from formalizing these procedures and allowing DSHA to do what some businesses have done and what the State of California has done with their standards; by preventing OSHA from moving forward with the number of positive kinds of developments that have taken place, we are going to force more workers to suffer unnecessarily. We have case histories of workers in every State in the union; terrible things have happened in terms of injuries that have wrecked whole families. No, people do not bleed a great deal, they do not have concussions, it is not the kind of dramatic workplace accident situation that you have in the construction industry, but the slow death that is taking place more and more as we increase our digital world and people are more and more sitting before keyboards, eyestrain, all kinds of carpal tunnel syndromes from the actions of the wrists, all kinds of disorders are developing rapidly that injure more and more workers. More and more women, also, are drawn into this, more and more women incidentally who happen to be the wage earners and their families have been drawn into this. Why let the workers suffer? Let us get it over with. Let us get the standards out there and stop the suffering of the workers. The Democrats want to stop the suffering.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, it would be good to have a few facts on the record. I think it is important to take another section from the President's veto message where he states that the administration agreed to the inclusion of funding for this study based on a clear understanding that the study would not be used as a reason to delay OSHA's proposed ergonomic standards. H.R. 987 would reverse this agreement by forcing OSHA to wait up to 2 years before issuing a standard in expectation that the conclusions of a new NAS study were different from those reached by NAS just last year and already reached by the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health which completed an exhaustive study in 1997. Both of these studies concluded that musculoskeletal disorders are caused by physical forces in the workplace and that ergonomic solutions can reduce those forces and the incidence of MSDs. These two studies do exist. They keep saying they do not exist. This NAS study was completed in 1998, published in 1999. The conclusion reached here in the study is that: ``better understanding of the course of these disorders would provide information that would assist in formulating strategies for tertiary intervention.'' So the new studies, the continuing studies will seek ways to intervene. There is certainly room in this complex area for studies for a long time to come. I hope that we do not stop after we complete 2 more years of study. But there will be an ongoing set of gathering of evidence and development of intervention strategies that will make it safer for the people in the workplace. That is no reason to delay. What we really hear today is a clear statement of the Republican platform on the workplace. The workplace is not a place that they want to make safe for the workers. They are indicating their great contempt for workers, as they have indicated repeatedly. OSHA, of course, is a major target. They have several bills which attack OSHA, and they always give them strange names or names that camouflage the real intent. There is the ``Science Integrity Act,'' which is actually a bill to allow businesses with financial interest in particular regulations to place their own experts on the peer review panels. That is a majority Republican bill for OSHA. There is a ``Safety Advancement For Employees Act,'' and that is a bill to exempt penalties to employers who violate the OSHA standards. There is the ``OSHA Reform Act of 1999'' which would totally eliminate OSHA's enforcement of standards in its protection of whistle blowers. Then there is the ``Fair Access to Indemnity and Reimbursement Act'' which would chill OSHA enforcement by awarding attorney fees to businesses whenever OSHA lost a case. They are consistent. They have been plugging away at OSHA for a long time. They are consistently hostile to working families. That is what we are hearing today. It is good that we are having this debate to have the destructive Republican platform for working families clearly stated on this floor.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, the following informational items can contribute greatly to the lifting of the veil of confusion being promulgated by the Republican majority. I am also submitting examples of victims of ergonomic disorders and examples of business owners in establishing their own ergonomic standards. Truth is on the side of the American working families.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I have listened to the debate for the last 10 minutes, and I am appalled by the fact that the debate is taking place without any real examination of the question of Kashmir. I have heard the various reasons that the gentleman has given for sending a signal to India, but the reason that all of us should be concerned about sending a signal to India is that the Kashmir bind that we have been in for almost 50 years is caused by the fact that India refuses to accept the simple route of Democratic self-determination for Kashmir. Kashmir is a large body of people who ought to have the right to vote as to what they want to do, whether they want to be independent or join Pakistan, or maybe we will even let India cross that off and do not have annexation to Pakistan on the agenda. Let them vote either to join India or to become an independent state. They will not even agree to that. If Kashmir were located in Europe or in Yugoslavia, we would all be concerned about the denial of self-determination by the people of Kashmir. It has gone on for decades now and nobody seems to care about the fact that the world's largest democracy, and India likes to call itself the world's largest democracy, and I applaud democracy in India, but it has great limitations and it is totally blind when it comes to democracy for Kashmir. Kashmir is not permitted to exercise the simple right to vote. Now we have a situation where the situation has escalated because these two powers, which dispute about a number of things but mainly about Kashmir, are now nuclear powers. They are nuclear powers. And I hate to say, but as new nuclear powers or amateur nuclear powers, they may rush into something and cause havoc in that part of the world. And of course, once we start using nuclear weapons, we have a problem with the atmosphere, we have a problem with the ashes being blown and radioactivity, all kinds of things can be set off by a war over Kashmir between Pakistan and India. I think that if we remove Kashmir as a point of contention between India and Pakistan, we would take a giant step toward promoting peace in that part of the world and toward avoiding a catastrophe which would pull in many other nations. Now, I was all in favor of doing what we did in Kosovo, because I thought it was important to establish a new moral order and to send a message to predators like Slobodan Milosevic. But India does not have any evil person we can personify in the case of Kashmir. But they have a long-term policy, a long-term policy of just denying the right to self-determination to the people of Kashmir. Who can justify that? And why not send a signal to India? Why not do something? I do not hear the United Nations debating it. I do not hear anybody proposing a sense of the Congress resolution. Why are we ignoring the problem of Kashmir? Why do we let it go on and on for decades? Are we waiting for an explosion? Are we waiting for something more serious that we will be drawn into? Are we waiting when we will have to take sides because of geopolitics, that China may be on one side, therefore we have to get on the other side? Why do we not proceed with a simple nonviolent solution. People have said we should not have gone into Kosovo with bombs; we should not have gone into Kosovo with NATO; we should have had a nonviolent solution. Here is an opportunity for a nonviolent solution. And India, as a nation, has always been in favor of nonviolence in many instances. Gandhi was the founder of the whole nonviolent movement. Why do we not send a signal to India that we would like to see them change their ways and let Kashmir have a vote on self-determination. Any signal would be a good signal in my opinion. I certainly will support the gentleman's amendment, because nothing else is being done.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I have a question I just wanted to clarify regarding the way the gentleman measures parental involvement. Under present law, there is a requirement in Title I that 1 percent of the funds must be available to the parents for parental involvement purposes. Does the gentleman have any way to measure or monitor any requirement that they carry out the parent involvement part of the bill?

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, will the gentleman yield?

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, all of the other authorizing committees come to the floor with comprehensive bills dealing with the total problem. The reason we are victimized here by gross oversimplification and extreme claims for what one particular action is going to accomplish in the education area is that we do not have a comprehensive bill. The Elementary and Secondary Education Assistance Act has been balkanized, and for a reason. This is part of a guerrilla attack, strategically. When the Republicans took control of the Congress in 1995, they wanted to abolish the Federal role in education, and they did a head-on invasion, a direct attack; and it failed miserably and the American people rejected it. Now we have a guerrilla operation. One beachhead was established with the Ed-Flex Act. Now this is a second beachhead whereby we are challenging the President's priorities; we are challenging the role of the Federal Government. They want to talk about flexibility, but flexibility means no accountability. As we reduce the size and the role of the Department of Education, there is nobody to monitor anything. We have a window of opportunity, a great door of opportunity open right now for some serious education reform and we have some funds to back it up. We do not have to keep robbing from the poor. This bill is designed to pilfer from the program's funds that have been targeted for the poor and spread the same resources thinner. We should stand up like the other committees, get in line and ask for more money. There is a surplus. Why do we not ask for part of that surplus to be devoted to investment in education? Not expenditures on tax cuts but investment in education. The best way to help Social Security is to invest in education. Instead of continuing to scramble money and rob from one part of the sector for another, let us move forward with a comprehensive bill. Bring the Elementary and Secondary Education Assistance Act to the floor and let us discuss it as a comprehensive bill. Now is the time to let the common sense of the American voters come into this House and guide the confused leaders here. Their straightforward and hard-headed point of view has said that education is our number one priority. The voters want to see some action. Why can they not see some action in terms of us asking for more resources? Do not just keep playing around with issues. We should abandon this perverted Robin Hood mentality where we are robbing the poor in order to take care of the rest of the sectors. The wealth of today and the future will be measured in brainpower. We should make education a priority the way the American people have made it and have a brainpower production machine which is thoroughly funded. And this committee should lead that and not follow. This committee should take the initiative in demanding more resources for education and not in balkanizing and trimming what we have already. We need a streamlined structure, a streamlined approach to education reform, and we cannot get that without bringing the Elementary and Secondary Education Assistance Act to the floor and discussing it wholly. As members of the Committee on Education and the Workforce we are denied an opportunity to fully debate every part and see how each part melds with the other because we do not have a comprehensive bill before us. We have only this guerrilla attack, this perverted Robin Hood approach which is designed to rob the poor in favor of the rich. ]

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I rise in support of this amendment. I urge that we consider some future request for additional funding to accomplish this. I think that we are all aware of the fact that there is a great deal of shortages in the area of information technology workers. The estimate now is that there are about 300,000 positions that are going unfilled, and that within 2 or 3 years, that number will pass a million because the number of young people who are in college now majoring in computer science is so small that it will never fill the gap. There is a need to broaden the base of the pool. Many more youngsters need to be going into computer science or pursuing an education which will place them in the information technology world somewhere. Maybe they will be placed as mechanics, maybe as technologists. Maybe they will go on to computer programming at some other level. So our teachers have to supply that pool from which we draw our future computer programmers and computer technologists and people in the schools who are teaching others how to use technology to the best effect for education. But it cannot be done unless we have some more funding. We cannot talk about it alone because the necessity to purchase the computers, the necessity to make certain that our schools are wired so they can make use of technology; all these items, we cannot ignore and expect this to happen. It costs money. We had, fortunately, a policy from the Federal Communications Commission which created the E-Rate. The E-Rate pays for the ongoing cost of using technology. It also helps to wire the poorest schools. It provides up to 90 percent of the cost for wiring the poorest schools. But they still do not supply the computers, and they cannot supply the salaries for the teachers. So we need to, again, return to the consideration of the fact that nowhere are we proposing additional funds. We are not attacking the problems of education in a 21st Century manner by understanding that they require more resources. Again, I cannot stress too much, we have a golden opportunity; the door of opportunity is open, because of the fact that there is a surplus. Other committees are talking about making demands on that surplus. We have to make demands on that surplus and say that education is an investment that ought to be made. Some portion of that surplus ought to be devoted to areas where it is expensive to operate like the area of technology. The digital divide is great. Recently a report was released by the Department of Commerce which showed that sinking further and further behind are the children in the poorest areas, because they do not have access to computers at home. The only other place we are going to be able to close the gap of the digital divide is at school. We cannot close it at school unless they have the money to buy the computers and to pay for the salaries of teachers. We need more funding to make this a reality. I think the gentleman has brought attention to the matter, and he deserves support for that reason.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Madam Speaker, today we consider a very important education bill. It is important because the Republican majority made it important. It is important because it is all that we have. In a year when we expect to be reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Education Assistance Act, we have been denied that opportunity, but pieces of the Elementary and Secondary Education Assistance Act have been put forward. The Ed-Flex Act is a piece of it and now this piece on Teacher Empowerment Act, H.R. 1995, which was considered today. The consideration of this bill today, which was kind of rushed to the floor and it was hoped that they would get enough votes to send a message to the White House that it cannot be successfully vetoed, but, of course, they failed in that effort. The President has promised to veto this bill because at the heart of the bill is an attempt to derail the President's initiative on more teachers for the classroom, especially in grades 1 through 3, where there is a need for smaller class sizes. We did get a bill approved, an appropriation approved last year, which would permit the beginning of the process of hiring more teachers for the classroom. Virtually 100,000 teachers would be hired under this legislation; and 30,000, the process has started as of this month. So in order to derail that for some reason the Republican majority is against smaller class sizes and they want to take away that priority, take away the targeting and they came up with this Teacher Empowerment Act, which is not a bad idea. The thrust of the bill is to provide a special initiative for the training and professional development of teachers, to improve the quality of teachers. By itself, that is a lofty goal and who could not subscribe to having better prepared teachers in our classroom? We want quality teachers; but for some reason to get quality teachers, the Republican majority chose to sacrifice the more teachers for the classroom. The act that is designed to lower the class sizes in the first three grades has to be sacrificed, put on the chopping block, in order to take care of meeting teachers' professional development needs and training needs. I think that for the Republican majority, it was more important to derail the initiative to have smaller class sizes than it is really to train teachers. The training of the teachers and the opportunities for professional development is secondary for them. They are pursuing an agenda, and this bill was a part of that agenda, to reach a point where all of the influence and direction from the Federal Government is wiped from the education sphere. They want to abolish the education role of the Federal Government and this, of course, takes them one step closer. If they can take the President's initiative on class sizes and get rid of that, it is one more step toward reducing the Federal Government's role in education. So that bill was on the floor today. The Republican majority had the greatest number of votes because they are the majority. They passed the bill, but the number of defections by Democrats was not as great as they expected and the President's threat to veto the bill certainly can hold. The bill can be vetoed until something more reasonable is done about the class size initiative of the President. There were a lot of good things in the Teacher Empowerment Act. By the way, it is called Teacher Empowerment Act; but all the teacher organizations, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the Grade Schools Group, all of the various education groups opposed it because they saw it as a sabotage operation designed to wipe out the reduction of the classroom size initiative. Now, that bill was on the floor today. Tomorrow the major bill on the floor will be the tax cut bill, and I want to talk about the importance of dealing with the education initiative. The education investments should come before big spending tax cuts. Education investments should come before big spending tax cuts, and it is very important to note that during the whole discussion of the so-called Teacher Empowerment Act today, the one thing that the Republican majority refused to allow any discussion of was additional funding. No new money is involved in their initiative. They want to take the money that has already been appropriated for the class size reduction and the money that already exists in various other teacher training and professional development programs and use that in a different way, mainly throw it out there to the States, let the governors decide how they want to spend that money on education. That is the thrust of what the Republicans want to do. It takes us one step closer to their long-term objective and that is to block grant all funds available for education to the States. By block grant, I mean take away the Federal guidelines, take away the Federal priorities, take away the long-term Federal commitment to the poorest districts and the poorest schools out there. The Federal thrust in education, since 1965, since the first Elementary and Secondary Education Assistance Act, in the era of Lyndon Johnson, has been to focus on those areas of greatest need, to target the Federal money to help with the problem that the States were not able to deal with and chose not to deal with and that is provide a decent education for the poorest students in the poorest schools in the poorest districts. So that initiative by the Federal Government is targeted by the Republicans. They want to take it away. Their long-term goal is to wipe out the Federal Government involvement in education. In 1995, my colleagues will recall, the Newt Gingrich program went head on in a direct attack on the Department of Education. They called for the abolishment of the Department of Education. They pursued that for a while. It turned out that the American people did not think that was a good idea. The voters did not think it was a good idea. They retreated, and now we have no more talk about abolishing the Department of Education. What we have is, instead of the direct assault, we have a great deal of warfare going on where they snip away at the powers, they attack at small beachheads that they establish, and they find every way to cut into the power of the Department of Education and into the Federal role in education. The Federal role in education, of course, is already limited. They make it appear that the Federal Government is responsible for all that is wrong in education. It is a very limited role already. Less than 8 percent of the education funding in this country, that is including higher education funding, less than 8 percent of that is provided for by the Federal Government at this point. But that is what we had on the floor today, another assault on that small role, that less-than-8-percent role fiscally. If one got 8 percent of the funds involved across the country, then I think that the influence of the Federal Government is probably no more, also, than about 8 percent. Control is vested in States and local education agencies for education already. But that is targeted. First, they wanted to get rid of it all together. Now they want to block grant it and turn it over to the governments. That is what was on the floor today. No item which talked about additional funding was received in an amicable spirit by the Republican majority. In fact, the only amendment that called for fresh funds, new money, new initiative with new money was the amendment offered by the gentlewoman from Hawaii (Mrs. Mink). The gentlewoman wanted to offer grants, some help for sabbaticals for teachers. If one is talking about training, then in order to hold certain people into the career path, in order to make certain that they have an opportunity for growth, somewhere they ought to encourage and help to finance the sabbaticals which already are offered in many local education systems. It is an area that was not new, but the gentlewoman from Hawaii wanted to give more help and called for more money for that. That, of course, was voted down by a large margin and condemned by the chairman and the Republican majority. No new money is the credo of the leadership of the Committee on Education and the Workforce. The Republican majority insists that we never discuss authorizing new funding. But tomorrow, we will be discussing on the floor an expenditure of $864 billion over a 10-year period for tax cuts. We cannot talk about money when we are talking about education. No new money. The government is broke. We cannot make investments in education, but we can have big spending tax cuts. That is obvious. It is a huge, monstrous piece of big spending, $864 billion, and there is no room anywhere for an investment in education. I think my colleagues have heard the previous speaker tonight and they heard the previous set of speakers from the Democratic side talk about this tax cut. While I am not prepared and do not intend to go into it with great deal, I associate myself with most of the remarks made by the gentleman from Maryland (Mr. Hoyer) and his associates. Their plea was that we not go forward with this monstrous $864 billion tax cut, that we look at other kinds of things that ought to be considered at the same time. We cannot separate, in my opinion, the discussion of the tax cut, however, from the discussion of education. They did not do it. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans that talked tonight really placed education on the table for discussion. Within the parameters of the conventional wisdom here in Washington, and that sometimes includes the White House, when we talk about large amounts of money, they do not want to talk about education. It is a direct insult to the voters. We have poll after poll which shows that education ranks as one of the number one priorities over the last 5 years and recently moved to the very top. Before Social Security, before defense spending, before all of the other priorities which are usually considered, education ranked as number one. Why are the voters being ignored? I do not know. They can ask their Congressman. Why is it that, when my colleagues discuss education, they insist that they cannot discuss new money? Additional resources. Why is it that the American public repeatedly says, we would like to see more Federal assistance for education, but they are only answered with rhetoric about new kinds of changes in the reform programs, but none of those new changes have any resources behind them? With the acknowledgment of the existence of a huge budget surplus, and I do not want to get into an argument about how much the surplus is or what it is going to be over the next 10 years, I just know that it is foolish for us laymen who are not involved directly in the calculation process to sit still and watch our leaders talk about huge sums of money that they are going to negotiate on and we question whether it really exists. I have some friends who went to a meeting today to hear someone lecture about the fact that there really is no budget surplus, and we should stop discussing it. I heard that, in 1996, when we were on the eve of an election, and we had gone through 2 years of the Republican majority insisting, not only that there was no money for an increase in funding for education, but that education should be cut, and we had proposals in 1995 that education be cut by almost $4 billion, but, in 1996, something miraculous happened. Both parties agreed in the negotiations at the White House that there was additional money available somewhere, and instead of cutting education by $4 billion, because we were approaching an election where the polls showed that the public wanted more Federal assistance for education, and the party that stood in the way might suffer and might lose seats, suddenly there was agreement. The Republican majority agreed to an increase in education funding of $4 billion. Instead of a $4 billion cut, we got a $4 billion increase. They found the money somewhere. Now, I remember the argument at the time was that we would get the money from sales of the spectrum, the spectrum auctioning. The auctioning of the spectrum was going to create that money. It was not in hand. But since both parties of the negotiation agreed, it suddenly became a reality. The $4 billion that was appropriated, it has been spent. Since 1996, they have been spending the money. So I assume that whatever assumptions they made, they lived up to those assumptions one way or the other. I have not checked to see if we have auctioned off enough of the spectrum to add up to $4 billion, but when it came time to make the decision, the reality was what the two parties agreed upon. If both the White House and the Republican majority leaders are saying now that we have a huge surplus that could accommodate, over the next 10 years, an $864 billion Republican tax cut, and the President has said, well, he will entertain some kind of tax cut, not that much, I assume the surplus is real, and the tax cut possibilities are real, and they are going to go forward. It would be ridiculous for us to sit out the process and not get involved. Education ought to be put on the table so that it becomes a part of the discussion. The doors of opportunity are open for education to be discussed in terms of new resources and new appropriations. If the blind men who are in charge here insist that they do not see that as a possibility, some of us who are not in charge must sound the alarm. We must tell the American people, do not sit still and accept a big spending tax cut while there is no new investment in education. I hope that my party will rally behind me soon and that they will see the folly of allowing a huge amount of surplus over the next 10 years to get committed to something, and it is going to happen. There are going to be some commitments of that surplus over the next 10 years. We sit still, and we let education be left out. At this point, the forecast for education being included is quite dismal. We have a bill which has been set forth by the administration for the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Assistance Act. In their reauthorization proposals, they do not propose any great increases in the funding for the ongoing programs. In fact, there is sort of an understanding that we are going to live within certain budget guidelines. There are ceilings that have been set. The budget caps, as they call them, will not be taken off. That may all be true in conventional wisdom, but if the surplus exists, it is folly to assume that they will not in the final analysis be negotiations of some part of the surplus being committed to programs. Certainly, it would be folly to sit still and not commit any part of the surplus to programs and let it all be used for big spending tax cuts. The forecast for education right now may be dismal; but if we put on our thinking caps, if we sound the alarm for the general public, the people who in, poll after poll, show that they think education is important, if we let common sense enter into this matter, then we can go forward beyond the Republican plot to have Ed-Flex and Teacher Empowerment and other kinds of block granting drain off the funds, and we would not make any progress in terms of new resources for education. There have been some dramatic changes now in the fiscal environment. Those people who said there was no money available 2 months ago cannot insist that there is no money available now in light of the facts that have been revealed. Even the budget agencies, the Congressional Budget Office, they all admit there is a surplus. There is an argument about how much of the surplus is from Social Security funds and ought to be reserved only for Social Security, the lock box theory. There is an argument that there are certain amounts of money available and will be available beyond the Social Security surplus and that that should be budgeted. Either way, either set of assumptions that are accepted, there is an acceptance of the fact there is going to be additional money available. Why not put education on the table? Why must we accept what the Republican majority has offered us on the Committee on Education and the Workforce and on the floor today? What they offered us today was a perverted Robin Hood operation. They were going to take only existing funds and scramble them and use them for other purposes instead of having any new funding. When they do that, what they are doing is taking money away from the traditionally targeted programs, which are designed to help the poorest students in our poorest schools, and redirect that money away from the poorest schools, stealing, pilfering from the poor to take care of other sectors, and making that the hallmark of their education reform program. Going to the public and saying this is our answer to their request or their demand for more Federal assistance. We give them the same money in new forms, and we hope that they will be fooled by it. But I hope that common sense will not allow us to be fooled, that we will insist that education appropriations be put on the table alongside any tax cut spending, alongside any spending for shoring up Social Security, alongside spending for health care. Probably there is going to be a package which contains all of those elements. Now, on May 26, I introduced a bill which deals with one aspect of education which I think is critical. In the light of the large amounts of money that were being made available in the surplus, now is the time to discuss it. Not all the problems of education will be solved by new construction and modernization of our schools, although that was on the agenda today. We did discuss the need for more technology in our schools and the need for teachers to be trained to utilize technology and how important that was. It, the modernization process, requires that we have money to repair the schools and take care of the old wiring and make certain that they can be wired. In some cases, some schools cannot be rewired. They are going to have to build new schools. So construction and modernization ought to be a part of this agenda. It was totally ruled out before because of the budget caps. And if we take the ongoing budget as it is, common sense and conventional wisdom says there is just no money. But if we accept the fact that there is going to be a surplus, and we talk about large amounts of money, like $864 billion for a tax cut, then we can also talk about taking this opportunity to plan to spend over the next 10 years, or 5 or 10 years, money that is necessary to provide adequate schools, safe schools, schools where there are no health hazards, as well as schools that can be modernized to the point where they can make use of modern technology. Schools can take advantage of the fact that we have an E-rate, which provides a reduced rate for people who make use of technology on an ongoing basis. The on-line services, the telephone services, 90 percent of that in the poorest of schools would be paid through this E-rate fund provided by the Federal Communications Commission. A lot of things are happening that we need to catch up with by providing more funds for construction and for modernization. Now, on May 26 I called on my colleagues to join me in the cosponsorship of H.R. 1820, which is an amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Assistance Act. And this amendment would be germane certainly, because there is already a provision, Title 12, under the Elementary and Secondary Assistance Act, which calls for money for repairs and construction. So we can add, if we ever get around to reauthorizing the Elementary and Secondary Assistance Act, we can certainly add that to the package. Or if we do not get around to reauthorizing the entire act, it is in the law. It is the law right now. We can amend it to provide for this injection of necessary funding for school construction. I am just going to read from my own letter to my colleagues, and I have a big heading on top which says that, ``In the Year 2000 We Launch the March Towards a New Cybercivilization. We are spending $218 billion on highways and roads in 6 years. Let us invest half this amount, $110 billion, in 5 years, to build, repair and modernize schools.'' Let me repeat that. ``In the Year 2000 We Launch the March Toward a New Cybercivilization.'' A cybercivilization, meaning the digital world is taking over. The computers are taking over. They are everywhere, infused in our life, and they are probably going to have a greater influence and a greater presence in our lives as we move on. Recently, there was a lot of discussion of the fact that one individual now, his net worth is $100 billion. This tops all the millionaires and billionaires throughout American history. The name of that individual is Bill Gates. Now, Bill Gates is worth, they say, at least $100 billion, and his company is worth far more. Now, Bill Gates does not own any gold mines, he does not own any oil wells, he does not own any uranium mines. All the kinds of things that used to make people rich are not associated at all with Bill Gates. What does Bill Gates have that allows him to accumulate $100 billion as an individual and a company worth far more than that, Microsoft? Well, Bill Gates is where he is and has the kind of gigantic assets that he has through the application of brainpower. It is all about the brains that were used to develop the software in harmony with the computers and then to capitalize on the Internet. He has been accused of some unscrupulous actions and so forth, but that is irrelevant in terms of the basic thrust of what happened here. What happened here is that brainpower, marshaled repeatedly, directed, concentrated on certain objectives produced results. And the same thing is happening over and over again in numerous high-tech companies. We are ahead of the rest of the world because we did not have any central committees making rules which said that we can only focus our brainpower on natural resources. We are only going to concentrate on mining and oil wells and so forth. People who had the know-how to launch the cyberrevolution went ahead and launched it, very young people who are in charge. The guys who used to be called nerds, or probably similar people are still called nerds in high school and college, the nerds triumphed with brainpower. It is all about very educated people concentrating their resources and being able to generate wealth. So there is a direct association between brainpower and wealth. We are definitely moving into a cybercivilization, and it is ridiculous for us not to recognize that and to shape our public policy in a way which accommodates the fact that we are moving into a cybercivilization. There are some nations, like India, who recognize this. And public policy has produced in India large amounts of people, personnel, who are in the computer programming arena, who are in various stages as computer programmers and document technologists. Out of proportion to other similarly situated nations, India is producing people in the area of information technology with information technology expertise. But let me just get back to the appeal to my colleagues that I sent out on May 26. ``In the year 2000 we launch the march toward a new cybercivilization. We are spending $218 billion on highways and roads in 6 years. Let us invest half this amount, $110 billion, in 5 years to build, repair and modernize schools. Please join me as a cosponsor for H.R. 1820, an amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Assistance Act which mandates a worthy Federal investment in education for the children of America. ``Public opinion polls consistently show that our voters consider Federal aid to education as the Nation's number one priority. We must now move beyond paltry pilot projects in our response to this long-term public outcry. H.R. 1820 commits the Federal Government to make the contribution most suitable to its role. ``Through direct appropriations we must make capital investments in school infrastructures, offer leadership in the building of schools, and then leave the details of the day-to-day operations to local and State authorities.'' I have no problem with local and State authorities being in charge of the implementation, but the resources need to come from the Federal Government because most States and local governments cannot commit the kind of resources necessary to modernize our school systems the way they should be. ``H.R. 1820 proposes to help all schools by authorizing, on the basis of school-aged children, a per capita distribution of the allocations for the purposes of modernization. Security, by the way, should be added, repair, technology and renovations, as well as new school construction. ``H.R. 1820 deserves national priority consideration for the following reasons: One, the best protection for Social Security is an educated workforce, able to qualify for high-tech jobs and steadily pay dollars into the Social Security Trust Fund. ``Two, the effective performance of our military in action, utilizing high-tech weaponry, requires an educated pool of recruits. ``Three, the U.S. economy will continue to be the pace setter for the globe only if we maintain a steady flow of qualified brainpower and updated know-how at all performance levels, theoretical, scientific, technical and mechanical. ``Invest in education and all other national goals become reachable.'' Invest in education and all other national goals become reachable. Invest in education and we have a great possibility, a greater possibility. I do not think Social Security is about to go bankrupt. There are a lot of scare tactics applied to discussions of where Social Security funds are now and where they will be 50 years from now. But one way to assure that Social Security funding will be there is to have a workforce out there paying into the Social Security fund. Whatever else we do, and I do not rule out having general appropriations for Social Security, but whatever else we do, we should keep the payment of funds into the Social Security treasury from working people, people who are working. And if we do not have people who can qualify for the jobs that are going to be available 20, 30, 40 years from now, if we do not have people that have the know-how to do the high-tech jobs, the likelihood is that we are going to contract out a lot of our work to other countries that do have the population and the workforce with the know- how, and they are going to pay money into their Social Security fund, and we will have our Social Security fund deprived of the payment by workers into the fund. That is the first source. So the best protection for Social Security is an educated workforce. We ought to have a discussion of education on the table when we consider what to do with the huge surplus that is anticipated over the next 10 years. Instead of being a projected $864 billion in tax expenditures, we should say some portion of that money should go for education. In this particular piece of legislation, the bill I have introduced, I only want $110 billion out of the total that is projected. Even if we have to take the $110 billion away from the tax expenditures, that is $110 billion from $864 billion. The parameters for the discussion have been set by the majority party. They have said we can talk big money, we can talk in billions, we can talk $864 billion, so let us use that as a reference point and say why spend on tax cuts the full $864 billion? Let us negotiate at least $110 billion over a 5-year period to build schools and to modernize schools. Invest in education. There may be additional money we will want to invest in whole school reform, which, despite the fact that the authorizing Committee on Education and the Workforce did not come up with the program for whole school reform, we get high praise for some of the whole school reform efforts that are going forward. There are many other places where we may need some investment in education, but a large capital expenditure is needed for school construction and modernization. And a capital expenditure of this kind is only a one-time expenditure. It is not something we would saddle the budget with forever. It would not be ongoing. We would take care of the problem, we would invest in building schools, and then we will have a result from that investment, a return on that investment later on. I think any businessman, if he had a surplus and there was clearly identified needs in the area of capital investments, would make those investments in order to be able to realize that return in the future. The General Accounting Office told us in 1995 that we needed $112 billion at that time. That was 4 years ago. We needed $112 billion just to keep the infrastructure at a level which would accommodate the amount of schoolchildren attending school at that time. We now have many more children attending school. I think we have close to 53 million children out there in schools, and what I have just projected, an expenditure of $110 billion over a 5-year period, would be only an expenditure of $416 per year per school-aged child. An expenditure of $416 per child per year over a 5-year period. So we are talking about a relatively small amount of money to invest in education and guaranty the workforce that we need for tomorrow. And that is an appeal I made to my colleagues on May 26 to cosponsor. And I recently developed another appeal in light of the changed circumstances; that we now know that there definitely is additional money available. I projected it before and I said we should get ready for it and we should put on the table a reasonable package which includes school construction. I am all for the President's call for an expenditure of a part of the surplus on Medicare. I am all for his call of an expenditure of the bulk of the surplus on shoring up Social Security. I am not against that, but I think it is a great mistake, a great blunder by both Democrats and Republicans not to put education on the table and make it part of the package. But circumstances recently have changed so favorably until I do not see how we can ignore the great window of opportunity that is now open. So I prepared another letter which I have not sent out yet, I will send it out tomorrow, I start with the following heading. ``Democrats must respond to the overwhelming change in the fiscal surplus negotiating environment.'' I repeat. ``Democrats must respond to the overwhelming change in the fiscal surplus negotiating environment.'' ``Republicans have now ratcheted up their demands for a mega-billion- dollar tax cut. The Democratic President has now indicated that he will entertain a tax cut at some level.'' So it is definitely on the table. ``Missing from the end game negotiating table is a Democratic scenario for school construction and modernization.'' At this moment, that is not on the table. None of the speakers tonight have talked about education being part of the mix. I heard discussions of defense, additional expenditures for defense that ought to come out of the surplus and a few other items, but no one talked about education although education if you want to consider the national security of the country as being important, the first item you ought to look at is the quality of our education, including such practical and immediate problems as the workforce required by the military. The military requires recruits that are highly educated, people who must have had enough prerequisite education in order to be able to go into the military and learn how to deal with a high-tech military, high-tech equipment, procedures, et cetera. You need well-trained people in the military as much as you need them in the area of information technology. So the first step toward shoring up our military should not be new expenditures for equipment like aircraft carriers and B-2 bombers and smart bombs but to make certain that the people who guide those smart bombs and who prepare the maps and the intelligence before you drop the bombs do not make a mistake of the kind we made with the Chinese embassy in Yugoslavia. Or you have people who are smart enough with their high-tech equipment not to be fooled the way we were fooled with the Yugoslav dummy equipment, wooden weapons and all kinds of things that made us believe that we were bombing their military into ineffectiveness when actually we were hitting very little of their military equipment. I do not know why we fell for that trick because we pulled that on Hitler when we were projecting openly exposing equipment in the south of France to make it appear that we were going to launch an invasion of the mainland of Europe from the south, toward the south of France, instead of at Normandy, and the Germans fell for that and we are proud of the fact that we pulled that off. Why we would let Yugoslavia pull the same kind of trick on us with respect to equipment that we thought we were bombing, I do not know, but it points up the need to have better training and a better educated military, set of military personnel from the bottom to the top. Let me continue. As I said before, ``Missing from the end game negotiating table is a Democratic scenario for school construction and modernization. H.R. 1820, an amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Education Assistance Act, authorizes a direct appropriation which is only one-half the amount authorized and appropriated for transportation. Not $218 billion but $110 billion, or $416 per child per year for 5 years. All of the Democratic proposals for school reform and education are worthy, but nothing proposed is equal to the number one priority ranking that the voters have assigned to education. A construction and modernization initiative of this kind fills the vacuum.'' This kind of initiative is a response worthy of what the voters have demanded. In poll after poll, you have said education should get more assistance from the Federal Government. You do not want to hear an answer that we are going to have a Teacher Empowerment Act which takes old funds away from poor schools and redirects them, spreading them out over the whole country to train teachers better but no new funds are going to be allocated. You do not want to hear that kind of response to an overwhelming demand that the Federal Government play a greater role in providing assistance to education. Here is a response worthy of it. Lay these responses alongside of the $218 billion that we approved for highway and transportation last year, $218 billion over a 6-year period. That is about 50 some billion dollars a year for the next 6 years. We approved that. The authorization committee came forward with it. It was not the Appropriations Committee. The Appropriations Committee was driven by the energy of the authorizing committee. Today we had the authorizing committee, Education and the Workforce, refusing to even ask for additional funding and take to the Appropriations Committee the priorities that have been set by the American people. So we are asking for a worthy response, $110 billion over 5 years. Lay that aside the highway and transportation bill of $218 billion over 6 years and then lay that aside of the new request from the Republican majority for $864 billion over 10 years. If you get dizzy considering billions of dollars, I can understand but at least let us look at the comparisons and understand the framework in which we are operating. I have had people say to me, ``When you talk about $22 billion a year for school construction over a 5-year period which all adds up to $110 billion over 5 years, that is mind-boggling.'' It may be mind-boggling, but we live in a mind-boggling era and we are a country of more than 250 million people. There are more than 16,000 school districts out there, and there are 53 million children out there. When you look at the number of children and you look at the amount spent per child, we are talking about $416 per child per year. Maybe that can help you understand the mind-boggling figure of $22 billion per year over a 5- year period which adds up to $110 billion. And then lay the $110 billion alongside $218 billion for highways, lay that alongside $864 billion for a tax cut, and you are able to comprehend maybe what is going on in Washington. Do you want to stand by and let your government leaders make the blunder of a tax cut expenditure of $864 billion while schools receive zero from a surplus that does exist, or we assume exists? Democrats risk also being upstaged on this because I do not think the majority party is as dumb as some people consider it to be and I do not think this whole process is going to go forward without the majority party waking up to the fact that the people out there are still demanding that the Federal Government do more for education. Between now and the next election in the year 2000, I expect some movement on the part of the majority party, and I hope the Democrats are not going to be victimized by an October surprise like the one we had in October of 1996 when the Republicans agreed to an increase in education funding of $4 billion. After the Republicans had gone for a period from 1994 to the fall of 1996 calling for the abolishment of the Department of Education, wanting to cut school lunches, they attacked education vigorously, they cut Head Start, they cut title I, they went into 1995 and shut down the government because the President would not agree to those kinds of cuts, after all that had happened, in the fall of 1996 they decided to appropriate $4 billion more for education and they went out and told the public, ``We are the party which supports education.'' And they had enough people to believe that to win back the majority. I am convinced that that was a major item, a major part of their winning in 1996. ``Democratic refusal to support a meaningful dollar investment in school construction and modernization could weaken our ties to our labor allies and leave open an opportunity for Republicans to capture more labor union support.'' I have talked before about the way we treat the working people in this country. People look at requests for new money for education, for items like school construction or items like whole school reform or any items related to education, they look at it and say, ``Well, that's for minorities, that's for people in the inner cities,'' but most of the working families in this country cannot afford to send their children to private schools. So we are talking about the public school system. And a refusal to direct funding into school building repair and modernization is an abandonment of the public school system and working families are out there who are going to suffer as a result. ``We cannot emphasize too much the fact that the fiscal negotiating environment has undergone a rapid, almost revolutionary sea-change since the announcement of the long-term multi-trillion dollar surplus. To adapt to this change and at the same time respond to the number one priority of the voters, we urge you to review your position on H.R. 1820 and sign up for cosponsorship now.'' I am trying to get this new letter out. I have some sponsors that we did not have before. The minority whip the gentleman from Michigan (Mr. Bonior) now is a cosponsor of this bill. The gentlewoman from California (Ms. Pelosi) on the Appropriations Committee is a cosponsor. We hope that we can have new momentum that will be generated among those skeptical Democrats who did not want to be associated with an appropriation figure which seemed unreal. It is not unreal anymore. I hope I do not have to repeat why it is not unreal. I think that every one of my colleagues, Republican or Democrat, can see that $110 billion alongside $864 billion is not an unreal projection of what should be available for school construction. Now, one final specific item about this particular bill, H.R. 1820. We propose to appropriate the money on the basis of the number of school aged children in each State. This is a bill that would not be targeted, means-tested and that the utilization of it would have great flexibility for security purposes, for repair, for modernization, for technology, for construction, for renovation. There would be great flexibility and it would be appropriated according to the number of school aged children. If you look at it in terms of the blanket call for $110 billion, it may seem kind of irrelevant to you, but let us look at what each State will get if you take the number of school aged children projected for that State for this year and you apply that to the formula. Alabama would receive $341 million for school construction per year. This is the first year. Each year for 5 years, Alabama would receive $340 million. California would receive $2.7 billion a year for 5 years. Florida would receive $1.1 billion. Hawaii, $92 million. Iowa, $233 million. It would be money which is real enough to deal with the problem that the General Accounting Office has cited. We are talking about expenditures which would make a big difference in terms of school construction and school modernization and repair, et cetera. We are talking about an investment in education which would be a capital investment, the value over 30, 40, 50 years, versus the $864 billion projected for a tax cut expenditure over a 10-year period. Mr. Speaker, I include for the Record these two items, my Dear Colleague letter of May 26, 1999, and my Dear Colleague letter of July 14, 1999 in their entirety: In the Year 2000 We Launch the March Toward a New Cybercivilization--We Are Spending 218 Billion Dollars on Highways and Roads in Six Years let us invest half this amount--110 billion--in five years to build, repair and modernize schools Dear Colleague: Please join me as a co-sponsor for H.R. 1820, an amendment to the Elementary and Secondary Assistance Act which mandates a worthy federal investment in education for the children of America. Pubic opinion polls consistently show that our voters consider Federal Aid to Education as the nation's number one priority. We must now move beyond paltry pilot projects in our response to this long-term public outcry. H.R. 1820 commits the Federal government to make the contribution most suitable to its role. Through direct appropriations we must make capital investments in the school infrastructures. Offer leadership in the building of schools and then leave the details of the day to day operations to local and state authorities. H.R. 1820 proposes to help all schools by authorizing a per capita (on the basis of school age children) distribution of the allocations for the purposes of modernization, security, repair, technology and renovations as well as new school construction. H.R. 1820 deserves national priority consideration for the following reasons: The best protection for Social Security is an educated work force able to qualify for hi-tech jobs and steadily pay dollars into the Social Security Trust Fund. The effective performance of our military in action utilizing hi-tech weaponry requires an educated pool of recruits. The U.S. economy will continue to be the pace setter for the globe only if we maintain a steady flow of qualified brainpower and updated know-how at all performance levels-- theoretical, scientific, technical and mechanical. Invest in education and all other national goals become reachable.