Providing for Consideration of H.R. 10, Scholarships for Opportunity and Results Reauthorization Act, and Providing for Consideration Of H.R. 692, Default Prevention Act

Floor Speech

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Ms. NORTON. I thank my good friend from Florida for yielding and for his passion for our children.

Mr. Speaker, the short answer to the gentleman who wants to know why would we want to take away vouchers from these children is that we don't want to take vouchers away from these children. We want those who are currently in the program to maintain their voucher until they graduate.

But I should caution Members on both sides about voting for $100 million for a private school voucher program for a District that didn't ask for it while the Republican majority has pending a $2 billion cut for K-12 education for kids in their own districts.

The irony is that, when Newt Gingrich was Speaker, he first proposed private school vouchers, but as conservative as he was, he worked with me on a home rule public charter school alternative. The D.C. Council had voted for charter schools, but there were only two or three fledgling schools and charters weren't going anywhere.

Today, Mr. Speaker, there are 115 public charter schools in the District, and the reason is that, with my support, Speaker Gingrich placed H.R. 3019 in the 1995-1996 omnibus legislation establishing the D.C. public charter school board.

Today almost half of D.C. students go to publicly accountable charter schools, and most of these schools have long waiting lists. That, my friend, is what choice looks like.

Another speaker has now stepped forward with a private school voucher program to be authorized for the third time today, although the evaluation that Congress mandated definitively shows that the program failed to meet its stated goal to help children improve.

Vouchers did not improve math or reading scores for the children from low-income neighborhoods in this program, and that was the reason for the bill in the first place.

In light of that failure, I offered a compromise, and the President supports it. All of the students in the current voucher program would remain until graduation, but no new students would be funded. That would mean years of private school vouchers, but only in the District of Columbia, because this Congress has just voted down similar private school vouchers for the Nation.

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Ms. NORTON. That, my friends, is what compromise looks like: first, phenomenal growth of public charter schools, which are supported by both Congressional Republicans and Democrats; second, allowing all current students to remain in private voucher schools until graduation. If more compromises like this were on the floor, the majority would not be divided into multiple factions that have nothing to show for years of leadership.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for yielding.

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