Congratulating Charter Schools Across the United States for Their Contributions to Education

CONGRATULATING CHARTER SCHOOLS ACROSS THE UNITED STATES FOR THEIR CONTRIBUTIONS TO EDUCATION -- (House of Representatives - May 03, 2005)

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Ms. NORTON. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from Michigan for yielding me time, and I thank him and I thank the gentleman from Nevada for bringing this resolution in support of charter schools to the floor.

Mr. Speaker, charter schools are one of the most innovative developments in the history of public education in our country, and they came from the bottom up. They have not developed out of State governments or the like. They have come from searches within jurisdictions for all alternative public schools, and this is what they are.

In the District of Columbia, we think of the charter schools as an alternative public school system because there are so many of them. We have 43 charter schools in this one city alone, and that is the largest number of charter schools per capita in the United States.

Why are there so many charter schools? We feel strongly in the District of Columbia that public money must go to public schools, and it is understood that here and throughout the United States public schools which have to take every child are often overcrowded and underfunded, have had a very tough time making up for what particularly the most disadvantaged children do not bring to school. As a result, public schools in many jurisdictions show low scores for children in those schools.

What is a parent to do? What parents increasingly do is look for a public alternative to their public schools. They want better schools, but the public is very clear that it wants public money for public schools. If we have any doubt about that, remember that even this House has never voted a voucher bill for, nor has the Senate, anywhere except for the District of Columbia where you can undemocratically do anything you want to do, but for everybody else they have listened to what people say and that is, yeah, we will punish you if one dime goes to anything but a publicly accountable public school.

Looking for a way to deal with the fact that, yes, many public schools do not show the progress they should, it seems to me we have to look to the paradigm that the public itself has created, and those are charter schools. There is no better place to begin than in the District of Columbia where people have simply voted with their feet. When they did not like their school, they have gone to a nearby charter school.

They have advantages. They are not the advantage discussed in this resolution, where it says, whereas charter schools improve students' achievement. That is very controversial. I do not know whether they do or not. All I know is that there are studies that say that they do and studies that say they do not.

I want to say to my goods friends on the other side who are with me in support of charter schools, our case does not rest on that. If my colleagues understood how difficult it was to deal with education in the inner city, they would understand that the fact that they come so close ought to be enough; that parents want them as an alternative; that they are small; that they are flexible; that they are in their neighborhoods; that sometimes they are specialized. That is enough.

We have got a long way to go before we find the elixir for bringing particularly disadvantaged children to where they should be; but if we just look at what some of these schools in the District of Columbia, like just by some of their names, District of Columbia Bilingual School, that is totally a bilingual charter school.

The SEED school, this is the first public live-in school in the District of Columbia. These children do not go home during the week. They do not go home at night. So they have money from us per capita from the school budget, and they raise other money; and these children actually live in a public charter school like a boarding school.

There is the Marriott Hospitality Public Charter High School, where children, besides learning the general high school curriculum, also prepare themselves to go into the hospitality field, which is the most important industry in this region.

Here is another one, the Washington Mathematics, Science and Technology School. And these are some of the reasons that parents have, in fact, sometimes chosen alternative schools here in the District of Columbia: the public school test scores are better. They are better and systematically better, but my colleagues do not see me here saying public schools are better because their scores are better.

The fact is that each kind of school has broad benefits that parents have chosen and both kinds of schools are accountable to parents and to the public for the dollars spent.

I do believe that they stimulate competition, unlike private schools which do not stimulate any competition at all. Private schools in the District of Columbia, which can take whatever children they want to or not, are no competition for the District of Columbia; but if there is a charter school in one's neighborhood, the principal will look to see what that charter school is doing.

The superintendent today has announced a plan because there are a few charter schools that are very good and they must take every child, but there are a few charter schools that are very good about actually pairing those charter schools with some charter schools in their neighborhood which are not doing as well.

With No Child Left Behind we have a problem we are seeing all over the country. You have got to find yourself a better school. Well, guess what. Those schools are all full so there is no place to transfer now. Everybody ought to wish for charter schools because there is a publicly accountable school with a public dollar that perhaps one can transfer to. They are opening fast, but not fast enough for us here.

There is no real substitute in any civilized society for a public school system; but particularly when parents are not satisfied with their public schools, it does seem to me that charter schools offer the alternative and the only alternative we ought to fund.

The District received the first Federal funds, first funds from this Congress for charter schools. That was when Speaker Gingrich was here. He knew that he profoundly opposed school vouchers. He worked with me on charter school funding for the District of Columbia. That paved the way for charter school funding which is now available to every State in the Union.

We had mothers who went to schools with private school vouchers. The vouchers that this Congress mandated be paid for in the District of Columbia were fully paid for by private funds, but we said you do not have to pay for them. You have been raising money every year; we will pay for them. So we simply transferred public funds for the private funds which have been sending these same children to school.

Well, the mothers came to me who had been going to school on the private funds, and I said you are my folks and I understand why you are looking for alternative schools. Tell me more. I wanted them to know why I opposed vouchers from public funds for private schools; and I was amazed at how many of them said, Congresswoman, we wanted to go to a charter school, but they were all full. So, look, we wanted a better school, and that is why they chose and were pleased to get these vouchers.

Well, of course, I argued since charter schools are what the people of District of Columbia want, if you have got any extra money, Congress, please give it to us for charter schools. We said, oh, no, you are the District of Columbia; we can experiment on you. We can do anything undemocratically to do what we want to do, and we will do some undemocratic things to you that our people would punish us for doing if we did it to them.

So now our folks are still hungry for even more charter schools, and we have got people going to private schools as well.

I am going to put in the RECORD what our charter schools have done because each year we have a climbing up. This is how people vote. They vote with their feet. This is what a market system is about. Ask people what they want. This is what democracy is. Ask people what they want, and they will choose what they want. Do not impose on them what you want.

In our city, since most of our Catholic schools which would be the alternative schools in the Northwest and most of our most deprived children are in the Southeast, the first year of the vouchers, we had most of the children in middle class and better schools, thank you very much. Then there was an outcry, which I can see, whether they can do any better this time. I can tell my colleagues it is very much harder to do better if you are from a very disadvantaged neighborhood in far Southeast and there is a Catholic school over here in this part of town and you have got a voucher to go there. That is not going to work in the District.

What will work in the District is what the people in the District have embraced, and that is, if there is to be an alternative, let it be a publicly accountable school.

The District of Columbia, unlike many jurisdictions, has absolutely eliminated charter schools that were not doing what they were supposed to do.

So we know what to do when they work. We know what to do when they do not work.

I am pleased to see the spread of charter schools. I believe that every district has to decide for itself. In this region, for example, in Maryland and Virginia, where Republicans have the majority of the Congress, they cannot even get charter schools, and yet there are hundreds of thousands of poor Hispanic and black children who might decide that was a good alternative for them, not to mention the children elsewhere in those States, but they cannot even get charter schools, which are publicly accountable charter schools to be embraced in their districts. That is how much people in their districts want every public dollar to go to the public school system.

When I argued that on this floor, they said, who do you think you are, somebody voted by the people or the District of Columbia? Well, we were not, but we are going to tell you what to do with your schools. Well, we have led the way on what to do if your schools do not work. Designed, publicly accountable schools, which parents agree should be the alternative that they want.

This is still America. This is still a democracy. Nothing is felt more deeply than who decides how a person's child will be educated. It was wrong for this Congress to decide for us rather than to decide on the alternative you now come to the floor to embrace.

Mr. Speaker, I very much thank the gentleman for yielding me this time.

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