Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 2004 - Continued

DEPARTMENTS OF LABOR, HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES, AND EDUCATION, AND RELATED AGENCIES APPROPRIATIONS ACT, 2004—CONTINUED

AMENDMENT NO. 1543

Mr. DURBIN. Mr. President, it is my understanding that one of the underlying amendments is the amendment offered by
Senator ROBERT BYRD of West Virginia.

During the August recess, I visited many of my State's cities and home school districts, stopping in to meet with principals, teachers, parents, and students to talk about the state of education in Illinois. We have many fine schools, there is no question about it. But we are also being challenged by the fact that we face a sizable State deficit. This year our Governor, Rod Blagojevich, had to find $5 billion in savings out of our State budget, a substantial amount, making cuts in many areas.
He tried his best not to cut into State funding for education. Despite his best efforts and the efforts of the general assembly, most of the school districts I visited are facing serious hardships.

Let me give one illustration. In Elgin, IL, they recently constructed four new school buildings that were to be opened this year. But because the Elgin School District has fallen so far behind in State and local assistance, they will be unable to open those buildings. So there sit four brand new schools which don't have the staffing and certainly don't offer better amenities than the older schools offered; they just cannot be opened. It is an indication of the problems faced by many school districts in my State and across the Nation.

When President Bush was elected, he came to Congress and said he wanted to be the education President. He suggested that we try a bipartisan national approach to establishing better standards of accountability for education across America. The President proposed No Child Left Behind. It was a unique concept, one which called for regular testing of students to determine whether they were making progress and, absent that progress, changes would have to take place in the school district. You would have to find better teachers or a better school environment, principals who were more efficient in delivering educational quality, and certainly demands would be made for better teachers. All of these objectives were very positive.

I sat on the Senate floor and behind me at this seat was Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. Paul had a passion for education, a teacher by his own profession. He was a great critic of No Child Left Behind. Despite the fact that there was strong bipartisan support for the President's program, Paul Wellstone would stand there with his microphone day after day and speak to the Senate and the people watching across America and say: Listen, tests are important, but education is about more than just testing. He would say, incidentally, if you pass the President's bill, you are going to have to come up with the money to make certain these kids have a chance. If the scores don't meet the norms or standards you expect, what are you going to do? Are you going to help them or merely diagnose the problem and walk away from it? He was skeptical that when the time came, we in the Congress would appropriate the money to make No Child Left Behind work.

That was Paul Wellstone's speech day after day, week after week, month after month. Ultimately, he voted against the bill.
I voted for it, but I remembered what he said. Then I went back to Illinois and visited school district, large and small, rural and urban, districts in growing areas of our State and districts in economically depressed areas of our State. I found that many of them were echoing what Paul Wellstone said in opposing No Child Left Behind. They were talking about the burden on a teacher who comes to a classroom at the beginning of the school year realizing that teacher will ultimately be tested in a high-stakes test at the end of the year. What that test meant to the students, to the school, and to the teacher was that in order to get good grades on the test, teachers were kind of changing the way they taught. They were no longer teaching in a creative and innovative fashion, but they were focusing on answers to the test questions. School
administrators, incidentally, said: Senator, we are a little concerned that the promises made by the Bush administration to send money to school districts to meet the mandates of No Child Left Behind are not going to be fulfilled. The promised money that was to come down to the school districts under title I, which is money to help reach the students who are not doing well on tests and help them to reach grade level and to succeed, the title I funds promised by the Bush administration under No Child Left Behind, is not going to be there. That is the money that is supposed to be there for afterschool programs, so that some of these same students running into difficulties would have a helping hand after school; and summer school programs for the same purpose are not going to be funded under the Bush budget.

The same school administrators in Illinois said, incidentally, this idea of making certain that teachers meet certain levels of qualifications and certification is a good idea, but it takes money to reach those goals, to send some of these teachers back for additional college classes in science, math, or whatever their specialty might be. There is no money for the school district to deal with that.

So I heard the story over and over. It came to my mind that Paul Wellstone was right; No Child Left Behind was a great promise, but it is an unfulfilled promise because when the budget was delivered to us, unfortunately, the money wasn't delivered with it. Title I, which would help the No Child Left Behind Program, is underfunded by more than $6 billion in the Senate bill we are considering on the floor. Six million kids across America are at risk of not meeting the standards if we don't come to the rescue with the amendment by the Senator from West Virginia, Senator Byrd. In my State, it would add $255 million in title I funding to help more than 740,000 low-income kids meet the standards we imposed—Federal standards we mandated under No Child Left Behind that were mandated, but the program was not funded.

Over the last decade, the enrollment of low-income students in Illinois public schools has increased from 32 percent to more than 37 percent.

Districts across the State are really trying to comply with No Child Left Behind standards, but they need the full amount of the funds promised to be sent to these school districts, as well as the full mandate of the Federal law.

Illinois has done a number of school funding studies, and every one of them shows definitively that it will take much more money to help kids become proficient in reading and math. It stands to reason. If you have a child struggling to learn to read, that child needs more personal attention. But if you have a large classroom with 30 kids or more, the likelihood of personal attention is diminished. So if you do not send the funds to the school district for smaller class sizes, that child who is going to face the reading test has less of a chance of succeeding.

The State superintendent in Illinois testified this winter before the Illinois House Appropriations Committee that it will take even more funding to help low-income and non-English speaking students to keep pace with their peers academically.

Our State superintendent, Dr. Robert Schiller, also stated:

Based on current trends, Illinois will fall short of meeting the Federal goal, set forth in No Child Left Behind, of all children meeting or exceeding reading and math standards by 2014.

Thirty-seven percent of Illinois students fail to meet State reading and math standards.

As is the trend nationally, Illinois has significant gaps between white and minority student achievement and between low-income students and their more affluent peers.

Last month, the Illinois State Board of Education released its early warning list of school districts required to provide school choice, supplemental tutoring, or take corrective action this school year. More than 500 schools in my State are on the list, and the number might go up by the end of the month when the final calculations are made.

Compared to other States, Illinois has been pretty lucky as far as education funding at the State level. For this next fiscal year, which started in July, the State was able to increase per pupil and categorical funding to keep school districts on the road to improvement. But beneath the surface, the Illinois State Board of Education and our local school districts are struggling to implement the requirements of the federally mandated No Child Left Behind.

District budgets are straining under these unfunded requirements addressed by the Byrd amendment. How many Senators in this Chamber stood up with great pride and said we are voting for No Child Left Behind because we believe in accountability, education is the highest priority in our country, and we need to be there for our kids and their families? All of us who voted for the bill gave that speech.

Look what happened when the Bush budget came down. The money was not there—a $6 billion shortfall in money needed in schools across America.

We sent out all these wonderful speeches out to be printed in newspapers, and we posed for pictures with students and teachers. But months later, when it comes to funding the bill we passed, the Bush administration refuses to put the money down and this Congress followed suit and put together the bill before us today which also fails to keep that promise. This title I money was supposed to be the pool of resources from which districts would implement school improvement provisions necessary to meet adequate yearly progress. Districts now have to use State and local funds to try to reach those goals.

Despite an overall increase for K-12 education, more than $30 million in cuts and reallocations were made at the State level in my State this year. This includes a significant reduction in the number of State board employees, the elimination of State gifted education programs, the elimination of the State family literacy initiative, and the statewide math education initiative.

While Illinois has been successful in keeping budget cuts out of the classroom, that may not be the case if our State remains in its current financial straits.

The impact of the Federal Government's failure to fund title I as we promised is more deeply felt at the school district level where the financial picture is bleaker.

Across Illinois, school districts are laying off teachers, cutting programs, and reducing the hours of operation. Sixty-one percent of our school districts are operating with deficits, and here we have a Federal mandate from the Bush administration under No Child Left Behind that imposes new responsibilities on these school districts operating in a deficit and fails to fund the program.

Many of these school districts have had deficits for several years in a row. This number is expected to rise about 80 percent next year. This spring, 62 percent of local bond proposals failed, and 55 percent of local tax referenda failed. Those are hard to pass in good times. In a recession, they are particularly difficult to pass. And we had a recession which began before this President came to office by a few months and which has continued unabated ever since.

Our State unemployment rate is about 6.6 percent in Illinois. We have lost 120,000 manufacturing jobs while President Bush has been in office, and those numbers are duplicated across America. There is little wonder taxpayers resist the idea of increasing their property taxes at a time when we are facing this recession.

In many areas of our State, local revenue increases have been less than 5 percent because they are limited by tax caps. When local resources cannot be increased, it makes title I money even more important to these cash-strapped school districts.

For example, in my hometown of Springfield, Public School District 186 has 36 elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools. Just over 15,000 kids attend school in that district. Springfield has had financial challenges over the last several years and has cut more than $30 million from the district budget in the wake of the failed tax referendum. This year, six Springfield elementary schools failed to make adequate yearly progress, and they must offer public school choice.
Springfield needs every title I dollar the district can get to improve student achievement and get the schools moving forward making progress.

What would Springfield do with the money? I asked the superintendent, Dr. Dianne Rutledge. She said, with more Federal funding, if Washington kept its promise to send money for No Child Left Behind, this is what they would do with it. She would hire additional teachers to reduce class sizes, and that on its face is a good idea. I have yet to meet a teacher who has prayed for a larger class. They want smaller classes so they can focus more attention on students who need help and even more attention on students who are gifted who, with additional time, can do extraordinary things.

She would also operate reading recovery, and hire a school improvement coach for each school to provide intensive and personalized year-round professional development to teachers and staff.

If the Senate fails to adopt the Byrd amendment, there will be less money for Springfield. They will not be able to hire the teachers, and fewer kids will have tutors.

Let's look at a larger school district in my State, the Chicago public school system. They educate more than 438,000 kids in K-12 in 602 schools.

Eighty-five percent of the children in Chicago public schools are defined as living in poverty. Roughly 90 percent are minority.

The Chicago public school system is, in many ways, the poster district for setting high academic standards and adopting an aggressive program for school improvement. Ten years ago, 48 percent of Chicago's schoolchildren were performing in the bottom quarter of national achievement in reading and math. Today that number has been cut in half, first by Paul Vallis, who came in under the direction of Mayor Daley and brought real reform to the Chicago public school system, and then followed by Arne Duncan, our current CEO of Chicago public schools, an extraordinary educator who is doing a great job.
He reported last week for the first time that number has been cut in half, and Chicago public schools are performing above the Nation as a whole. That is an amazing achievement in a district that diverse with so many challenges.

Despite the Chicago public school system's dramatic recovery over the last decade, 365 of its 602 schools have been labeled as failing to make yearly adequate progress. That is more than half.

The Chicago public schools' budget increased this year over last. The district has managed to avoid drastic cuts. Most of the increased funds are committed to certain projects, and several of the initiatives are specifically to comply with Federal requirements.

To comply with the highly qualified teachers mandate in No Child Left Behind, Chicago public schools has just completed work on a brandnew $2 million database to track the qualifications of each of their 25,000 teachers. The Chicago public school system is likely to have to create a similar system to track the qualifications of thousands of paraprofessionals.

Complying with the Federal mandates of President Bush's No Child Left Behind has led to some terrible challenges for this major city school district. The Chicago public school system wants to invest title I dollars in afterschool, summer school, and extended week programs. It is required to use a large portion of its limited Federal resources to move kids from schools that are failing to other schools.

What would the Chicago school system do with the money in the Byrd amendment? We asked the finance director, John Maiorca. He would expand afterschool and summer school opportunities for students at risk in failing the test. He would invest in supplemental education services and additional tutoring for these struggling students, and hire additional teachers to reduce class size.

Two days ago, I was at the opening of the schools in Chicago. I went to a school on the west side known as Dodge Academy. Dodge Academy closed 2 years ago because it was a failing school, but there was a promise made that it would improve and reopen. It has, and it is an exceptionally good school.

One can tell, walking in the door, that this is a school that is destined to succeed. Not only do they have a wonderful, bright, and remodeled building because of a lot of hard work by the local school district but they also have some of the brightest teachers. They are a school that is trying a new concept, under the leadership of Mike Koldyke, that is going to bring to each of these classrooms two resident teachers. So for a year they are going to have teachers in residence who are training to become teachers, working with veteran teachers, and then they will move these newly qualified teachers with experience to the failing schools in the Chicago public school systems and try to turn them around. It is a great model. It works in hospitals. It can certainly work in schools. But it costs money.

The money from title I, which would be part of No Child Left Behind had the Bush administration and this bill adequately funded it, could have been used for that purpose, but it is not there. With the Byrd amendment, it would be there, and so the Chicago public school system would have that opportunity.

So right now we are dealing with the broken promises of No Child Left Behind, unfunded mandates at a time when school districts in Illinois and across America are struggling to survive. How can we, in good conscience, impose these ideas and mandates on the school districts, as good as they may be, and then refuse to pay for them?

Senator Byrd really is calling to task all of us who voted on No Child Left Behind, those of us who stood so proudly by this bill and said this is the answer to America's education needs. The question now is: Will we produce the money it takes to make this succeed? Quite honestly, if the Byrd amendment fails, the answer is no.

Many of the same people who took great pride in saying they co-authored this program, cosponsored it, and voted for it, will turn around and vote against the funding for the mandates they are creating in school districts across America. These are unfunded mandates in the middle of a recession, at a time of State deficits, when schools are struggling to survive,
unfunded mandates from the Bush administration in No Child Left Behind.

The only thing the Bush administration guarantees it will pay for is the test. So the test will be administered but any effort to improve the scores of students will be hampered, hindered with additional obstacles because of the refusal of this Congress to appropriate the adequate funds. We need to make certain that the $6 billion shortfall in title I in No Child Left Behind is a shortfall that is filled, and filled soon.

I rise in support of the Byrd amendment, commend Senator Byrd for his leadership, and urge all of my colleagues to put their money where their press release was. It is not just a matter of taking credit for a program. Stand up now and appropriate the funds to make it work in Philadelphia, in Iowa, in Chicago, all across America.

I yield the floor.