Major Owens

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, do the Governors get 30 percent off the top for administrative expenses?

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

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I offer an amendment.

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

Mr. OWENS. I hear language, and a central program is not the same as a mandate. We have tricks here of the trade which all of us who have been legislators understand very well. It leaves it wide open for the strangling. The summer youth program will not die in one summer. It will be strangled slowly because it is in there with other disadvantaged youth programs which have not been treated in any favorable manner. They will be transferring funds from the summer youth program into the other programs until there will be little left.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, when the gentleman uses State and local synonymously, the Governors have the discretion but the local levels will have----

Mr. OWENS. In some states?

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I thank the gentleman.

Mr. OWENS. The gentlewoman is a member of the committee so she is aware of the fact that this precious consolidation mode of operation has been dropped for the dislocated workers. We have a line which mandates funding for dislocated workers. What we ask is a mandate for summer youth employment.

Mr. OWENS

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

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Chairman, I rise in strong opposition to the Housing Opportunity and Responsibility Act [H.R. 2]. Among many things, H.R. 2 would dismantle the 30-year bedrock principle of U.S. housing policy-- the Brooke amendment. With the punitive undertones of the bill and several proposed amendments, H.R. 2 represents Welfare Reform Part II . . . punishing the less fortunate for being poor. Using such euphemisms as local flexibility, income diversity, work incentives, and self- sufficiency, H.R. 2 would shamefully take from those who have the least resources and are the most vulnerable the right to something as basic as food and clothing: a decent place to sleep at night. If we are going to have an honest debate about the best way to allocate federal resources to address the housing needs of this nation, then we need to place all of the facts on the table: U.S. housing policy is embarrassingly inequitable. Despite the low-income housing needs of this country, only 20 percent of housing outlays is allocated for providing housing assistance and subsidies to lower-income families. The other 80 percent is tax expenditures enjoyed by wealthier families who are able to deduct mortgage interest, property taxes, capital gains, and other investor-homeowner ``perks'' from their tax liabilities. The result of this unjust, inequitable housing policy: Over 70 percent of the families who qualify for low-income housing assistance are not receiving it. Without regard to this imbalance in Federal housing policy, H.R. 2 would blatantly ignore those Americans who truly need housing assistance. H.R. 2 would mandate that housing authorities reserve a paltry 35 percent of new public housing units for families earning 30 percent or less of the median income in a local area (i.e., the very low-income). The remaining slots would be reserved for families earning up to 80 percent of the area's median income. (Under current law, 85 percent of public housing units must be provided to families with incomes at or below 50 percent of the area's median income.) In most communities, 30 percent of the area's median income is roughly equivalent to the poverty line. (In New York City, 30 percent of median income equals $11,700 for a two-person household.) To reserve such a small percentage of public housing for our poorest families, given the dramatic evidence of unaddressed needs, is an unforgivable act by my Republican colleagues. To add insult to injury, H.R. 2 includes a ``fungibility'' clause that would create a loophole that further weakens targeting provisions. H.R. 2 would allow public housing authorities to satisfy their meager 35 percent targeting reserve for the very low-income by counting the number of Section 8 vouchers granted to such families. (The Section 8 Program would be required to reserve only 40 percent of the slots for the very low-income.) Thus, if a public housing authority gives 75 percent of Section 8 vouchers to the very poor, it would NOT be required to make public housing units available to such families. In effect, public housing would be offered to higher-income families, while the very low-income would be offered housing vouchers. On the surface it appears that public housing would then become more diversely populated and the very low-income would be free to secure housing outside of the traditional public authority ``warehouse.'' However, it is unreasonable to assume the private housing market could reasonably accommodate the elderly, disabled and large low-income families who have very special housing needs. H.R. 2 would cleverly erode the protections of the Brooke Amendment. Under current law, this amendment sets the maximum percentage that tenants could be charged for rent at 30 percent of adjusted gross income (AGI). However, H.R. 2 would introduce a deceitful practice touted as giving the tenant a ``choice'' in rent calculations. H.R. 2 would allow the tenant to choose between two different calculations: (1) the tenant could choose a rent calculation based on income, in which case the rent could not exceed the 30 percent cap; or (2) the tenant could choose a flat-rate determined by the housing authority based on the rental value of the housing. This leads to an obvious question: What assurances are there that the tenant will not mistakenly choose the rate that will be more costly to him or her? Moreover, H.R. 2 would require housing authorities to set monthly minimum rents at $25 to $50, and authorities could grant hardship exemptions from such minimum rent requirements. To individuals who make more than $100,000 per year, a minimum rent of $25 to $50 may seem reasonable. Such reasoning only illustrates how out of touch supporters of this bill are with the people they represent. For the state of New York, a $50 minimum rent would affect 900 households, and a $25 minimum rent would affect 1,828 households. For homeless families utilizing special rent assistance, but who have no income, this minimum rent would be a hardship. For large families receiving AFDC in low benefit states, this minimum rent would be a hardship. For families awaiting determination of eligibility for public benefits, this minimum would be a hardship. For individuals and families transitioning from homelessness to housing, this minimum rent would be a hardship. Yes, many of the people that we represent have little to no income at all. The Congress should be compassionate enough to grant these families some leeway. Support the Velazquez amendment that would only allow a minimum rent up to $25 and would grant the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) the authority to define eligibility for the exemption. Finally, H.R. 2 would permit the shortsighted, misguided practice of turning over state public housing funds to local governments in the form of a block grant without regard to vital protections. The Home Rule Flexibility Grant could be utilized by cities and towns to develop and administer their own low-income housing programs. Again, the perverse possibilities of such a fund are crystal clear. Local governments, already grappling with fiscal viability, may choose to use federal housing funds for other city needs. Local governments would be free to establish their own rules and regulations regarding income targeting provisions, 30 percent rent ceilings and other tenant protections. Undoubtedly, H.R. 2 is a bad bill. It is not a marked improvement over last year's failed effort to reform the nation's public housing policy. It contains minor provisions that do some overall good for the community development and housing needs of our most vulnerable: permitting HUD to take over chronically troubled housing authorities; permitting the demolition of obsolete, dilapidated urban public housing; and permitting ``elderly only'' or ``disabled only'' public housing buildings. However, these are crumbs compared to the overall famine in housing face by 5.3 million poor families who pay more than 50 percent of their income for rent and/or live in substandard housing. This bill does little to provide ``a housing opportunity'' for our vulnerable citizens and abdicates a great deal of federal ``responsibility.'' Vote ``no'' on the so-called ``Housing Opportunity and Responsibility Act.''

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the session has now truly begun. We are now contemplating the parameters of the budget. There has been a budget agreement reached between the President and the Members of the House and the Senate, and now we can go forward in a session that has sort of been marking time up to now. Nothing is more important than the discussion of the budget. Our Nation's values are all locked up into the way it proceeds with its budget. What we really care about we can discover by watching the figures in the budget and understanding that what is really important to this Nation will be reflected in how we score our budget. The parameters are there. Discussion will go forward. Maybe we will restore the Democratic deliberation process back to the Congress. We were beginning to lose it because discussions were taking place out of sight, off center. Most of the Members were being excluded. There is a budget committee, which we assume would be the primary focus of deliberations on the budget, but that did not happen. I am told by my colleagues that serve on the Budget Committee that very little discussion has taken place on the Budget Committee about the budget. It was off limits for most of the Members. We have experienced a lot of that this year. It seems that after 1994 and the 104th Congress, when we had the Contract with America, everything was laid out as to where the majority Republicans wanted to take us. It was refreshing to see clearly what the goals and objectives were. The American people behaved accordingly. Knowing fully well what the party and power wanted to do, they reacted, they responded. There had to be a lot of adjustments and corrections before the election, and things proceeded as they proceeded. But at least there was a dynamic interaction, a public discussion. We knew that there was a proposal to eradicate the Department of Education, and the republic reacted to that. We knew that there was a proposal to cut Head Start drastically, to cut title 1 programs. We knew those things. The reactions of the public helped to guide what was happening, including guiding the party and powers, to the point where they reversed themselves and changed their minds on some of those critical areas. This time it is a stealth process, it is a stealth operation, it is an underground operation, it is a guerilla operation. Very little is discussed and laid on the table. We find out about it later. Not only in the discussions of the budget do you have a situation where you have a closed circle, a commanding control group somewhere, at the White House probably most of the time, deciding what the parameters of the budget would be, but the whole process is repeated throughout the entire Congress. In both parties it seems that there is a great love affair with oligarchists and kleptocracists, whatever you want to call them, small groups that have the power to make decisions. They think they have the power to make the decisions, they make the decisions and then they hand them down to the body, both Republicans and Democrats. I understand there is more and more of that happening at the committee level, instead of the whole committee operating the way it did previously at the level of the subcommittee. A subcommittee is a small working group. We have committees, and then the committees are broken down into subcommittees. The whole idea is that you need to get down to a level where it is reasonable for people who are here for the process of deliberation to conduct themselves in a process of Democratic deliberation and come out of it with practical results. But this year you have subcommittees being upstaged by working groups, small groups selected by somebody, oligarchists and kleptocracists at the lowest level, and then they come back and announce to everybody else that we have made this decision, take it or leave it. We do not want it disturbed. Here is the manna from heaven; eat. It runs contrary to the Democratic process. I hope that now we have had enough of that in the budget discussions and that we are now going to have a chance really to talk about what it is that the White House has agreed with the Congress to do and how can we really discard some of it and adopt some of it, expand on some of it and go forward to do the business that we were elected to do. We are all Members of Congress. We all come from a district about the same size. We are all elected and we are all basically equal. We ought to have the right, we ought to have the opportunity to at least deliberate. The majority party has the votes and eventually they will decide what happens. But let us have the dialogue. Let us have the chance to have the discussion. Let us have the American people hear the discussion. Your common sense out there is probably far more valuable than anything that can be done or said in these closed circles. The average American is superior to the oligarchy that people seem to set up. We always criticize these command and control processes. The Soviet Union collapsed because it had a command and control secret, closed-circle operation. So good sense, common sense could never get into that circle. They kept doing things and making decisions that were out of touch with reality. The reality of the economy, the reality of the Soviet people where they were, all of that was lost because the oligarchy, the kleptocracy, the closed central committee circle made the decisions and everybody else was shut out. So let us go forward in the budget making process and let everybody have an opportunity to see how the process goes and where we are in this Nation. The President has said that we are the indispensable nation. I really agree. In this critical 1997, just a few years away from the year 2000, the next century, I think we are the indispensable nation. I really think we ought to think about that responsibility of being the indispensable nation as we shape a budget for this year and for the next year. We are the indispensable nation. The whole world does not depend on us, but we have a pivotal role. Some things will never happen for the good of the world unless we make them happen. Some things will never happen for the good of our own Nation unless we make them happen, this pivotal generation we are in. Some things will not happen for our own constituency that ought to happen that are positive unless we make them happen. We have a burden on us and we have an opportunity that we never have had before. We do not have the burden of the cold war on our backs anymore. We do not have to carry the burden of an arms race to the extent we had to carry it before. We do not have to carry the burden of secrecy and suspicion among the largest nations of the world. Most of the industrialized nations of the world are not at war, cold war, hot war with each other. So we can jettison that and go forward. We ought to realize that probably few Congresses in the history of the United States have had such an abundance of resources and an atmosphere in which to utilize those resources which might do so much for the world and maybe for the universe. We are every day discovering more and more about the universe, and maybe life is out there and maybe we are going to be colonizing moons and planets, and so forth. But here is an opportunity, a golden opportunity. I had a delegation of the women's group that wanted to get more resources to fight breast cancer. Breast cancer, they say, is escalating, that there is a great increase, geometrical increase in the number of cases of breast cancer. Breast cancer not only is increasing in America and in the developed nations, which always thought that they had the highest incidence, but now they see an increase in breast cancer in places that did not have so much breast cancer before; and other kinds of cancer of course also seem to be on the rise. I do not see why the meager resources that are available for this kind of research, research of other presently incurable diseases, or diseases with a high rate of fatalities, I do not see why we should hesitate, I do not see why we do not have crash programs, I do not see why we do not dedicate ourselves to the proposition that everything that can be done to eliminate, eradicate, or reduce the damage done by these diseases can be done. Mr. Speaker, we are the indispensable Nation, we are the pivotal generation within an indispensable nation with the resources available. There has never been a nation as rich as the United States of America, never the kind of resources available. I do not see why we cannot look at the President's education proposals and say that those are part of our responsibility as an indispensable nation. Let us look at the fact that we are in a position to educate more people than any other nation in the world, educate people in the sciences that relate to health care, that relate to finding cures for diseases like breast cancer or diseases like AIDS, et cetera. We do not have to carry the burden on our backs totally for the whole world. We should not be so arrogant as to believe we do, but we are pivotal. We can do more than anybody else, and to do less is to fail the world at a point in history where it needs us very badly. If we had an education agenda which said we are going to go forward and educate as many young people as possible, give them everything that they need in order to fully realize their capabilities and their abilities all the way, so that they can become the scientists, the technicians, the writers, whatever we need in order to help guide the world, they can become that. In the area of science, in the area of biology, in the area of medicine, we know that if we have more people working, looking for the solution, working toward a solution, looking for a solution, if we have more people doing research, if we have all of the combinations and permutations being examined and reviewed, tested, then we are more likely to get a cure, we are more likely to get close to the kind of protocols which reduce the damage, et cetera. We know that there is a cause and effect, not a cause and effect, but if we take certain steps with respect to putting researchers out there with the proper equipment, with the proper guidance, we get a result. So we should have no less than we can. Our schools and our universities should be turning out more students at every level, and when we get to the university level and the graduate level and the level where people do research, we should not have pools of people who are scarce, but the maximum number should be involved. That is what the Nation should dedicate itself toward. Mr. Speaker, we should have a budget which is not apologizing for the amount of money in it for education. True, we do not know always the best ways to spend money, but I think there is a clear need in certain areas that we ought to address. We ought to address the areas that are obvious first, and we ought to address the areas that are experimental, the areas that have to be tested, and address those with greater gusto. I mean we ought to have more experiments, not less. We ought to have more attempts to examine what does work and to take what works and expand it, to examine the things that are basic to any workability of an education process and expand those. Mr. Speaker, I want to talk maybe about education and some new developments in education that we ought to be very happy about. I want to talk about the education budget and some disappointments in the budget agreement related to education, but I think we need to see it in the context of the bigger budget. The bigger budget is that this great rich Nation of ours is going to be spending billions of dollars, and is it moving to focus the expenditure of those dollars in the wisest direction. How much discussion is there, there is almost none, by the way, of the defense budget and the waste in that budget. How long are we going to continue to waste billions of dollars on defense while we force other programs into a discussion of scarcity? We make it appear that there is an environment of scarcity, of poverty for domestic programs, for programs that really are designed to help people. At the same time, we are flagrant in our waste. Nobody wants to even challenge the obvious waste that takes place in the defense budget. The CIA budget, we are wasting billions of dollars, and in this discussion we are not even talking about it, we are talking about wasting Medicaid or wasting Medicare, and there is always some waste in any program where human beings are involved. I will not stand here and say that there is no waste. The problem is, the greatest waste is where the greatest amount of money is, and that is in the defense budget. And yet, there is no discussion of why we are going to continue to waste money on defense. We could get the money we need for breast cancer research. We could get the money we need for HIV research; there are a lot of different causes which are human causes, causes which uplift humanity and will carry us to a new dimension as we go into the 21st century, and they are going to bleed. They are going to compete with each other while we continue to waste money on the expenditure of aircraft that we do not really need, on the expenditure of forces that we do not need overseas, or if we need them overseas, then certainly the countries where they are stationed are the ones who benefit most by their presence, the countries that ought to be the ones who pay for the overseas bases. We have said this many times, of course, on this floor, but I am going to continue to say it because I think it will get through to the common sense of the American people. There is something that takes place in the atmosphere of Washington that makes people timid about expressing the obvious truth. We do not have a command and control situation here. It is not as tight as the Soviet Union, but I can understand how the go-along-to-get-along theory that Sam Rayburn or some of the other Speakers have counseled young people who come in here, get along to go along or go along to get along theories infect people who come into this body. And there are certain things that become off limits, certain things that they will not challenge. The young child who saw the emperor was really naked is a good example for us to always keep in mind. Hans Christian Andersen's story of the Emperor's New Clothes, somebody told the emperor he had the best clothes possible and he was finely dressed and they had a cloth that was invisible. And the emperor fell for it, he walked out naked, and everybody was afraid to say what was obvious; everybody was afraid of the emperor, they were afraid of his guards, they were afraid of the whole system, they did not want to be ostracized, they did not want to be called troublemakers. And of course it took a little kid to point, with obvious amazement, that the emperor is naked, the emperor has no clothes on. The tax structure of the United States is an abominable structure. I have said it many times here and I must repeat it. It is not under discussion. Corporate welfare is rampant as it was before and it still is now. After years of discussion, nobody has the guts to stand up to corporate welfare. We heard from the chairman of the Committee on the Budget, the majority party's chairman, make some very bold and brave statements months ago about cutting corporate welfare. Well, where are the proposed cuts to corporate welfare in the proposed budget agreement? We do not see any cuts to corporate welfare. Where are the cuts? Where is the attempt to begin to equalize the tax burden between corporations and individuals? Corporations now pay a little more than 11 percent of the income tax burden where individuals are paying 44 percent, individuals and families, and we have talked about this many times before. It was not always that way. They once had a situation where corporations were paying more, and then there was a tremendous shift under Ronald Reagan where corporations went down as low as 6 percent of the overall tax burden and individuals shot up to 48 percent. They made an adjustment, and now it is individuals and families are paying a little more than 44 percent and corporations are paying between 11 and 12 percent. That discussion is not allowed, it is off limits. We cannot obviously pursue that at all, and there is no discussion whatsoever of doing something about the tax burden, adjusting it, in this budget. There are some additional goodies for the people who benefit most from corporate wealth. The gap in income is continuing to grow, and whereas we were once a nation that had one of the smallest gaps between the richest people and the poorest people, we now have the largest gap between the rich and the poor. And the gap is growing all the time, but yet we have focused on capital gains tax cuts in this budget agreement. Capital gains tax cut cost us $112.4 billion over a 10-year period, according to some calculations that have been done by some Democratic colleagues of mine; $112.4 billion over a 10-year period will go to the people who are already the richest people in America. Why are we preoccupied with those people, while at the same time we are cutting the budget for Medicare and Medicaid, while at the same time we say we cannot increase the budget for research on incurable diseases. In the case of the National Institutes of Health, those kind of constructive budgets for life, we cannot increase them but we can decrease the revenue in order to give a tax cut and more money to the richest people. The estate and gift tax credit will cost us about $40 billion over a 10-year period. The people who will benefit by this particular new provision in the code, the Tax Code, if it is passed, are people who already are the richest people in America. About 3 percent of the people in America would benefit from this gift of $40 billion over a 10-year period. Why are we doing this in this indispensable nation? Why is the pivotal generation, the people who have a chance to do so much for the world, piling dollars on top of dollars for people who already leave the most dollars? The common sense of the American voters is the only salvation we have, possible salvation. Now is the time for the common sense of the American voters to come to our aid; look at the budget very closely, follow these discussions very closely. It is confusing, I know, because we have not really made any decisions yet. The budget is behind schedule, and we do not even have an alternative proposed by the majority party. The President produced a budget in February. The alternative budget or the budget to counter that budget that the majority party usually produces was not produced this time. They decided not to have a budget. It is part of the stealth policy. Speaker Gingrich says politics is war without blood. In the theater of war, they decided to try a new tactic, the stealth policy. The gorilla warfare is not to put your cards on the table, so we did not have the majority Republicans producing a budget. They went to the White House instead and said, we will negotiate something and come out with an agreement first. That has kept it out of sight, off center stage, and now we have an agreement which a lot of people in America think is finalized. It is not. The agreement is not final. There are some things that this oligarchy of negotiators have decided which will not hold, necessarily. The Members of Congress certainly are not puppets. Members of Congress are certainly not paralyzed. It is possible to make this oligarchy back down, and to have some things done with this budget which have not been done. Nothing is impossible, and certainly a lot of things are possible. There are going to be a lot of changes. We would like to have those changes be made in favor of the people who have the greatest needs. We do not need anymore tax cuts for the richest people in America. We do need to address Medicare and Medicaid in a new way, and stop the assumption that that is the place where most of the money is, and therefore we can keep cutting Medicare and Medicaid. Members might have heard and read in the newspapers that this budget is good because it restored disability benefits to legal immigrants. Let us applaud that. Let us celebrate that. Members might have heard that Medicare recipients will pay a higher premium, also, $4 more each month; it does not sound like much, does it; or $4.50 per month. It does not sound like much, but why, in the richest Nation in the world, the richest Nation that ever existed, why are we cutting money on the one hand, cutting taxes for the richest people, and on the other hand, we are going to make Medicare recipients pay $4.50 more per month? The savings that Medicare will yield will come from cutting payments to providers, mainly hospitals and health care plans, as well as the savings that will be gained by the increase in monthly premiums. Why? Why are we being forced to move in a way which will penalize the elderly and the poorest people? Members might have read also that budget negotiators have agreed to expand health care for about 5 million poor children. That is, again, good news. But there are people who do not agree with that. That is what the negotiators have agreed to do, and it is still in jeopardy because there is a great deal of disagreement about how that should be done. Five million poor children is one-half the estimated number of children who need coverage. They say there are about 10 million children who need coverage. We think the estimate is much higher, but let us be grateful for a small step forward. Half of the children, 5 million of the 10 million who need coverage, half will be covered with this $17 billion over 5 years. Will it be coverage by Medicaid, or will they give the money to the States, which is always a very dangerous proposition, and let the States decide? Because States are notorious for ignoring the people with the least amount of power in their States, within their borders. They are notorious for ignoring the poor, and the New Deal and all the programs that were generated by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in the 1930's were designed to make up for what the States had refused to do to compensate. So when you are giving money to the States, always be aware of the fact that they are part of the problem, not part of the solution. If the money to cover children is handed to them totally, without any oversight, which is quite strict, I fear many children who need the coverage will not get coverage. Administration officials said this budget deal also will cover disabled legal immigrants who were in the country on August 22, when the bill was passed. That is another bright spot. We have proposals to deal with a problem that has overwhelmed some of the congressional offices. I have more people seeking help with immigration problems and problems relating to the immigration reform than any other problem in my office. There are just hundreds of people who fear that they are in dire straits, and are. The threat to their well-being is tremendous. There are nursing homes that will not admit elderly people who are not citizens, even before the September cutoff point goes into effect. They do not want to have people in the nursing home who are not eligible for Medicaid and then they have to kick them out, so they are just preempting the situation by refusing to admit them. Anybody who is a legal immigrant who needs nursing home care cannot get it, because of the fear that they will not be able to get reimbursed for their services, and already they have begun the tragic course of triage; throwing the elderly overboard. I just want to break in with a note of optimism, some good news. In the budget the agreement still calls for an increase in the funds for telecommunications and for revamping our schools, so the schools can make full use of the new educational technology efforts. Technology literacy will be promoted as never before, and schools will be all wired early in the next century. All that is very optimistic language, and I prefer to believe we can make that happen. In connection with that, there was a development which should help schools and students all over the country that took place yesterday. I want to pause from my review of some of the negative elements of this budget agreement to point out the fact that something amazing happened yesterday, and we should all take note of it. It helped the children in Brooklyn in the 11th Congressional District and everywhere else across America. That was an agreement reached by the FCC. The FCC voted to implement a mandate of Congress. When Congress passed the 1996 Telecommunications Act they mandated that the FCC should make provisions for the provision of discounted or free services to libraries and schools. The FCC acted on a subcommittee recommendation yesterday, and we are off and moving. It is a historic occasion. The Federal Communications Commission has adopted the joint board's recommendations for providing eligible schools and libraries discounts on the purchase of all commercially available telecommunications services, Internet access, and internal connections. Eligible schools and libraries will enjoy discount rates ranging from 20 to 90 percent, with the higher discounts being provided to the most disadvantaged schools and libraries and those in high-cost areas. Total expenditures for universal service support for schools and libraries is capped at $2.25 billion per year, with a rollover into the following years of funding authority, if necessary, for funds not dispersed in any one year. That means that $2.25 billion is available for schools and libraries, and those that are in the richest neighborhoods or the more affluent neighborhoods can get a discount of at least 20 percent off the telecommunications service. That includes telephone, by the way. Most schools in my district have only a few telephones, because telephones at present charge the business rate to schools. They cannot afford to have even enough telephones. There is already technology related to telephones which will allow a school to program their phones so every child who is absent and does not show up, the home of that child can be called off the program that is set up over the phone. But we do not have, in many cases, the adequate phones to do that. We do not have phones adequate enough for the teacher to make the trip to the phone and make the call, because there are not enough available. The teacher would have to stand in line, they would have to go downstairs, in many cases, and deal with lining up at the office, et cetera. Just more telephones would greatly improve the ability of our schools to function. But more than telephones are involved here. The internal connections, wiring of the schools inside, that can be part of the discounted cost. You can engage a contractor and the contractor can get paid from the funds from the telecommunications industry. In a poor school in an inner city the community, the neighborhood of Brownsville, parts of East Flatbush and parts of Bedford-Stuyvesant, they would be paying only 10 cents for every dollar's worth of services. A 90-percent discount would mean, and I hope I am not oversimplifying it, on your phone bill related to this process you would be paying only 10 cents for every dollar's worth of service. That is a great step forward. The high cost of wiring internally, the high cost of hooking up to the Internet and maintaining on-line services, all that will be discounted for the poorest schools down to the level of a 90-percent discount. This is not just for this year or next year, it is for eternity. Theoretically it goes on forever. That is a revolution. That is a monumental achievement, to have that kind of opportunity provided for the schools of America, and the libraries. Schools and libraries are all eligible; not just public school, private schools. Everything that falls in the category of providing an education to elementary and secondary education students is eligible. This is a great revolution. It is a revolutionary action, in my opinion. We did not hear any fireworks yesterday, there was no great celebration, only a few people announced it on the television news. McNeil/Lehrer did have a special discussion of it. But it is revolutionary. It is like the Morrill Act which established the land grant colleges in every State. The Morrill Act is unknown to most Americans. The Morrill Act is unknown. Morrill himself was a congressman who was unknown, but the Morrill Act established land grant colleges in every State in the United States. Every State has a land grant college now, and some of the great universities of America are those land grant colleges. It had an explosion of higher education over a short period of time, relatively. Morrill proposed it during the Civil War, when America was at its lowest ebb in terms of its attention being focused on education. It was proposed during the Civil War, and later on enacted after the Civil War and fully given appropriations, and it took off. Practical education was the emphasis. They copied the model of Thomas Jefferson at the University of Virginia, where practical education was the emphasis. Agricultural and mechanical colleges they were called at first, but they understood that they had to teach literature, English, et cetera. So everything the higher education institutions were responsible for, the land grant colleges became responsible for them, too. They just had an emphasis which was different. They emphasized practical education. The great experiments in agriculture that we have had in this country which put our agricultural industry way ahead of all other economies with respect to the ability to grow food and produce food at a cheaper cost resulted as a result of the Morrill Act. The Morrill Act created the colleges which set up the experimental stations. They created the colleges which established the county agents who went out to the farmers and got the farmers to make use of the theoretical knowledge that the universities had produced, a great revolution that most of us do not know about, but it was a government action. It was a government action with ramifications and results that continue to flow to the benefit of the American people. What was done yesterday by the FCC in my opinion will have the same kind of impact and effect. There was another government action when they decided the transcontinental railroad. Most people do not know, it was not private industry that built the railroads across America. Private industry has always run the railroads and private industry has always been up front, but the government made the contracts and the government offered the prizes to those companies that could build the railroads and link the east coast with the west coast. They came through mountains and swamps, and they did all kinds of things, but they were paid by the Congress. And Congress had a bonus. If you were going through difficult territory, mountainous terrain, Congress gave more money to the companies than they gave to those who were going across the plains. The great transcontinental railroad was a government project, and it unified the country in a way which, if we had not had the transcontinental railroad, the country would never have been unified. It made America America, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. That was a government action. The Morrill Act, the transcontinental railroad and then the GI bill following World War 2. The GI bill was another one of those governmental actions with revolutionary implications and impact on the American economy in terms of large numbers of men returning to the peacetime economy who got a chance to get an education and who boosted America's industrial might, technological know-how, carried us forward in ways that we never would have gone forward if those men had not had the opportunity to be educated in all walks of life. I meet lots of millionaires who got their start with the GI Bill of Rights. So governmental action. Yesterday the FCC took another governmental action which really has to be carried out mostly by private enterprise, but it started with the Congress. It was the Congress that mandated that you have to do this. The mandate to the FCC came from the Telecommunications Act of 1996, and the FCC has followed through on that. I am very optimistic about the impact of that, because the President of the United States knows the value of telecommunications on education. They have taken steps already. We have funds flowing already to the State education departments and down to the local education agencies to get ready for this technological revolution and take advantage of it. Any teacher will tell you that their presentation in the classroom can be greatly enhanced if they can use some of the material that comes via the Internet or if they can use videotape of a key moment or if they can use a CD ROM at a key moment. It can be greatly enhanced. We talk a lot about doing things in the area of education assistance, which gets down to the classroom. Here is one that really can get down to the classroom. One of the unfortunate things in New York City is that we did a survey several years ago and found that two-thirds of the teachers of math and science in the junior high schools had never majored in math and science. Things have not gotten any better since then, because New York City has had a great program of encouraging the most experienced teachers to retire. In order to save money, the teachers at the upper end of the pay scale had been encouraged to get out of the system. They have been given buyouts and all kinds of inducements. We have drained some of our best teachers away in the last 3 or 4 years. So the teaching of math and science certainly has not improved as a result of these buyouts and the people leaving the system. It is as bad as it was 3 or 4 years ago. One way to compensate for that is to have teachers who are not as experienced in teaching math and science, even some who did not major in math and science, have the benefit of the back up of some of the courses that they can get on the Internet or the courses that they can get via educational television or via videos. There are ways to supplement what happens in the classroom, as we try to get over this period of the scarcity of teachers in the classroom, particularly in inner city communities where there are other hardships and problems. Teachers continue to be in great shortage. The number of teachers who are substitute teachers in my district is far greater than the number of substitute teachers in most other school districts across the country, because they cannot find the teachers who are really qualified and meet all the requirements and can pass the State tests, et cetera. So what you end up with is people in the classrooms, but they are really not the best quality teachers. We keep imposing new curriculum requirements on the students. We insist that they must take tests, but we have not solved the problem of getting decent teachers. Finally the biggest problem we have not solved is the problem of physical space and equipment and supplies. It is the most basic problem. One would think that in the richest Nation that ever existed on the face of the earth every student, every citizen could be guaranteed that you can go to school in a safe environment, free of health hazards. That is a basic. That is a basic that we thought the President would help us with in terms of the construction initiatives, school construction initiative that was in the budget before the negotiators finished. Somehow mysteriously it got kicked out. The President's education initiatives are 80 percent intact after the budget negotiations. We have a lot of things to be happy and optimistic about, but the school construction initiative probably is the one that would have helped the poorest children in America the most. School construction initiative would have helped to guarantee that the revolution that took place yesterday, revolutionary decision with respect to telecommunications, becomes a reality in the inner city schools. There are inner city schools, there are schools in my district that will not be able to use the 90 percent discount for telecommunications, because the wiring in the school is such that they cannot be wired for modern telecommunications. There are some others where they can be wired. However, they have an asbestos problem. If you bore holes, you will find asbestos and the law says that you have to have a certified asbestos removal contractor there. And that is very costly, because we do not have any place in the city to store asbestos. They have to store it in expensive places. It becomes a big problem. We had NetDay in New York State in September 1996. And in New York City, which is half the population of New York State, very little happened with NetDay. NetDay is a day where you have volunteers come out, and they wire the schools for $500. They get a package which includes all the equipment they need, all the wiring. And they have enough equipment and wiring to wire the library of the school plus five classrooms. So a school is considered wired for NetDay if it wires its library plus five classrooms. In New York City we could not get even 5 of the 1,000 schools in New York wired in the way in which NetDay really dictates. They claim they wired some schools because they put a special telephone line in. We later found that they were calling that wiring of schools, and it was far removed from the kind of thing that NetDay should produce in terms of the wiring for telecommunications. An enhanced set of telephone lines was not enough. We had far too few schools in a city with 1,000 schools that were wiring for NetDay. As a result of being disappointed with the results of NetDay, during National Education Funding Day, which was October 23 of last year, the Central Brooklyn Martin Luther King Commission, which is my advisory committee for education, pledged to wire 10 schools in 10 weeks to overcome the problems experienced on NetDay. We picked our 10 schools and said we would wire them in 10 weeks. We had the assistance of a group called the Hussain Institute of Technology, a volunteer group that has set up a computer practicing center with about 20 computers, free instruction. And they have done wonders with helping people learn how to use computers on the Internet and those people who already knew how to use them have improved their skills so they could get promotions on their jobs and are going to better jobs somewhere else. The combination of the Hussain Institute of Technology, Martin Luther King Commission seeking to wire 10 schools in 10 weeks has run into all kinds of obstacles, mostly related to asbestos. And we have not wired a single school since October 23. It is now May 8. We have not completed a single school because the wiring cannot go forward until we solve the asbestos problem. We do not have the money to pay an asbestos contractor to come in. We wrote letters to the board of education, have been on television appealing for help. All kinds of things have happened. All we have gotten is a response from one asbestos contractor who wanted the publicity and said he would provide free service, but when we went to get the free service, he changed his mind. That kind of cynical playing with children resulted from publicizing our plight. One thousand schools are in New York City and we cannot wire 10. In my district there are 70 schools. Those schools, I only wanted to wire 10, and I cannot get even one wired as of today. We hope we will have a breakthrough soon. The breakthrough will come in the form of giving up on going into the walls, a technique where you wire by stringing the wire outside. It is ugly. It alters the way the building looks. It is another way you communicate to children that your school is not like the others, but it would get the job done. The proposal is to wire some schools by stringing the wire outside the walls in full view and, of course, the danger is they will be tampering with the wires, but we will go forward and try to get it done. But across the country in all of the inner city communities, you have the same kind of problems: old schools, asbestos problems. In New York City you have many schools that still have coal burning boilers, boilers that are burning coal. We recently had an announcement by the mayor, this is an election year in New York City, and the mayor, following the precedent set by the White House, is sort of doing what you call the continuing campaign, the continuing campaign as focused on education and schools. Because when the polls were taken, the one area that the mayor of New York City was clearly graded with an F was in the area of education. The mayor of the city had cut the school budget dramatically by almost a billion and a half dollars. The mayor had waged war on the previous school chancellor. We do not have a superintendent. We are so large we have a chancellor. The previous chancellor had a plan for renovating, building and repairing schools over a 7-year period. He produced a plan that would cost $7 billion, I think. And the mayor literally ran him out of town. He kept after him until finally the previous chancellor resigned, went out of town. Gave up. The building plan for construction, for renovation, for repairs that the previous superintendent, Mr. Ray Cortines, had prepared, is sitting there on the shelf and still needed because when schools opened last September, September 1996, there were 91,000 children in New York who did not have a place to sit, 91,000 who could not be safely seated. They say they have solved most of the problems now and when you go to investigate what is happening with the 91,000 that could not be seated, most schools will say, we have taken care of it. What they have done is they have put children in closets, hallways. They are even a few cases where bathrooms have been converted to classrooms. They say they have solved the problem and school is not overcrowded. But when you go and you ask the question, how many lunch periods do you have, the lunch period is an indicator that it is overcrowded, they cannot feed children within a reasonable period of time. You know they have too many. Some schools, most schools have three lunch periods, three lunch periods. Children start eating at 10:30. One school I found had five lunch periods. Children started eating lunch at 9:45. They say they are not overcrowded, but if they are forced to start children eating lunch at 9:45 in order to accommodate them, they are overcrowded. We have gotten so used to abominable conditions, conditions which are atrocities against children, until we take them for granted. It is quite all right to feed children lunch at 9:45. We are moving to try to get some kind of regulation installed or health department edict, something to stop feeding children at 9:45 or even at 10:30. It is bad enough, the period between 11:30 and 1:30, to have children, that is more reasonable, but to go to 9:45 for children who are in junior high school and say you have to eat lunch is child abuse. And it seems to me that something about the physiology of the child is greatly impaired if they are being forced to cram in lunch, and they just had breakfast. But the atrocities are great. Overcrowding and the lack of attention to facilities, the lack of money for construction over the years. They have been scrimping and refusing to put the money forward for construction. We have had to close down some buildings because they literally were really falling apart. Recently the mayor launched an offensive to prove that he really cares about schools, although he ran the chancellor out of town. He did not come forward with another plan. He is now saying he has a long-term plan for the renovation and repair of schools. Looking at an article that appeared in one of my favorite community papers, the Flatbush Courier Life, it has a very lengthy article describing what happened to the schools, what may happen to the schools in Brooklyn as a result of the mayor's election year initiative. They had $275 million. The mayor's long-term plan opens up with $275 million allocated to schools for the entire city. When we talk to people across the country about New York City schools, they always get bewildered because the figures are so great. We are talking about a thousand schools. We are talking about a million students. We are talking about 60,000 teachers. So I know one can get dizzy, and that $275 million seems like a lot of money to help renovate and repair schools. Brooklyn received 44 percent of the allocation, according to the Flatbush Courier Life; $121 million, again, looks like big money but it will only pay for 78 projects in 48 schools. Forty-eight elementary, intermediate and high schools in Brooklyn will get some of the money to pay for 78 projects within their schools. Now, remember, I have 70 elementary, intermediate and high schools in my district. I have 70. The Borough of Brooklyn has 2.5 million people. So we can see we would have many, many more. Only 48 of our schools will be able to get the assistance for 78 projects. In Brooklyn we still have more than 100 schools that have coal burning boilers. That should be a first priority, because coal burning boilers produce pollutants. We all know about that. We have the highest asthma rate of any large city in the country in New York City, and we wonder why we have a large asthma rate among children if they are sitting in schools which are burning coal. New York City is broken down into 32 different school districts. There is a chancellor and then 32 superintendents and one of the superintendents, John Comer, community superintendent of District 22, said, ``We were delighted to receive the preliminary plan which will only enhance our buildings for the children and professional staff. It was long overdue. Hopefully, we can get money every year to restore the buildings in this great city to what they once were. Money like this hasn't come in a long, long time.'' It is just a tiny amount for Brooklyn, $12.1 million. Everyone is singing the praises, but with this piecemeal approach we will fall further and further behind because these are buildings that are 100 years old. In many cases they need new roofs, new boilers, and on and on it goes. Mitch Wesson, another superintendent for district 21, a school in my Congressional District, ``stressed the importance of boiler replacement. He said about a third of the district's schools were still heated by coal.'' In his part of the district there is a concentration of these coal burning furnaces or boilers. ``We are looking forward to having our coal-fired buildings converted,'' he said. ``Obviously, we're pleased the work is being done. Our superintendent and school board pushed the issue. We hope these repairs are accelerated not just for three of our buildings, but for all of our buildings.'' Desperately everybody is hanging on to hope that the mayor's small beginning will become a reality. It will not be a reality unless we get some help from the Federal Government. It will not be a reality if the President continues to go along with the negotiation that has been reached. The school construction initiative is no longer on the table, and we are told it cannot be restored. The Congressional Black Caucus pledged that this will be our No. 1 priority. We will fight to get it back into the budget. The school construction initiative must go forward. And if people in certain parts of the country feel it is not needed, let us have an emergency school construction initiative in the inner city schools where these atrocities against children are being committed. Phyllis Gonon, superintendent of District 18, District 18 has a large number of schools in my Congressional District, he said ``Most of our schools need capital improvements. Most of our schools are falling apart. This building as well.'' The one she is in. ``The roof has leaked for 18 years.'' I repeat, the roof has leaked for 18 years. District 18 offices are located in the P.S. 279 Annex building, prospective repairs to which she is referring, that is the building where the roof has been leaking for 18 years. She added, ``We haven't been satisfied with the work that has been done on District 18's buildings in the past. Even where they're doing expansions, she continued, at P.S. 233, for instance, which isn't listed, the work has to be done over and over again.'' The buildings are so old. It would be better in some cases to tear them down and start all over again because the repairs do not hold. Eric Ward, community superintendent of District 17, District 17 has about 26,000 students, it is the largest one of the local districts in my Congressional District, it is wholly within my Congressional District, District 17's superintendent says, ``We are grateful for any capital improvement that occurs in the District. But for every one that has been approved, I have about five others that need to be done. New York City, Mr. Ward adds, has many historic buildings that are beautiful. The city needs to have in place a system for updating, renovating and repairing them. Until the city devises a systematic plan, they will be behind the eight ball.'' Now, Chancellor Cortinez had a systematic plan prepared. Mayor Giuliani has only discovered education is important in this election year. We are going to elect a new mayor in the fall of 1997 and suddenly education is on the agenda of the mayor. But even with city hall making it a priority, the amount of money we can see in comparison with the magnitude of the problem is far too small. David Gulob, who is a spokesman for the board of education, when he was questioned as to how did they select 48 schools out of a thousand-- 48 are in Brooklyn, I am sorry, but for the whole city the number will not be more than a 100. A hundred schools in the city at this rate would receive some kind of emergency help. How did they select them? It appears that there were two pieces to this selection process. Schools that had needs and had submitted those needs were considered because they were on record. And then the board of education sent the list over to city hall and to the city council and they made political decisions about which of the victims would be salvaged first. We are into a situation where it is so horrendous. The school construction problem, the problem of providing a safe and decent place for children to go to school is such that it has become a political football. The scarcity of the resources are such that they have to run it past the political process. There is no system where they have an objective list which says that the emergencies are greater here and they have some kind of prioritization of the emergency so that we get the worst situations first. No, it is run by the city council and the mayor, so that political decisions can be made in this great economy of scarcity. I want to close on a note of optimism. We welcome the revolutionary decision of the FCC to provide telecommunication services to all the schools and libraries in the country at a great discount rate, the discount rate being weighted so that the poorest areas will get the biggest discount. That can do a great deal for the children with the greatest needs. If they do not have, however, the complementary program of the school construction initiatives proposed by the President, many of the schools who have the greatest needs will not have the buildings in position to take advantage of this great revolutionary achievement of the government and the private sector. We hope that all Members will hear the common sense of the people out there and understand children need safe places to sit. The school construction initiative of the President must be supported by both parties as we go forward in a bipartisan quest to improve education in America.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, first I would like to applaud the fact that we have been discussing education now for more than 2 hours and that both parties have chosen to talk about education tonight. It is an indication of the kind of priority that we have set here in Washington on education, both parties. As I said earlier this afternoon, we are in a situation now where something wonderful is going to happen in the 105th Congress as a result of the bipartisan cooperation, which I think is very sincere and very real. We have a problem, however, that there are people holding on to the past, the recent past, the past of the 104th Congress. They really understand that there is a new environment for the discussion of education issues as a new political environment, and they discovered that political environment last year during the 104th Congress. The Contract With America made an onslaught on Federal participation in education. The Contract With America came forward and proposed to eliminate, eradicate, the Department of Education. They proposed to cut school lunches, they proposed to cut Head Start, they proposed to cut Title I. I do not want to dwell too much on that unfortunate, very uncomfortable situation of the 104th Congress, but it is important to set all discussion within the context of the great triumph accomplished by the common sense of the American people. The common sense of the voters triumphed over all of the proposals of the Republican majority for education, the proposals that would have rolled us backwards. They even proposed a total of cuts that would have amounted to about $4 billion at the beginning of the 104th Congress. The Republican majority made those proposals and moved that way; it shut down the government. Let us not forget that the government was shut down because the President and the White House refused to go along with drastic extreme proposals for cuts in areas like education. Let me just conclude this recapitulation of the 104th Congress by saying that I want to pay tribute to and give credit to those leaders in the Republican majority who decided to turn it all around. They did a 360 degree turn. They listened to the common sense being expressed by the American people. They listened to the voters. They listened. They watched the polls which showed that the American voters ranked education as a high priority, and they have consistently been doing so for some time. They listened and at the last minute, faced with the possibility that their negative positions on education might very much impact on their reelection possibilities, they did a 360 degree turnaround. I applaud the fact that they were not so ideologically entrenched, so philosophically dogmatic that they could not make the turn. Given the necessity of getting reelected, they decided to make the turn. I applaud the fact that the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Goodling], chairman of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, who is a former school principal, teacher, school superintendent, been around a long time, been on the Committee on Education and the Workforce for a long time, he was there with his insight, his experience, his wisdom. So when the turnaround took place, the chairman can tell them where to intelligently make the changes. The turnaround, which was a 360 degree turnaround, instead of cutting education by $4 billion, they increased education by $4 billion, and the gentleman from Pennsylvania [Mr. Goodling] helped to guide them in making those increases in Head Start, in title I, in Pell grants. You name it, the positive increases in education were made, and I applaud the majority for responding to the common sense of the American people. Given the fact that the common sense of the American people has been discovered as a reality politically, we can expect no one in any leadership position in either party, certainly not in the Republican Party which saw the folly of their ways, to openly be against improvements in public education. They would not openly attack the effort to improve education. What we can expect, though, and have to be prepared for, and it may very much slow down the effort, confuse the effort, is guerrilla warfare, ambushes, Trojan horses, people who pretend that they care about education coming into the walls, into the compound and sabotaging. People who say they care about education, but they think, or they propose that the Federal Government not get involved. Federal Government involvement is minuscule even at the height of involvement, even if we follow the President's proposals, and the President has made a extensive approach here. The President does propose that we not play around with education. Mr. Speaker, this is a call for action for American education of the 21st century. It covers education from early childhood to lifelong learning, right through graduate school, Pell grants, and undergraduate school. It is comprehensive. It talks about construction, it talks about standards in the classroom, telecommunications. It is a comprehensive approach. Certainly President Clinton has earned the title of education President merely for making proposals. It is for us, the Members of the legislature, the Members of Congress, the House and the Senate, to follow through on these proposals and not to sabotage them, not to confuse the situation with misinformation or disinformation such as some of which we have heard in the previous hour. There are people who say that we should not go forward with Federal involvement because the Federal Government has too many programs, seven hundred programs. Well, Mr. Speaker, I am in favor of streamlining and improving Federal involvement in education, but I will not take the irrational position that the number of programs is somehow a barometer of whether the programs are effective or efficient. If we did that, we would shut down half of the Defense Department. The Defense Department has far more than 700 programs or 700 weapons systems. If we look at the defense budget and really go through it, there is probably nothing in the world that in some manner is not in the defense budget, where they do not approach some problem of human concern in the defense budget. They approach reading and counseling, a whole lot of other things other than weapons systems. And then they have numerous weapons systems, which if we were into the fallacy of measuring effectiveness and efficiency by numbers, we would say shut down some of these weapons systems, because automatically to have too many is to have an ineffective defense. Mr. Speaker, that is an irrational approach. If we are going to streamline the way the Federal Government approaches education, let us not begin by making irrational proposals about the number is too great and therefore we should wage war on the numbers. What has happened with that irrational approach is that small has become evil and big has been too big to contain. So a lot of small programs that were very meaningful and very efficient and effective were cut out, and big programs were left, just because the size was so great that the people who wanted to wage war on a number of programs did not bother to touch them. Some small programs related to libraries, related to foreign language, literature and libraries, made a lot of sense. They had networks that cut across all the libraries of the country, and for a very tiny amount of money we were building up the inventory of books in foreign languages, which was significant. That was cut out, so small that it was deemed one of those programs, automatically, if they are that small and we have too many programs and numbers mean so much in view of education, then automatically let the small programs go. That is not a rational approach. I hope as we go forward in the spirit of bipartisan cooperation we will cease using these kinds of irrational barometers and measurements and that we be honest about, let us evaluate each program, let us evaluate each approach on the basis of what works. The previous speakers talked about what works, what really works. Let us take that criteria and talk about what really works. Mr. Speaker, we are going to have a hearing I understand next week in New York City, and the discussion is about what works. That committee will have a discussion of a program proposed by the mayor of New York City. Mayor Giuliani has gone out to get parochial and private schools to accept children from public schools as a result of the overcrowding in public schools that took place, that was highlighted. It has been there for some time, but it was highlighted last fall when we had 91,000 children in New York City who did not have a place to sit in school on opening day. To what degree that exists right now, I cannot tell you. We have been trying to find out. And there is a wall of obscurity that has been deliberately promulgated which prevents us from really knowing, have they solved the problem of overcrowding? Did they move children around to empty schools or schools that have less than capacity? How did they solve the problem of 91,000 children in school on opening day not having a place to sit? How did they solve the problem? We still do not know. What we do know is the mayor took the initiative and said, I will find places for 1,000 children in parochial and private schools; I will raise the money from private sources. So every day in the paper we have new articles about the 1,000 children, the fact that the corporations and the private sector have come forward and provided the tuition money, the fact that they have a lottery, the number of children that the parents have applied to put their children in the program, and the last count was close to 20,000. They have 1,000 slots. Close to 20,000 have applied, so they are going to have a computerized lottery system to select. All of this is very exciting, and I congratulate the mayor for doing something concrete about a problem. Mr. Speaker, we are going to help place 1,000 youngsters. The only question that we have to ask is, what happens to the other 90,000? There are 90,000 youngsters that we still have not placed. The 1,000, we hope that they will find secure places in the parochial and private schools. And we want to express our thanks to the private entrepreneurs and various people who put up the money to pay the tuition. We want to congratulate the parents who were lucky in the lottery; 1,000 out of 20,000, and the number may still be drawn. I do not know when the cutoff point was. In that lottery, though, we will have 19,000 losers. But we congratulate and bless and wish the best of luck to those 1,000 who do go forward. This is a good idea. Private industry, let us do more, let us place more children. Mr. Speaker, there are a few questions that we can ask to show that this is not the answer to the problem. New York City has 1 million students; 91,000 had no place to sit as of last September. How do we solve the problem? Do they have the capacity in the parochial schools to take all 90,000? I do not think so. Are we going to be able to raise the tuition for all 91,000? Is the private sector that generous? Are we going to get the money for 91,000? I do not think so. I do not think that is the solution to the problem. The solution to the problem lies in a plan to rebuild and renovate and build new schools in New York City, the kind of plan that was proposed by the previous chancellor of the New York City school system. We do not have a superintendent; because we are so big, we have a chancellor. The chancellor presides over 32 community school districts in New York City. The chancellor of the last system proposed a plan over, I think, 5 or 7 years to renovate, rebuild, build new schools. The present mayor ran him out of town, ridiculed him and made all kinds of roadblocks. So, the man with the plan to take care of the problem was run out of town. The solution now becomes, instead, placing children in private and parochial schools, and we are way behind if all we can do is place 1,000 of the 91,000. So we have to be careful. In the present atmosphere, everybody wants to jump on the bandwagon. The voters have spoken. Education is a priority issue. The voters have awakened and they want to say: Well, Mr. Speaker, we spent the money necessary for defense, we spent the money to contain the evil empire, billions and billions. We went from a horse and buggy Defense Department after World War I to a multibillion- dollar Defense Department before the end of the Cold War. We were spending money on a scale which is impossible almost for most voters to comprehend. Mr. Speaker, $3.5 billion for an aircraft is beyond the comprehension of most people; $2 billion for a submarine, beyond the comprehension. We take the cost of one submarine, and we can solve the problem of New York City for the next 20 years of buildings. We can do a great deal with $2 billion in terms of construction, renovation, taking care of asbestos problems in some schools, lead poisoning problems in some other schools, boilers that still burn coal. We have one-third of the city schools almost that still burn coal, polluting the environment and contributing to the high asthma rate in New York City. A large number of young people have asthma, larger than most big cities. So be careful, beware. The Trojan horses are within the walls. They say that they are in favor of improving education; they say that they want to support the effort to revitalize and guarantee that every young person in America has a decent school, but the old attitudes that existed in the 104th Congress are still underneath the surface. There is an underground movement. There are guerrilla actions, there are ambushes that are going to take place, and we have to beware. Let me just pause for a moment to talk about what it means to have a Nation committed to go forward in every way possible to improve our education system from the cradle to the grave. We are creating a learning society. Before these were kind of loose terms thrown around, but we are really creating a learning society. President Clinton talks about a learning society, a lifelong learning society, where you learn from the time you are a baby all the way to the time you die. This comprehensive approach dealing with adult literacy and adult education, the Call for Action for American Education, understands that that is the kind of society we want to create. As we go into the 21st century we ought to be able to spend less for defense and less for weapons systems, and spend more to guarantee that there is a maximum opportunity for every person in America to be all that they can be. That is a sentimental, hokey slogan, you say, from the Armed Forces' public relations campaign, but it is pretty good. I will accept it. Mr. Speaker, let us try to guarantee that the opportunity for every American will be there to be all that they can be, to strive for excellence in every way, starting with the kid who was in preschool, preschool age, through kindergarten, Head Start, right up to high school, college. Let us dedicate ourselves to the proposition that in this great country of ours, we are going to give every person an opportunity to be all they can be. One part of this process ought to be to let us glamourize education and excellence more. Let us give more credits and more incentives to our students to be champions in the arena of education, in the arena of academics. We have a few national contests, the Westinghouse Science Contest and a few other well-known contests that reach out and embrace a small group of youngsters. We need more. We need to have academics elevated to the level of sports, so young people fulfill themselves and attain some kind of recognition among their peers and among adults by participating in activities which improve their minds. A healthy body, of course, is a premium. We want to encourage healthy bodies. We still have a problem in America with people who do not exercise enough. We have a problem of obesity. Exhibition No. 1 is standing here. We do not want to denigrate sports, we do not want to denigrate physical activity, but we do want to exalt academic activity, intellectual activity. I am here to pay tribute to a project, one of these 700-some projects in Federal education that was talked about before. I want to pay tribute to that for exalting the academic achievements of students. It is called ``We the People * * * The Citizen and the Constitution.'' ``We the People * * * The Citizen and the Constitution'' is a national competition that is organized to encourage young people to learn more about our Constitution and our Government and how it works. This was initiated, by the way, during the celebration of the centennial; not the centennial, the 20th anniversary of the bicentennial--the 200th anniversary of the Constitution. It was one of the activities initiated. Now it is continued by the Center for Civic Education. The Center for Civic Education is part of the operation of one of our education centers funded by the Federal Government. I want to applaud them and congratulate them for this. They were not always involved. This started out as an ad hoc sort of thing just for the celebration of the Bicentennial. Now it has been institutionalized. I want to congratulate the Center for Civic Education for carrying it forward. They have now been doing this for quite a long time. I do not remember whether it is 10 years or more. Each year in each State, or first in each locality--I will use New York City as an example, New York City has a competition among the schools. Other areas of the State have competitions. The winners of those competitions go to some central place in the State and they compete for the State championship. This happens all over the country, in all 50 States. The State champions then are invited to Washington in the spring, and they compete among themselves for the national championship. The competition is all about who knows the Constitution, the Government, and its operations the best. What they do here, let me just read some background. The top high schools or the winners in the country come here and they participate in national finals on the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, and more than 1,250 outstanding high school students from 50 States came this spring. There were 50 States and the District of Columbia to participate. This has been going on for some time now. I think we have had the participation of something like 24 million students totally, at the local level as well as at the national level; in every locality, every State, they get a lot of participation. This year, of course, they came on April 25 and 26, and after 2 days of intense examination of their knowledge of the Constitution the field was reduced from 51 teams to 10 teams, the top 10 teams. The first two rounds of competitive hearings were held April 26 and 27, at the J.W. Marriott Hotel here in Washington, and the combined scores of each team determined the 10 teams to compete Monday in the championship round on Capitol Hill. They were right here a few days ago, Monday, in this Capitol, in the Rayburn Building, competing for the final championship, 10 different teams. In the competitions, students demonstrate their knowledge of the Constitution and Bill of Rights before simulated congressional committees composed of constitutional scholars, lawyers, journalists, and government leaders. Students compete as classes after completing a comprehensive course of study on the Constitution to qualify for the competition. The national finalists had won congressional district and State competitions in order to advance to this point. Then after the day's competition here on Capitol Hill they announced the winners last Monday night. I want to pay tribute to the winners of the contest. First I will pay tribute to the top 10 schools. This is the kind of activity that you will not get on television. The championship games are broadcast for college and at the local levels you have championship games broadcast for high schools and sports. Students who are good in sports always get attention. They get trophies, and there is a trophy case in every high school. We would like to replicate that and have academic and intellectual activities given the same status. So I take my hat off, and I want to congratulate the top 10 schools in America. Lincoln High School in Portland, OR was one of those top 10; East Kent High School from Kentwood, MI; Clara Barton High School from Brooklyn, NY, in my own district; East High School, from Denver, CO; Castle High School from Newburgh, IN; Maine South High School from Park Ridge, IL; East Brunswick High School from East Brunswick, NJ; Tahoma High School from Kent, WA; Arcadia High School from Arcadia, CA; and Our Lady of Lourdes Academy from Miami, FL. These are the top 10 schools in the competition on ``We the People * * * The Citizen and the Constitution,'' a competition designed to test the students' knowledge of both the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. So I salute all of the top 10, and I would like to pay additional tribute to the top four. The top winner was Our Lady of Lourdes Academy, Miami, FL. They came in first this year, first place. The second winner was Arcadia High School from Arcadia, CA. Congratulations, Arcadia. Congratulations, Our Lady of Lourdes. Then No. 3 was Tahoma High School of Kent, WA. Congratulations to Tahoma High School. No. 4 was Clara Barton High School of Brooklyn, NY, from the 11th Congressional District. I want to congratulate the members of the team from Clara Barton High School in my district in Brooklyn. My hat goes off to them. This is the second time they came in fourth in the contest. This is, I think, the sixth time that they have made it to the national finals as State champions, so something great is going on at Clara Barton High School. I want to congratulate the students who participated. This was one of the largest classes. The rules require that the participants in this contest be a whole class, and that the class be under the instructor, the coach, for the whole year. So it is a class in social studies or history or some related matter that comes as a class. What happened at Clara Barton High School this year is that because of their past reputation, because they had come and won fourth place before, because they had consistently won the State championships, the teacher, the coach who heads the class, was inundated with requests to get into his class. So we are talking about 40 students, one of the largest classes. It was the largest class to come to the contest, all 40 students. New York City has an overcrowded situation, but high school teachers do not have to take 40 students. Mr. Casey, Leo Casey, was the teacher, Dr. Leo Casey. He agreed to take 40 students because of the overwhelming demand to get into his class. These students have not been celebrated as sports heroes. They are not entertainment celebrities. But the tradition that has been established at Clara Barton High School is such that the winning tradition in the intellectual academic arena has led to students clamoring to get in. So Dr. Casey accepted 40 students, and those 40 students, that was the largest team here in Washington. I want to read the names of the students. I am going to take the time to do it because I think this is part of the process of creating an environment in America where education is exalted, where academic and intellectual activities are raised to a new level, our students are inspired and given incentives to strive for excellence. These are students who strive for excellence in the area of understanding the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. They are: Nicole Aljoe, Munira Basir, Letricia Bennett, Michelle Bennett, Katherine Bernard, Slahudin Bholai, Dafina Westbrook-Broady, Keusha Carrington, Shakira Chang, Calvin Coleman, Dean Douglas, Nirva Dube, Iesha Etheridge, Jonathan Ewars, Migdalia Feliberty, Sean Forde, Sharkara Godet, Oslen Grant, Moshesh Harris, Rochelin Herold, Christopher Hubbard, Sonia Hurble, Tiffany Jefferson, Generva John, Anthony Marin, Anisah Miley, Travis Moorer, Calistia Nanton, Franchelica Nunez, Damian O'Connor, Ayo Ogun, Emmanuel Onasile, Tamara Osbourne, Charlene Palmerm, Carolina Perez, Natalie Pierre, Raquel Rivera, Tanisha Simpson, Camille Sinclair, Vysaisha Singh, Vijay Sookedo, Sharon St. Hill, Karrien Stone, Naquida Taylor, and Andrea Telford. These are all students, and I think the Members might have surmised from reading the names that they come from very diverse backgrounds. It was the most diverse team to appear at the national contest. I might point out that in the 11th Congressional District, my congressional district, when the census was taken in 1990, 150,000 people listed themselves as being noncitizens, 150,000 out of a total 582,000. So I have one of the highest noncitizen populations of all the congressional districts. The 150,000 came forward and indicated they were not citizens, so they were legal immigrants. I assure the Members, the illegal immigrants did not come forward. So we have 150,000 of the 1990 legal immigrants. The diversity of my district is reflected in the names of these children. My district has Cambodians, there are Chinese, there are Pakistani, there are a whole array of people from all of the islands of the Caribbean; we have Haitians. It is a wonderful mixture, a rainbow mixture of America in my district. Generally, Mr. Speaker, there is an income level that is lower than average. Not all of these children are poor, but the great majority come from low-income homes who go to Clara Barton High School. I want to congratulate them on their magnificent achievement. I want to congratulate Mrs. Florence Smith, a former high school teacher, who served as the volunteer coordinator for my office. The 11th Congressional District coordinator is Florence Smith. By the way, she resigned, retired from school one year, and the next year she became the coordinator for my 11th Congressional District, and she has been there since then; about 8 years with Florence Smith, who does not receive a penny for her services. If Members want to talk about volunteer services in harmony with the great conference that was held in Philadelphia this past weekend, here is an example of the kind of volunteers that we have in America. People who retire and who, in some cases, spend more time in activities after retirement than they did when they were working. Congratulations to all the people who made it happen. In my congressional district, the Clara Barton High School team is sponsored not only by my office but by the Central Brooklyn Martin Luther King Commission. In fact, the money that was raised to first send this team to the capital at Albany was gathered by the Central Brooklyn Martin Luther King Commission. Money that has been raised in the past years before the funding level went up nationally to get them to Washington, the great sponsor and mentors of the Clara Barton High School team have been the members of the Central Brooklyn Martin Luther King commission. We have some other organizations that have also become sponsors. Children's Times is a publication on education. Thomas Jones and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. Jones, have been very instrumental in encouraging the young people at Clara Barton High School and in raising money to make certain that they were able to go to Albany and come to Washington. So it is a kind of growing group activity. They still have difficulties raising funds to get to Washington. I want to call on the bar associations of Brooklyn, the bar associations of Manhattan and New York, and all the lawyers who know what the Constitution is all about, judges' organizations, I would like to call on you. Some judges come to practice with the youngsters. They come to my office on a Saturday morning about twice a year just before the contest and judges come and sit with them, go through the process and coach them in terms of how they handle tricky questions in the legal system related to the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. So it is a group enterprise of great magnitude. I congratulate the winners, the champions from Clara Barton High School in Brooklyn. It is one of those activities that we should see more of. The old- fashioned spelling bees and the science fairs and a number of incentives to have children participate more in academic activities which develop their minds is an absolute necessity and must go forward. Again, this is one of those 700-some Federal programs that have been ridiculed by the previous discussion. The Center for Civic Education does a great job. And I would not want it to arbitrarily be denied funding because it happens to be one of many programs. That is an irrational approach. That is an approach taken by people who really have not quite come around 100 percent to the understanding of the need for education to become America's No. 1 priority. Our national security is all tied up with what we do with education. Our national security, certainly defense and our defense posture and our military services still have a great deal to do with national security. I am not denigrating that, but in a world which is more and more an economically competitive world, in a world where there is great competition for ideas, our No. 1 resource are our people and the education of those people must be our No. 1 agenda. I congratulate the American voters. The American people understand that. They understood it long before the Members of Congress were willing to admit it, but now the Members of Congress have been forced by the insistence of the electorate to admit that education must be our No. 1 priority. Political necessity has dictated it. What we have to worry about now is a people who are not sincere who, because of political necessity, they give lip service to their support for education. We have to worry about the Potemkin village effect. Does anybody know what a Potemkin village is? There was a general named Potemkin in Russia who took Catherine the Great, who was his empress, on a tour to show her how magnificent a village that he was in charge of was; and in that village they had fronts. The houses were beautiful, but they had nothing behind them. They were all linked together. So Catherine the Great could not see behind them. And Potemkin's village was a beautiful village, but it was nothing but facades. The danger is that there are some people that would want us to go to the American people with a Potemkin village in terms of educational improvement. They are satisfied to just get the headlines, make it appear that we have gone forward, but really not do the job. It is a big job that we face. It is a big undertaking. And unless you are willing to follow the leadership of the President and take a comprehensive approach, comprehensive, a call for action for American education, this is a comprehensive approach. It starts with preschool education. It goes to Head Start. Preschool education and Head Start have been given a great intellectual and philosophical boost by the recent conference that was held at the White House on early childhood education and learning. Several magazines have run some articles on the brain of young children, how the brain develops. It seems now that there are no detractors. And nobody opposes, nobody questions the theory now that the brain of a young child is the most valuable thing on Earth. It has potential that has seldom been tapped. They can learn so much more than we teach them. They can be developed in so many more constructive ways than we know. We should focus maximum attention on what happens to young children. The brain is affected by how often they are squeezed, by how often they are cuddled. The brain is affected. The brain is affected by whether they are yelled at or whispered to. The brain is affected by the number of times their cries do not get a response. The brain is affected by the way you hold their hands and encourage them to grip the hand. It is affected by the way you move to help their eyesight develop. These are things that all the scientists agree on that great things happen to the brain just by the proper nurturing. Recently we had scientists that affirm that this is happening positively. Recently we had several studies that show what happens if it is negative, if you do not take care of children when they are very young, what the results are. The Romanian children that came from the Romanian orphanages have been cited several times in several studies from some of the Soviet and other Middle Eastern orphans. People saw these beautiful little children who had no mothers and fathers. They were being kept in pens and being thrown into big rooms where the adults only came around to feed them. And they were physically beautiful children and needing some help and attention in the hearts of many American parents who did not have children, and some who had children, who wanted to help so they added some of these children. They have gone and adopted children. We had a heart-breaking example on television, I think, last night a news story about a family that adopted two Russian youngsters, fraternal twins, and what that family went through as a result of the damage that those young people had already suffered. You could not reverse it. Their brains had been affected in ways that could not be changed. So they are very anti-social. They have been ignored so long until they can form no attachments to human beings. They really are very suspicious, very hostile. They have things that they do that are incomprehensible. The mother and the father tried for a long time. The father then died from pancreatic cancer, and now the mother just is overwhelmed. She cannot get help anywhere. She tried to place them in a residential school and found that the school saw them as being too difficult, they could not keep them. It is not that she is not trying as hard as possible. It is an almost impossible task to raise such children in a normal situation, because the scientists have confirmed that your brain actually atrophies, it gets smaller, it dries up as a result of in childhood not being treated a certain way. They have a study where they took some of these children from Romania, mainly Romanian, there is a thorough study done on the Romanian children, they took them through CAT scans and these various devices that can actually look at the brain and they showed the diagrams on television where the brain had shrunk and where it was irreversible. Certain parts of the brain shrinks, they cannot respond normally. They are damaged children. On the other hand, there is a percentage that, no matter what happened to them, they survive, a small percentage. You might say the old argument that people often make, well, I went through poverty, I went through despair, but I came out all right. A certain percentage of the human race can be classified as almost super people; and no matter what group you are looking at, a certain percentage is going to overcome whatever conditions you put in front of them, a small percentage. The overwhelming number of people respond to stimuli, and the brain is affected. So that nation which understands the importance of handling its young people with the maximum amount of nurturing and care; that is, the nation which first commits the most resources to young people, will certainly be in a position to not only save a lot of money later on in terms of the social dislocations that people who are damaged perpetuate, but in terms of the benefits of alive minds capable of learning, alive minds that have been expanded and they can absorb new information and new changes in technology very rapidly. If you treat the minds of the young people a certain way, they have those kinds of minds and they have the mental and emotional attitudes, which are also constructive. Because people have always responded to them in a positive way, they respond to other people in a positive way. Their ability to work on teams, their ability to work and relate to their peers, all of this is affected. We have concrete, scientific evidence which documents this. More important than genetic, the old debate of inheritance versus conditioning, environment versus the inheritance, that old debate can be put to rest. The inheritance does count. The genes you get do set up possibilities. The greatest problem is in the way those genes are handled in the early years of life. You can take some weak genes and improve on them, actually, if children are nurtured a certain way and treated in a certain way. You can take some beautiful genes, strongest genes, and you can destroy them. They will atrophy, they will shrink, dry up in terms of the brain, and you will have a set of behaviors that has nothing to do with the genetics that they inherit, the condition is there. So what we put into Head Start, the dollars we spent for Head Start are the dollars we could get the greatest benefit from. If Head Start programs are going to degenerate and if we are going to put them on tight funding and say, yes, we subscribe to the principle that early childhood education ought to be supported, but we will not appropriate money so you can really have teachers who know, child-care specialists who know how to handle children and you just put them out there and you get welfare recipients, as has been proposed in some cities, you take people who are on welfare and you force them to go to work in child- care centers. Nothing could be worse than to have a person taking care of children who does not want to take care of them. Nothing could be worse than to have a person taking care of children who will be hostile to them because they feel they are being forced to do something they do not want to do. So do not put people who are on welfare to work in child-care centers unless they want to go and receive training as to how to raise children, unless they are mothers already that have gone through the process already and understand how to nurture the children. And do not do it in a happenstance way so that maybe they know it, maybe they do not. It pays to screen the people who are taking care of children in day- care offices and Head Start, anywhere else. Let us not try to solve our welfare jobs problem by using children as unfortunate guinea pigs. That is one lesson we ought to learn. Education funding for early childhood, education for Head Start should be adequate funding. What is adequate funding? You can determine whether or not the ingredients are there by looking at the situation and setting up a set of rules that either the place is safe or it is not safe. The day-care center or the Head Start center, either the place is conducive to learning, with enough light, enough air, or it is not. There are standards that can determine what is adequate. When it comes to personnel, you can determine whether the person has experience, training and they are able to deal with the job that they are assigned to do with respect to children. The dietician in the kitchen, they can determine whether they really know what they are doing, are they going to put too much salt in the food. All these things are doable. We can do them, but we have to have adequate funding to guarantee that they get done. What I am saying is that the Potemkin village approach to say we are for education, we are for early childhood education, but say what is too much money, Head Start should not spend too much money, what is so much money? Let us determine what is adequate. Which brings me to my final discussion for today. If you have bipartisan cooperation here in the House and they really want to go forward to improve education in America, then there is a set of standards which must be reexamined. I invite the voters, the citizens who are listening, to apply their common sense. I spoke to a group in Cleveland called PS-21, a group of people who are dedicated to the proposition they want to have the most improved schools in University Heights, Cleveland Heights, they want to have the best possible schools. One of the ways that they are trying to accomplish this is to make sure that local citizens, leaders, teachers, people concerned about education and parents have a maximum discussion of what it takes to make good schools. A series of forums that they have had last year and this year, they are going to go all the way to the year 2000 because they are getting ready, they are remolding their schools to be the best possible schools as they go into the 21 century. So that is why they call it PS 21. We had a good discussion, and I talked to them about the micro level, at the citizens level, out there in the schools, the PTA's, people on the firing line, teachers. We have to have this kind of dialoguing to make certain we get the maximum benefits from what is happening at the macro level. The macro level is what President Clinton is proposing. The macro level are Federal programs. Macro level is what Congress will do when it acts on President Clinton's proposal. The macro level involves such things as the vote that is going to be taken next week on the discount to schools for telecommunications services. The Federal Communications Commission acting on a mandate given to them by Congress will vote on a proposal to provide telecommunications services to schools and libraries across the country at a discount rate of between 20 percent and 90 percent. The poorest schools will get up to 90 percent discount on telecommunications services, and any school in the merit system will get at least a 20 percent discount on telecommunications services. And by telecommunication services, I mean a whole range of things, including telephones. Most of our schools in New York do not have but a few telephones because they are charged the business rate for telephones. If telephones are put into this universal fund for telecommunications that is now going to be voted on by the FCC, then we will at least have more telephones in schools. But online services for computers, computer hardware, the wiring of the school, all of these things can be paid for at this discount rate that the telecommunications industries will have to pay for. They have a fund called a universal fund that the money goes into, and at this point it is a $2.5 billion fund per year, $2.5 billion per year indefinitely. It is not a short-term proposition. So this is a macro activity we ought to all understand, to relate to this macro activity. At the local level you have to have schools that can be wired. If a school has an asbestos problem in New York, you cannot even get to the first step and take advantage of the universal fund that is going to be established by the Federal Communications Commission. We had Net Day across the country, various States, localities. We have Net Day. We had another Net Day episode in New York last week, and on Net Day volunteers go to help wire schools. For Net Day, the standard is that you should wire five classrooms and the school library, and you have completed a Net Day responsibility. Well, Net Day in New York has been a gross failure. You have 1,000 schools and only a handful have been wired because the asbestos problem is there. You cannot bore holes and confront the fact that there is asbestos that must be taken care of. So at the micro level, unless we find a way to solve the problem of asbestos, we will not be able to take advantage of the macro programs. We will not be able to get part of that universal fund. The President has proposed and we have in effect the literacy challenge fund. We have the technology learning grant program. These are already under way. We cannot take advantage of those in the schools that do not have the iniative to deal with the local problems that allow them to link up with these problems. That is why it becomes so important to deal with construction before you deal with anything else. They cannot go into the 21st century and take advantage of the educational technology that is being developed. Computerized learning, videos, all kinds of things are being developed to supplement the teacher in the classroom. There is no substitute for the teacher in the classroom, by the way. Recent studies have shown that no matter what you do, the quality of the teacher in the classroom determines whether or not children will get an adequate education or superior education. So the quality of the teacher we have to take as one of the constants. But around that they can have their performance enhanced. Teachers can do so much better no matter what kind of teacher they are if they have enhancement and can use the Internet, the videos, the educational television, computerized learning. All that is available and we should make a maximum opportunity to use it. Mr. Speaker, we need what we call opportunity-to-learn standards in our great discussion of how to improve education in America. We need to focus on opportunity-to-learn standards. We know about the standards for curriculums. The President has pushed that and I agree with curriculum standards. We know about testing standards where we are going to have tests that are similar enough from one State to another to be able to compare the performance of States, schools within States and performance of States with each other, and have some idea of what is happening in America overall with respect to adequate and excellent education. What the set of standards that we have not agreed on, we did agree on, and it was reversed. And the great horror story of the 104th Congress, they turned around everything except one, in one area they went backwards at a rapid rate. We had opportunity-to-learn standards written into the legislation. The Goals 2000 Educate America Act had three sets of standards. They are the curriculum standards. They had the testing standards. And through a long debate, we members of the Education Committee had gotten the opportunity-to-learn standards. Opportunity-to-learn standards are exactly what they say. If you are going to have a curriculum that is a great curriculum, if you are going to have testing, you are testing the children to see if they measure up and can learn that curriculum, one thing else has to happen. You have to have a guarantee that the students have an opportunity to learn by seeing to it that they have the right books so that they can measure up to the standards, pass tests, guarantee that they have a safe place to study, a safe place to learn. That is part of the opportunity to learn. Guarantee that they have qualified teachers, people who know what they are doing. At one point we had a survey in New York City and found that two-thirds of the teachers who were teaching math and science in public schools in New York City had not majored in math and science in college. In junior high school, if you have teachers teaching math and science who did not major in science in college, you have a problem. Opportunity-to-learn standards would say that the standard is that no State, no locality should permit a situation where children do not have an opportunity to learn because the teachers are not qualified. Opportunity to learn means that, if you are going to teach science, the school ought to have a science laboratory. It means that the science laboratory ought to have adequate supplies. Opportunity to learn means that you have books in the library which enhance the textbooks which are not 30 years old. We have a problem with history books, social studies books being 30 years old in some of the libraries in New York City. So opportunity to learn and the agreement to accept opportunity-to-learn standards is one of those barometers by which we can measure whether people are sincere about improving education in America. One of those barometers to flesh out the Trojan horses and the underground operatives and the people trying to ambush the effort is to ask them, how do you feel about opportunity to learn? One of the first tests of opportunity-to-learn standards is, will you support the President's construction initiatives because at least every child should be in a building that is safe, in a building that is warm. In a building that does not burn coal and put pollutants in the air for children to breathe to get contaminated with all kinds of harmful substances. A building that is safe, a building that has decent lighting, a building that has decent ventilation, a building that is adequate so that you do not have what is happening in New York City. Again, schools will tell you because the board of education and the bureaucrats have told them that they do not have an overcrowding problem. We had a little test, the Central Brooklyn Martin Luther King Commission, which is my advisory committee on education, they sent people to school to see if they have solved their overcrowding problem. Principals said, we have no problem, slightly over capacity. They were lying. The next question I told them to ask was, how many lunch periods do you have? How many lunch periods do you have? That is a telltale sign of an overcrowded school. We have numerous schools that have three lunch periods. Children start eating at 10:30. They do not stop until 2:30. We have discovered one school that has five lunch periods. I said, if you have five lunch periods, when does the first group eat lunch? At 9:45. Is it not child abuse to make a child eat lunch at 9:45? Is there not something wrong nutritionally, physiologically with making a child eat lunch at 9:45 in the morning? The principal who told me this has been living with it so long she was not embarrassed. She said, we let them have a snack later on if they get hungry. The last group that eats, we let them have a snack in the morning because they get hungry before we finally get to them. Five lunch periods, from 9:45 up to nearly 2, they are eating in relay teams. It is overcrowded. The capacity has been exceeded. You should not do that to children. No matter what they do to lie about the statistics and tell us, once we asked the question, how many lunch periods do you have, we have a telltale sign it is overcrowded. We can go around and see with our own eyes that children have classes in storerooms, sometimes in the hallway, two or three classes are in the auditorium. We can see that the overcrowding is there, even when the bureaucrats do not admit it. We still have the problem, 91,000 children did not have a seat in New York City when school started last fall, and large numbers still do not have seats and nobody is willing to admit it. So opportunity to learn means that the construction initiative of President Clinton should go forward because at schools like the schools in New York and the schools in numerous other cities that are overcrowded, that do have unsafe environments, lead poisoning, asbestos, all kinds of problems which affect the health of children. Those schools are transformed into the best schools that America can make. The President is only proposing a small program that will set off the process, stimulate the State to put in money, stimulate the localities to spend money. And we must understand that. The great emergency for opportunity to learn is the construction of school buildings in our inner cities. The $5 billion fund that the President is proposing should be given. The first proportion that they are proposing, up to 50 percent, I understand there were a lot of objections from Members of Congress. Members of Congress, I plead to them to open their eyes and look at the evidence. The greatest problem is now in the inner-city communities. Children do not have an opportunity to learn because they are denied the basics of a decent place to sit, a safe place to sit, and a place free of toxic substances and a place which is ventilated properly and lighted properly. It is that basic. Opportunity to learn means much more. But let us at least start with the President's construction initiative. We will follow through. The President is proposing training for teachers, suppliers. The President is proposing a number of items that become very important. The incentive of having young people in elementary, secondary schools know that they can go to college, if they apply themselves to their studies in elementary and secondary school, that is also important. It is a continuum from early childhood, from the cradle and how you handle a baby when you pick them up and nuture them all the way to lifelong learning of retired people who can still contribute to the society by volunteering, by helping to mentor, by trying to improve our society in a number of ways. In the process, we should also make certain that we build into our popular culture, build into our popular culture incentives that glamorize academic activities, that glamorize intellectual activities. I will close by saluting the Clara Barton High School championship team from my district for their performance in the contest to show their knowledge of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. I congratulate all the schools and all the youngsters across America who are champions in the area of intellectual and academic activities.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. I, too, want to commend the gentleman for this special order on education, Mr. Speaker. I have been listening and heard us cover a lot of territory, as is the case with the President's comprehensive program, this little booklet that came out, ``A Call to Action for American Education,'' which ranges all the way from early childhood education to higher education and lifelong learning. That is as it should be. I have served on the Committee on Education, and the name has changed lately, but it has been the education committee, basically, for the 15 years that I have been here. This is a time for great rejoicing among people who care about education, and that includes the overwhelming majority of Americans. Most Americans care about education. Most Americans, every adult American, thinks he or she is an expert on education, too. That is part of the problem and also part of the strength of trying to bring about improvement in our schools. Everybody cares, and I think we ought to hunker down and understand that we have a President that is ready to take a comprehensive approach, he is ready to cover the whole spectrum, and that in covering that spectrum, he has made a quite a number of commitments. I think when we add up the commitments over the next 5 years, we are talking about $50 billion at a time when everybody is afraid of being accused of being a tax-and-spend liberal. The commitment is there for education because it is absolutely necessary. I commend the President and I commend everybody involved. I am very optimistic about the bipartisan spirit that is available to help push this education agenda. I think it is real. I think that both Republicans and Democrats want to see education improved in some significant way as we go into the 21st century. I just want to take this opportunity to talk about one piece of this comprehensive approach. It is a piece that is bound to generate a considerable amount of controversy. It is a large amount of money. It involves expenditure for public works. And already I fear that we have some divisiveness setting in, even among Democrats, and disagreement on the construction part of the package. Construction a lot of people feel should be left up to the States and the local areas and the Federal Government should not even get involved. But I am here to tell you, we have a real emergency. In our big cities, we have a great emergency with respect to the basics of providing a safe place, a conducive place for young people to study, a safe and conducive environment for study. That ought to be the first and most basic thing that we are concerned with, just to have them have a place to sit with decent lighting, with enough comfort to be able to concentrate on their studies, with no fear of asbestos contamination, no fear of lead poisoning. It is amazing how old some of our schools are in the big cities. This is a plea for the construction component. It is a plea for us to be very broad-minded and understand that a proposal for $5 billion at the Federal level, with the hope that it will stimulate additional money at the State and the local level, is not an extreme proposal at all. Let me just give an example of New York City, which many people will say, well, New York City should take care of its own needs. But that has not been the case. And why penalize children. We had a bond initiative that passed, I am happy to report, on the environment. And in that initiative it talked about providing money to rehabilitate some schools' boilers in New York, boilers that were still using coal, were still burning coal in a city that has one of the highest asthma rates in the country. The asthma rate, number of children with asthma, is a scandal. Coal burning in schools is not the only contributor. There are other factors. But that is one we should eliminate. Now I am a public official in New York, and I thought, great, this bond issue talks about putting gas burning boilers in 39 schools to eliminate the coal burning boilers; and I thought, well, that is wonderful and that solved the problem. In a little more digging, I found we do not have 39 schools that have coal burners, we have 200 and some schools, almost 300 schools that still have coal burners. I know when we start throwing statistics, people outside of New York get dizzy. We have approximately 1,000 schools. One-third of those schools are still burning coal, one-third. That is a shock to me. So I am sure it is hard to understand when you get outside of New York that New York City has one-third of its schools still burning coal. We have schools that have asbestos problems to the point where we cannot wire the schools. If you start boring holes, the costs go up astronomically because when asbestos is present, you have to have a certified contractor, you have to have a place for that contractor to store the asbestos, and it is very costly to transport it and store it and we run into all kinds of problems with our net day because of the physical condition of the schools. We need a massive program to renovate churches and schools to make them safe. We need a program just to build new schools because some are so old that you cannot do anything with them. It is more efficient to just tear the schools down and build new schools. Now this is the big city of New York that has this problem. I am here to talk about it. I assure you it does not take much imagination to know that Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, the problem exists in most of our big city districts. Large numbers of young people, we have a million students in New York City, and as of last September, 91,000 of those students did not have a place to sit. So I thank the gentleman and I just wanted to highlight, we are moving into the process now where we are going to talk in detail about this comprehensive agenda of the President. Construction is on the agenda. I understand certain proposals have been made that a certain percentage of the money go to inner city districts. Some people are worried about too much going into inner city districts. It cannot be too much. The problem is grave. The problem is an emergency. If we are going to do anything about young children, the first thing we should do is think about safe places that are conducive to learning. Physical facilities are basic, and I hope they get a lot of support from the President's construction program in his comprehensive education program.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. The Fair Labor Standards Act, that is how the weekend came.

Mr. OWENS. We had a capitalism that worked for both the owners and the managers and the corporations and the workers. We had a capitalism that worked. Common sense will tell us that the present measures that are being undertaken, the abuses by the corporate powers, are going to destroy that capitalism. I think one appeal we can make to the American people and the American voters is to say enough is enough. We will put some chains on the abilities of corporations to dictate how our economy is run. We need to begin right away to make the necessary laws, to stop the tremendous abuse of power that is taking place. We need to exercise common sense and say we will not take conditions like the present post office is about to negotiate for a single source for the postal uniforms. We should say to the post office, ``No, we demand those uniforms be made in this country. Do not go all over the world for these things.'' The policeman, the post office man, whatever uniforms are being made, we should demand that they be made in this country. There are a lot of other common sense arrangements that we should start demanding now before we move to try to repeal NAFTA and GATT and some of these other laws. We must wake up because the hour is quite late.

Mr. OWENS. That was the basic principle that ought to be the bedrock of American capitalism, and they are throwing it away because we are not producing workers that can buy the products any more.

Mr. OWENS. The Japanese CEO's, the German CEO's, and other CEO's around the world are not earning those kinds of salaries.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, the gentleman from Vermont [Mr. Sanders] was implying before that the challenge to us is to stop them from making products in other countries with the cheapest possible labor and then bringing them back here to sell them duty free. That option is gone already. NAFTA is like the international law. GATT is international law. You cannot stop them anymore from bringing those products back. We will be violating the treaties that we have already agreed to.

Mr. OWENS. And if we had some tax laws with the people who are making the profits, instead of the present situation where individuals and families are paying 44 percent of the income tax in this country while corporations are paying a little more than 11 percent, there are a lot of things we could do to help to begin to bring some sense back into American capitalism. It was capitalism that worked before. It worked. Henry Ford recognized it when he said, ``I really need these people to make more money to buy my cars.''

Mr. OWENS. Every new NAFTA, every new GATT adds to that corporate power. It allows them to make higher and higher profits, 59 percent since 1993. That is light stuff compared to what is going on now, I am sure, in terms of the stock market still booming. They get more and more wealth to use to oppress the people who are, the overwhelming majority in America who do not have a voice. Like the gentleman said, they own the media. They snuff out open society. They snuff out the checks and balances. And they are going to snuff out the consumer, the consumer market that is the driving engine for capitalism. As Soros puts it, they are going to destroy themselves if there is no check and balance on them.

Mr. OWENS. And consumer spending is still two-thirds of our economy. We are going to wipe out consumer spending.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, I think that is very much on track. That process is being endangered now. If you wipe out the ability to organize and you wipe out unions, who have the resources and the know- how to organize, then you are going to shut off that whole process. There is an article in the February issue of Atlantic Monthly by a very successful capitalist named George Soros where he is saying capitalism is out of control and capitalism is going to destroy itself because there is so much great abuse of power. It is going to end the open society, what I call the society of checks and balances. Institutions like organized labor become a check on the power of corporations. Corporations are running rampant over everybody so the process of being able to organize is going to be wiped out.

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, as the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, I want to go beyond what has been said here so far and say that what we have in motion here is that NAFTA has been giving an incentive to the corporate powers to wipe out the American work force as we know it. American labor shall not exist in 10 years as we know it if they are able to continue as they are moving. The incentive to make more and more profits on the backs of cheap labor has led to a situation where it has been concluded by corporate power that they have to wipe out the American labor movement. Working conditions and environmental conditions are just as important as wages in these considerations with respect to cheap labor costs, and they want a situation where they are in a position to dictate not only the low wages, but also the working conditions and to be free of any environmental regulations. As the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Workforce Protections, what I have noticed is that all of the talk in this particular session of Congress about bipartisan cooperation and civility does not apply to anything related to organized labor. We have seen an assault start in this Congress on labor, unprecedented. Several hearings have been held on the right of labor unions to use their money for political education, and they have gone out to where it hurts a great deal in terms of how they can spend their own funds and they are challenging their ability to make decisions as a majority, that if one member of any union objects to his money being used some way, his money should be segregated from the rest and the majority rules as to how funds are spent cannot apply. That is one way to cripple unions. Another way is, of course, to come after the Fair Labor Standards Act. A lot of people think that the comp time bill is related to families, giving people an opportunity to have time off, but the comp time bill is all about the Fair Labor Standards Act as a major weapon of labor. If you get into the heart and soul of the Fair Labor Standards Act, you have to cripple unions. OSHA continues to be under attack. We just had a hearing on methylene chloride, a substance which causes cancer, causes pneumonia. Clearly every study has shown it to be more dangerous than they previously understood it to be, and OSHA regulations after 10 years are being resisted, and they will take the business of methylene chloride, all the businesses that need it will take it overseas. Airplanes, for example, have to use it in order to take the paint off when they check the body of airplanes to see if they are still sound and that is probably the largest use of methylene chloride. It is a huge business. They are threatening to take it to places overseas if we have the regulations installed by OSHA, just as they are threatening, of course, on any other environmental condition we set which safeguards the health of workers. So we have an attempt by corporate power to create a new class of workers, something between servants and peasants, in order to maximize their profits. They will come back and they will bring the jobs back once they do that. But NAFTA, GATT, allows them to make huge profits and use the cheapest labor in the world to make those profits and acquire the power necessary to destroy the labor force and the organized labor in this country.

Mr. OWENS

Mr. OWENS. Mr. Speaker, a few weeks ago we paid tribute to our recently deceased colleague, Representative Charlie Hayes. I spoke at that time about Charlie's congressional history. He was not merely an advocate for workers and organized labor; Charlie was a worker who rose through the ranks to become a powerful union leader. As a young organizer he placed his life on the line many times. As a Congressman Charlie gave his soul and his voice to the cause of working families in every possible way. His booming voice on the floor of the House was more than merely symbolic. Charlie Hayes' call for ``Regular Order'' was also a call for justice for workers. Regular Order! Regular Order Is loudly proclaimed Within heaven's sacred border Charlie Hayes has gone home Not even the highest celestial dome Can smother his big bold voice No choice is left for management Charlie will organize the angels A new prize will be the union shop By order of the Boss on Top Charlie's work will be certified Recognition granted to all who died In the hell of the sweatshop world To honor our tough holy hero Let union flags unfurl In vain desperate workers Seek to summon him with pages Congressman Hayes now rests In the womb of the ages Listen within heaven's border Hear the commanding bass Boom out the workers' demand for