Education

Floor Speech

EDUCATION -- (House of Representatives - September 17, 2007)

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Ms. FOXX. Mr. Speaker, I really appreciate Representative Garrett putting together this Special Order tonight.

While I missed the very beginning of it, I know we often share Special Orders when we are dealing with the Constitution, and I think it a bit ironic that we are here on Constitution Day dealing with this issue which we often talk about in terms of the Constitution and the role of the Constitution and the Federal Government in dealing with education.

Let me say, first of all, you have been here a bit longer than I have and have worked on some of these issues longer than I have, and you have excellent credentials. But I want to say, to sort of establish my credentials a bit, that I come from a background of education serving on the school board of Watauga County for 12 years. I was an administrator at Appalachian State University, I was an instructor, and I was a community college president. My doctorate degree is in curriculum and teaching in higher education, so this is an issue I am very passionate about and have been all of my life.

I understand the importance of education. I understand the importance of an excellent education for helping people break the cycle of poverty and for unleashing talents and skills. I know that No Child Left Behind is not the answer to what we need to be doing in this country in terms of unleashing the tremendous potential that exists with young people in this country.

I want to thank you for introducing H.R. 3177, the Local Education Authority Returns Now, the LEARN Act, which would allow States to opt out of the costly and burdensome No Child Left Behind law and return the control to the locals where it belongs. I am proud to be one of the 33 cosponsors of this bill. Again, let me go back to the fact that we are here on Constitution Day and remind people, which I think we need to do on a fairly regular basis, of what the Constitution says about the role of the Federal Government in education.

Amendment 10 of the Constitution says: ``The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or the people.'' Now, I read the Constitution fairly regularly, and I find no mention of education being a responsibility of the Federal Government.

I have established my credentials a little bit, and I will establish somewhat my historical credentials. I was on the school board of Watauga County not too long after the ESEA bill was passed. This was part of Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. There has been a great deal of debate about that bill since then. Of course, most people have lost sight of the fact that No Child Left Behind was, I believe, the eighth reauthorization of that bill. So No Child Left Behind has its origins in the War on Poverty, good intentions, trying to increase spending at the local school level, help children in poverty to do better. But the record of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act has been very spotty at best. And No Child Left Behind has also been very spotty at best.

What we need to do, again, is go back to the basics, in my opinion, where the role of the Federal Government is reduced in education and the role of the local school board, the local teachers, the local parents is increased. We need to make sure that we are not tying the hands of teachers and principals at the local level. That is what we have been doing with No Child Left Behind. We have been trying to mandate from Washington the way to handle education.

I find almost no support for this program in my district. I have had forums with teachers, principals, superintendents, and school board members. Many people complain bitterly about No Child Left Behind and the detrimental effect it has had on their system.

Now, we found out in talking with them that much of what they are concerned about is not really in No Child Left Behind, but it is in other legislation that the Federal Government has imposed. But, again, what we need to do is unleash the potential that is there for teachers to work with children at the local level.

I want to make a few comments, again, about my own experiences with this law and with other iterations of the ESEA Act of 1965 and throw out some things that we know about and have known about for a long time which make this emphasis on Federal funding so frustrating to those of us who pay attention to the research, pay attention to history and know what has been happening. There are thousands, literally thousands, of studies to show that there is absolutely no correlation between how much the government spends on schools and how much students learn.

So the more spending we have guarantees nothing in terms of learning. What we do know is that what makes an effective school and what makes good learning are excellent principals and involved parents, and No Child Left Behind actually mitigates against both of those things because of so much emphasis on testing and so much emphasis again on the cookie-cutter approach.

Let me say also that no research has ever established that the quality of individual schools is a cause of the gap in test scores among groups of students. What is important is the safety of the neighborhood, income, books in the home, whether there are a mother and a father in the home, how much TV the child watches and what is the level of the mother's education.

Education cannot control these factors. We cannot, through our educational systems, make those things different for children. We are going to see gaps in education as long as we see lots of children coming from single-parent homes where the mother doesn't have a good education. We are going to see lots of problems with groups of children when children don't live in safe neighborhoods or when they don't have a lot of books in their homes.

We know that schools and school quality contribute little to the emergence of test score gaps among children. Again, government-run schools simply are not going to be able to bridge the gap between what children need to know and what they are currently learning.

What we need to be doing, again, is to reduce the role of the Federal Government in the education process and help those teachers who are out there on the line every day dealing with a tremendous range of children in their classrooms, trying to teach the tests so they won't be considered failures.

One of the saddest things we have done, I think, with No Child Left Behind is label so many classrooms as failures, so many schools as failures, when people are working very hard doing a lot of good things. We are actually discouraging people from going into teaching and wanting to use their talents and skills on behalf of others.

So, I would say that we need very much to go back to local accountability in education, local control in education, and stop letting the 7 percent of the funding that goes into the public schools from the Federal Government be the tail that wags the dog, because so much more of the money is coming in at the local level. Those people know what their schools need, and we need to let the folks there hold their systems accountable.

Again, I want to compliment you on the LEARN Act and for bringing this up to folks, presenting the facts, so that people are not being misled by the propaganda that is put out about these things.

People would like to control our lives totally from the Federal level, but it is not possible to do. Our framers of the Constitution understood that. They were very wise in it. We need to go back to those principles which gave us fairly good educational systems in the past but are failing us right now in the attempt to control everything from the Federal level.

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Ms. FOXX. Before you go to that chart, I want to ask you if you would yield to a question.

Mr. GARRETT of New Jersey. Absolutely.

Ms. FOXX. I also had the opportunity to review that article tonight from The Weekly Standard and was very struck, particularly by the review of the book by Mr. Lieberman. I hope that at some point you will call attention to that a little bit. I intended to do that in my comments. But I think it would be excellent if we were able to enter particularly the review of his book into the record, because he makes many of those same points that I was making about the educational structure. I think he has done a very good service. So I would hope that you would be able to do that at some point in the effort here tonight.

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