Department of Homeland Security Appropriations Act, 2015 -- Motion to Proceed -- Continued

Floor Speech

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Mr. BENNET. Mr. President, it is a privilege to be here with my
colleague from Colorado.

I rise to talk about our schools and really to talk about our values
and our morality--what we stand for as a country--and to ask whether we
are able to look forward and create a better future for our children.

To set the record straight, let me be clear. When it comes to our
children, I have fallen short, you have fallen short, and this body has
fallen short. Let me explain why.

We have learned in the last couple of weeks that over half of the
public school children in this country are now poor enough that they
qualify for free or reduced lunches at school--children who, through no
fault of their own, are reaping the whirlwind of 15 years of stagnant
middle-class family income and the effects of the worst recession since
the Great Depression.

By many measures, as the Presiding Officer knows, Colorado's economy
leads the Nation. But even in our home State, we see more children
living in poverty. In fact, the number of children in poverty is
growing faster in Colorado than in most of the other 50 States.

As a country and as a State, we are making a lot of progress in a
number of dimensions, but we are headed in the wrong direction when it
comes to our kids. That is a bad sign for any country but particularly
for a democracy that aspires to be the land of opportunity.

A girl in poverty in the United States is five times more likely to
be a young single mother than a child from a middle-class family, and a
boy in poverty is twice as likely to be incarcerated as his middle-
class peers. Children from low-income families in this country are
about three times less likely to graduate from high school. Someone
from a family in poverty stands only a 9-in-100 chance of earning a
college degree. Think about that. There are 100 seats in this Chamber.
There are 100 desks in this Chamber. If they represented children
living in poverty in the United States, that desk, that desk, that
desk, those three desks, and three of those desks would represent
college graduates. The entire rest of this Chamber would be people that
would never earn a college degree or its equivalent and who would be
constrained to the margins of our economy and our democracy as a result
after that.

Interestingly enough, the equivalent number for children in the top
quarter of income earners is almost 80 out of 100. So 80 of these desks
from a more affluent family--80 of these desks would represent a person
who graduated with a college degree or its equivalent, and 20 would
represent people that had fallen short, but nine poor children would
have a college degree. In other words, in a way that is profoundly at
war with our founding ideals, poverty breeds deeper poverty, lack of
educational achievement reaps deeper academic failure, and broken
families are the surest predictor of more broken families in the next
generation and the generations beyond that. This is a sentence of
unequal opportunity for all poor Americans, no matter the color of
their skin. It is a generational sentence for 7 out of 10 children who
will remain at the bottom of the income scale their entire lives.

Are there people who defy these odds? Of course there are. As
superintendent of the Denver public schools and in this job, I have met
scores of children who have overcome the odds--sometimes alone--but
often also with the help of a parent who wouldn't quit, a teacher who
wouldn't take ``no'' for an answer, a former gang member whose sworn
duty is to keep young people out of gangs, a philanthropist who
insisted that Denver's kids would go to college. In these exceptional
children I have seen the indomitable nature of the human spirit
persevere against all odds and have recognized how little I and most of
us have achieved by comparison.

I have met kids who take three buses both ways to school leaving as
early as 5:30 in the morning just to have the benefit of a better
school all the way on the other side of town, kids who can't get up in
the morning because they have to work until 11 o'clock or 12 o'clock at
night in a fast food restaurant to help pay the rent, kids who pour
their heart and soul out into their studies and communities only to
learn that college is not for them because of an immigration status
they did not even know that they had.

I met kids who were the primary caregivers of younger brothers and
sisters who are taking care of ailing parents and grandparents, who
have made it to college for the first time in their family's history
who are that 9 in 100, who represent the best of our human spirit. They
are our heroes.

As one of our Denver public school students, Chaunsea Dyson from
South High School, recently told a radio reporter, ``When you are
growing up in poverty, when you are 15 or 16 that means you are
grown.''

That means you are grown.

As the father of three girls who are 15, 14, and 10, I would say that
is an awful lot to expect of a 16-year-old, especially one coming from
circumstances few in this Chamber could overcome. My point is that
while there are many heroic people in our schools--kids, teachers,
principals--succeeding in our school system today, heroism is not a
standard we tend to count on for the success of human enterprise. We
simply can't scale heroism. I wish we could--but we can't--to address
the scope of our achievement gap. It is too much to ask, and it is not
fair to our kids who have no control over the circumstances of their
birth.

I don't think there is one Member in this Chamber who could come and
say that is not true, that a child could control somehow the
circumstances of his or her birth, because one of the enduring truths
of being a human being is that we don't get to choose our parents. We
don't choose to be born into a home of wealth or poverty, a home that
values books or learning or a home which for whatever reason does not.
That is a matter of good and bad luck. Yet those circumstances beyond
our children's control--absolutely beyond their control--today almost
always determine educational outcomes in the United States of America.

So the question is, What is our obligation? What is our obligation as
a nation to remedy the burden of bad luck for millions of American
children?

I believe at a minimum it means we have a moral duty to assure that
our less lucky children have educational opportunities that let them
make the most of their God-given potential. That is certainly what I
would want for my own daughters. If we are honest, then by any
reckoning we are failing to meet this moral duty and I would say
failing very badly. If we ask ourselves why we are failing to do our
duty--how can this be--in my mind it comes down to a sad and simple
reality: We are treating America's children as if they were someone
else's children rather than our own.

To demonstrate this let's consider what conditions we have allowed to
exist for a child born, through no fault of her own, into poverty in
the United States of America in the year 2015. We know that by the age
of 4 she will have heard 30 million fewer words than her more affluent
peers--30 million. Ask any elementary schoolteacher in the country
whether that will make a difference in how prepared she is for
kindergarten. Fewer than half of poor children start school with the
skills they need to be ready to succeed in kindergarten. Every
elementary schoolteacher in America knows that. What are the odds her
neighborhood school will meet her needs? How about a school 1 mile
away? How about a school 5 miles away? It is not likely in many
American cities and rural communities.

When she reaches the fourth grade her odds are no better. She is 9
years old and there are 30 children in her classroom. On average, 24 of
her classmates cannot read at grade level--24 out of 30. Her chances of
being a proficient reader--20 percent--one in five.

One in five poor children cannot read at grade level in the fourth
grade in the United States of America this week, today, this year.
Would any of us accept those odds or outcomes for our own children?
Would any one person in this Chamber accept that? Would any of us still
be in Washington engaged in the Potemkin debates we are having if our
child couldn't read by the fourth grade? Of course not--of course we
wouldn't. But we act as if it is not our children who are the
casualties, and so we smile and we stroke our chins on the cable TV and
pretend this is all somehow out of our hands, too hard to solve,
someone else's problem.

Here is where it ends. In this knowledge-based global economy, this
unforgiving global economy, only 9 out of 100 kids, as I said in
poverty, will graduate with a college degree or its equivalent and 91
will not. These are the results we have produced for our children in
this unforgiving global economy.

But for once let's put aside the finger-pointing and the blame--
although we should take our fair share of responsibility--and let's ask
the questions our children might reasonably ask to judge their Nation's
leaders.

For example, they might ask: Why do we trail behind 35 other
developed countries in our math scores? Why does the United States rank
20th in increasing educational attainment from one generation to the
next--20th; the least likely country to produce more educated people
coming after us than there were before us.

Why are American children much more likely to be stuck in the
economic class into which they are born than children in at least 12
other countries, including Canada, Japan, Germany, Australia, and
Denmark?

These seem like reasonable questions. You wouldn't know they were on
anybody's mind around here with what concerns us on this floor, but I
can tell you it is of concern to people at home.

Why are we consigning, they might ask, our children and ourselves to
a social economic framework that is increasing, not decreasing,
inequality in this country, when other countries in the world are
headed in the opposite direction?

Why are we putting up with a set of circumstances in which income and
equality in America has grown significantly much faster than other
industrialized countries in the world? If I were a child living in
poverty in this country, those are the questions I would want to know,
in addition to the fact that I can't find a school, not just down the
street, not just in my neighborhood but in my city or even in the
region of my State to go to. To put it another way, I can't find a
school in my community that any Member of the Senate would be proud to
send their child to.

Why can't I find that school?

I didn't pick my parents. That was a question of good luck or bad
luck. In my case it was bad luck.

I know there are profound disagreements about whether the Federal,
State or local government should serve our kids and how. I am even
sympathetic, believe me, as a former school superintendent, to many
arguments about how poorly Washington is often situated to help. But
surely as a nation, one way or another, we have a moral obligation.
That is our legacy as Americans ``in Order to form a more perfect
Union, establish Justice, ensure domestic Tranquility, provide for the
common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings
of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity. . . . ''

Imagine how less powerful the Preamble to the Constitution would have
been if it stopped with ourselves, period--but it didn't. It resolves
the question in favor of our posterity--our posterity, not someone
else's--our children, not someone else's. What would this debate sound
like if we were serious about this moral obligation?

Without deciding today who would deliver and pay for these important
social goods, something we should debate and understand, consult with
our States and our school districts, our parents and our communities;
but, without making those decisions today, if we just were treating the
country's children as our own children, what would this debate sound
like? What would we do?

We surely would provide every parent and her child with the choice to
access early childhood education from birth to age 5 in order to attack
that 30 million word deficit. Surely we would do that.

I am not saying we should do it. I don't think we should do that from
here, but as a nation we should do that. Surely we would ensure that
every child, without exception and regardless of where they live, has
the choice to attend a high-performing school from kindergarten to 12th
grade. Surely we would do that.

We would enable every young person, consistent with most of our
postwar history, the chance to attain a college degree or other
advanced technical training without bankrupting their family. I saw
some data this weekend about this that showed that in 1975--and
admittedly it was the high-water mark--the Pell grants covered roughly
76 percent of what it cost to go to college, the average cost of
college. Do you know what that number is now? It is 22 percent, mostly
because the cost of college has increased so much.

Bankruptcy is a real issue. These goals--early childhood education, a
great K-12 school, affordable college--might seem obvious and even
unimaginative to many of us in this Chamber, but that might be because
we take them for granted for our own children. Of course we want high-
quality early childhood education, of course we want a high-quality K-
12 school, of course we want our young people to have access to college
without bankrupting our family, and that is the experience of a lot of
people in this Chamber. The terrible reality for most poor children in
America in 2015 is that these simple goals are as out of reach as
flying to the Moon, all over this country.

Some say we can't afford to change, and I say we can't afford not to
change. The costs of failure, as we know, are simply too high. Since
the Industrial Revolution, we have had the greatest economy the world
has ever known, and if we are to remain so in the 21st century, we must
educate our people. We have no other choice. They are our greatest
asset. We can do it.

I am not proposing today a new Federal program of any kind. However,
I will say if it were left up to me, we would have a standing committee
in the Senate focused exclusively on our children and their future.
Such a committee would, for example, examine every funding stream in
the Federal budget related to kids and ask what is working and what is
not working. What redundancies exist? How are we going to align every
single taxpayer dollar or tax credit to help support the health,
education, and well-being of our children?

I suspect that in addition to increasing efficiency, we would decide
to spend more of our resources in and around schools. That is where our
kids are, after all, and that is where the people who have served them
in our communities need to be instead of tied up in the redtape of
compliance and outdated and unimaginative Federal rules and
regulations.

In addition to that, we need to explore more efficient ways to
finance social welfare programs, promote more creative ways to weave
our social safety net in this country, and reform our criminal justice
system. A good start would be to graduate children from high school,
since around 80 percent of our prison inmates are high-school dropouts.
That would help a lot. We need to better engage with the private and
nonprofit sectors when the government isn't working well enough. This
is all part of a broader but essential conversation, one this body
continues to avoid while it wanders from one phony conflict to the
next, and one that becomes more difficult and more expensive the longer
we wait.

Our kids are waiting for us to have this conversation. We are wasting
their time. It is one thing for us to waste our own time--although the
capacity for doing that around here is beyond belief--but we ought to
stop wasting our kids' time. As I said, it is only going to become more
difficult and more expensive the longer we wait.

In the meantime, we have before us the potential to rewrite the
Elementary and Secondary School Act. Fixing so-called No Child Left
Behind is only one piece of the puzzle. Given where we are, this is all
pretty modest stuff. There are some very encouraging signs, although
the law has plenty of flaws. In fact, I said many times that if we had
a rally out in front of the Capitol to keep No Child Left Behind the same--if that is what the rally was for--not a single person in America would show up for that rally.

Incidentally, while we have this reauthorization in front of us, it
is a reauthorization that should have happened 7 years ago. It expired
7 years ago. We are running education policy in this country by waivers
from the Department of Education because this Congress cannot do its
job. Almost 40 of 50 States have waivers from the law as it exists
today. Let's change the law. Let's write it properly. Let's do our work
around here instead of spending our time on things the American people
don't want us to spend our time on.

Although everybody loves to hate No Child Left Behind, and I put
myself in that category, it has some good things. It required us to
face the facts about how our kids in poverty are doing in our schools.
It shed light for the first time on the achievement gap--the brutal
achievement gap--we have in this country, and some school districts
stepped up. Denver Public Schools is one such district.

Over the last decade, Denver Public Schools has implemented a number
of changes and has seen real results. My schoolboard and my principals
and my teachers and our kids and I would be the first to say we have
not yet gotten to a place where you can say the ZIP Code you were born
into doesn't determine the education you are going to get, but we are a
lot closer in Denver. We are a lot closer there than we are in a lot of
other cities in this country. We have seen some real results.

Almost 30 percent more students graduated and went to college last
year than in 2005. That is not enough. We are not satisfied with that.
But if you could say that about every single city in this country, that
we were graduating and sending 30 percent more students to college than
we were in 2005, that might give us some hope for the future. That
might suggest that some outcomes other than the ones we have been
seeing with the result of 9 out of 100 poor kids getting a college
degree is not where we have to end up, is not where we have to land.

I am here to tell you, not as a U.S. Senator, but as someone who was
a superintendent of the Denver Public Schools, this is possible. It is
possible to change these outcomes in urban districts and in rural
districts for children who are unlucky enough to be born into poverty
in the greatest Nation on the planet--unlucky enough to be born poor
and not born rich.

Denver has recognized the importance of providing access to high-
quality, early childhood education, and now an estimated 70 percent of
Denver's 4-year-olds are enrolled in preschool. That was not true in
2005.

As the Presiding Officer knows, we live in a State that doesn't
require or pay for 5-year-olds to go to kindergarten. That is a shame.
But because of the changes we made in Denver, our 5-year-olds go to
kindergarten--a full day if they want it, which most of them do--and 70
percent of the fourth graders in Denver have early childhood education,
and it is not only delivered by the Denver Public Schools, but by other
providers as well and the Denver public schools.

This seems to be having an effect as kids who attend the Denver
preschool program track higher in school readiness. They know more
about the alphabet, words, and books. They have a higher vocabulary and
are able to comprehend basic math. And in kindergarten, first, and
second grade, they showed better literacy and math skills than their
peers.

The dropout rate in Denver has decreased since 2005 by 60 percent.
Incidentally, the teen pregnancy rate has also fallen by 60 percent.
Denver Public Schools has gone from being the district with the lowest
rate of academic growth among major districts in the State to the
highest for 3 straight years. I am not taking responsibility for that.
I am here, not there.

Last year DPS student from low-income families had stronger growth
in math and writing than nonfree- and reduced-lunch students Statewide.
And Denver's nonfree- and reduced-lunch students showed more growth
than their State counterparts in math by nine points.

This was once labeled the failing school district in our State, but
because of the data that we have as a result of No Child Left Behind,
we can actually see what is happening--which kids are growing and which
kids are not, which schools are driving growth among kids and which
schools are not.

You can look at a map of our city and find a school that looks just
like your low-performing school with the same percentage of free- and
reduced-lunch kids where kids are succeeding beyond their wildest
dreams. Then what parents can do is say: I want that school, not this
school, for my kid. Because we have a robust system of choice in
Denver, parents are able to take advantage of that data, and we simply
would not have had the proliferation of high-performing charter schools
if it had not been for No Child Left Behind. In addition, Denver has
gone beyond that.

We have 33 innovation schools where teachers and administrators have
the flexibility to modernize their teaching practices and have more
autonomy to make decisions at the school level to better meet the needs
of individual students. And it is not just Denver. We have seen
progress all across the country--not remotely enough, but we have seen
progress, and we cannot go backward.

In the 3 decades prior to No Child Left Behind being passed--30
years--the average 9-year-old's reading score on the National
Assessment of Educational Progress increased only 4 points--4 points in
30 years. Is that acceptable? Contrast that to the gains from 1990 to
2012, which is roughly the life of No Child Left Behind. During that
span, 9-year-olds gained 9 points in reading, about 7 times as much
annual progress. We have seen similar progress in math--9-year-olds
only increased 2 points from 1990 to 1999, but from 1999 to 2012, they
gained 12 points. In that same span, African-American students improved
by 15 points and Latino students improved by 21 points.

The achievement gap shrunk as well. In reading, the gap between White
and African-American 9-year-old students dropped from 35 to 23 points.
It is still too big, but it is moving in the right direction. This
represents progress, but as I have said, in the face of stiff
competition worldwide, it is nowhere near enough.

Since the year 2000, we have dropped from second to twelfth in the
world in the production of college graduates. We need to write a bill
that builds on our successes and turns us away from the failed
practices of the past, and we cannot do it if we are constrained by the
typical politics--the small politics of Washington. We cannot afford to
have the same tired fights. We won't always agree on everything, but I
know we can find a way to pass a bill that helps our schools and school
districts to make the decisions they think are best for the kids they
are educating.

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Mr. BENNET. I appreciate the indulgence of my colleague from
Louisiana.

In a significant demonstration of leadership around here, Chairman
Alexander and Senator Murray have told us they intend to write a
bipartisan bill. Their process has the potential to be a rare exception
to the gridlock that has gripped this Senate, along with our bipartisan
work on the farm bill and immigration.

Senators Alexander and Murray have both expressed a willingness to
work together because they appreciate the importance of this task. They
understand the consequences of failure. They know enough about this
issue, and they care enough about it.

In January of 1941, during one of the Nation's most difficult times--
the height of the Great Depression and on the eve of our entry into the
Second World War, Franklin Roosevelt declared that there were four
universal freedoms that all persons possessed--freedom of speech,
freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear.

Today, in the 21st century, some of these freedoms may be obtainable,
but an honest assessment tells us it would be impossible to achieve all
of them without something additional, and that is freedom from
ignorance. In the end, freedom from ignorance is the surest relief from
the shackles of poverty.

Where does this leave us as we begin this important but long overdue
national conversation on the reauthorization of the Elementary and
Secondary School Act?

First, for all the reasons I have mentioned, America's children would
benefit if we treated our work less as legislators than as parents and
grandparents with a real stake in the outcome of what we decide.

Second, we must be clear-eyed about the Federal Government's proper
role in American education and what is not. As a superintendent, I
learned there are many things the Federal Government cannot and should
not do when it comes to educating our children. And above all else,
Washington cannot and should not micromanage our schools or our school
districts or cultivate systems driven by compliance rather than
creativity.

I believe the evidence of our failures and our successes over the
last 15 years suggest three primary Federal responsibilities: equity,
accountability, and innovation. After all, the deep and intractable
inequities that persisted along lines of race and class and geography
in America of the 1960s drove Lyndon Johnson to pass the first
Elementary and Secondary Schools Act. They drove the creation of title
I, specific funds targeted to the kids who needed the greatest support.

Sadly, for all the reasons I said, half a century later the data
reveals these profound inequities persist and our students need our
help now more than ever. But there is also reason for hope in this
data, and maybe that is the most important message I can bring. We now
have evidence that sustains support to make the difference in closing
the pernicious gaps that remain for low-income kids around the country.
Our deep commitment to equity, therefore, is as important today as it
was in 1963.

This means not just committing title I resources, but continuing to
expand efforts to open the best schools and attract the best teachers
and principals to our communities in the greatest need. In particular,
we must help teachers who are saying they want better preparation, they
want an excellent principal in their school, they want a better
compensation system and opportunities for leadership that allow them to
continue working with students.

At DPS we have made some strides. We created the Denver Teacher
Residency Program and introduced differentiated pay. We used Federal
innovation dollars to help us improve and expand early on. We are
creating leadership roles for teachers who demonstrate results with
their students. We survey our teachers every year, and their
satisfaction rates are higher than the national average. But there is
still much more for us to do.

Second, those of us working in the field know we must have a clear,
shared system of accountability, a system that allows us to monitor,
understand, and improve outcomes for students. This requires annual
assessments that monitor progress and growth across all our cities and
States. It requires breaking down data to show how and if we are
closing the gaps for all students in our school districts. It means
requiring States to take courageous action to turn around those schools
that consistently fail our children.

That is not just about paying attention to how we are serving our
low-income students in Detroit or Denver. It means examining how well
we serve our historically disadvantaged students even when they live in
some of the most advantaged neighborhoods. As we do this, we need to
work to reduce the amount of testing in our schools. As the father of
three daughters in the Denver public schools, I am concerned about how
much they are tested. But as their father, I also want to know every
year how they are doing against a set of rigorous standards and
compared to kids in Denver, across Colorado, and around the world. Will
they be ready for college? Do they have the skills they need to succeed
in this global economy?

Third, we have learned over the last decade there is a vital Federal
role when it comes to innovation in our schools. We can help provide
the preconditions for success by providing incentives for educators on
the ground to apply their own creative thinking to address our most
persistent education problems.

I say to my colleague from Louisiana, through the Chair, I am coming
to the end. I owe him 10 minutes whenever he would like it. I thank him
for his indulgence.

We will never solve the challenges our teachers and students face in
Washington, period. We will not do it from here. We can help local
leaders break free from a status quo that will never succeed for enough
of America's children.

We should help identify the challenges, provide resources to local
educators to overcome them in the context that works best for their
communities and their students, and we should continue to be the
clearinghouse that gathers these stories of successful innovation and
provide the resources to invest in scaling what works and sharing these
practices across communities and States.

Equity, accountability, innovation--that is our charge and the
commitment we must keep if we are to build an America where we treat
every child as if she were our own.

As a parent myself, I am well aware the first responsibility any
parent has is the education of her child. I am also aware that many
people believe a bad education is just one more outcome produced by
corrosive poverty in this country. Fix poverty, and you will fix
education. Maybe so, but that is cold comfort for millions of children
in our schools today.

In the end, we have a duty as a nation to ensure that education
liberates our children, rather than reinforces the circumstances into
which they were born. In that sense, America's children are our
children, our responsibility, not someone else's. Can you really accept
an America in which your little girl has just a 1-in-5 chance of being
able to read well or a 9-in-100 chance to graduate from college? Can
you really demand heroism as a precondition for success? If this were
your child, would you still be in the Senate, or would you go home and
solve the problem?

It has been said the future has no lobby in Washington, DC. Are we
really content to have that depressing observation be the ultimate
verdict on our leadership? I doubt we are. I would raise this as a
bipartisan challenge as I close.

I know the Senator from Louisiana knows a lot about what I came to
talk about today, and I look forward to working with him on the health
committee.

Here is my bipartisan challenge. Let's forge a lobby for the future.
Let's agree that the obligation we owe the Founders is to create more
opportunity, not less, for the children coming after us. Let's pledge
that every child in America is our child, and our future rests with
her, as it most assuredly does.

I yield the floor.

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