College Access and Opportunity Act of 2005

COLLEGE ACCESS AND OPPORTUNITY ACT OF 2005 -- (House of Representatives - March 29, 2006)

Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Chairman, I, too, want to thank the chairman of the committee and the ranking member and the chairman and ranking member of the subcommittee for their work on this important issue.

However, I, too, reluctantly must oppose this bill because I believe it falls short, and I think it would be wrong to give the American people the impression that we are meeting the challenges in higher education when we are not.

It was just 2 months ago that the President of the United States stood before this Chamber at the podium before us and delivered his State of the Union address. In that address, he told the people of this country the United States must do more to maintain our competitive edge in the global economy. He was right about that. Those were fine words, and in fact, the Education and Workforce Committee has been debating and looking into those issues for some time now, but the issue is not identifying the problem.

That is the easy part. The challenge is doing something about the problem. And in that regard, this body and the Bush administration, unfortunately, get failing grades, because we all understand that a key part of maintaining our competitive edge in the global economy is to make sure we invest in the skills and education of our workforce.

We need to make sure our people have the training they need in what is increasingly a knowledge-based economy, and to do that, we need to make the necessary investments. Yet the day after the President stood before this Chamber and delivered his State of the Union address was the day this House passed a reconciliation bill that cut $12 billion out of the Federal student loan program: $12 billion.

Now, we all know that usually when this higher education bill comes before this House, it contains those funding provisions, the provisions for student assistance in this country. But, unfortunately, those were taken out of this bill and dealt with separately and cut by $12 billion. So now this body doesn't have to deal with that issue with the bill before us today. But those are the facts.

We also need to invest more in our K-12 education system. And it was just shortly after the President delivered his State of the Union address that he delivered a budget that cut the No Child Left Behind from its authorized level. It was $15 billion short of what we had promised there.

If we are going to be serious about this issue, we need to make a commitment at the national level to address the competitiveness challenges in our country. We don't do right by the American people when we say one thing on the big day of the State of the Union address and then we bring a bill before the Congress that doesn't contain the necessary investments in funding to make sure that we meet the challenges.

And so, Mr. Chairman, I must reluctantly oppose this bill because it would be wrong to send a message we are doing something about the challenges when in fact we are not.

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Mr. VAN HOLLEN. Mr. Chairman, I thank my colleague, the ranking member of the committee, and I am pleased to join with Mr. Castle and my other colleagues in supporting this amendment, and I want to commend the gentleman from Delaware for his leadership on this very, very important issue.

I think it is vital in our Nation that we encourage more and more young people graduating from college to go into the teaching profession, to teach throughout our communities, but also to encourage many of them to go into those communities where they are most needed, where you have many more at-risk youth than others. That is what this particular amendment does, and the Teach for America program is a great example of this idea in action. If you look at their history, you see it is one of making sure that we do do a better job of getting into communities with these young teachers.

By 2010, Teach for America will increase the number of highly accomplished recent college graduates teaching in underserved urban and rural communities in the United States from 3,500 to 8,000 reaching nearly 700,000 underserved kindergarten-12th grade students every day. It recruits at over 500 colleges and universities across the country, and this year 19,000 individuals of all academic majors applied for the Teach for America program. They come from colleges all over the country and are represented with the full geographic diversity of our Nation. I am personally proud to say that 138 seniors from the University of Maryland system applied for the Teach for America program.

And they do a great job of encouraging more people, as I said, to get into the classroom. If you take a survey, and they did, 10 percent of those who were accepted to the Teach for America program stated that they would not have considered a career in education if they had not participated in this program.

Currently, 60 percent of Teach for America's 10,000 alumni are working within education to effect fundamental change. Last year's 2005 National Teacher of the Year was a Teach for America alum and is still teaching math in the District of Columbia public school system, the same school system he began in 8 years ago. So we want to encourage these students as they graduate and become teachers to go into these communities and then stay in those communities.

So I think, Mr. Chairman, in closing, I just want to again commend my colleagues on both sides of the aisle for their efforts in this area. I think it is a very, very important initiative and one that I commend to all our colleagues in this House.

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