Mr. SCHIFF. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to join my colleagues in urging support for the Public Education Reinvestment, Reinvention, and Responsibility Act. This bill invests more in education, $35 billion over 5 years, for title I, for poor and disadvantaged communities where many young people, through no fault of their own, are getting a poor education, and are failing to meet their full potential because of our failures. It provides more for charter schools, for magnet schools and innovative public school choice programs, and also to help children unlock the door of opportunity that is the English language.
How do we make this investment? Are we simply throwing good money after bad? Are we spending more without doing more? The answer is no. This bill targets children who are most in need. Seven percent of the public school budget is provided via Federal funding. Our solution is, therefore, a 7 percent solution; and it will only be effective if it is targeted and targeted to those who are most in need. This bill does that.
The bill also provides local schools with greater flexibility to use local innovation to meet local needs. It does this by consolidating a myriad of Federal programs into five national goals. I introduced legislation not unlike this in the State legislature in California.
It was very instructive as we proceeded with that bill, consolidating 30 categorical education programs into one. Each of the special interests that had grown up around that particular categorical program came to oppose it. It became very apparent to me, as I think it has to many in this country, that some of the educational programs, albeit started for good reason and with the best of intentions, have come to exist and persist for themselves, not for the benefit of the children they were intended to teach, but to perpetuate the suppliers, the vendors, of those materials of that approach, and this has to end if we are going to change public education for the better. This proposal consolidates those programs, develops a system based on accountability, not accountability simply that the money is spent for its intended purpose, but rather accountability that says, we will give you flexibility, you give us good results.
Under the current law, there is no accountability. That has to change if we are going to improve the quality of a public school system. We have to demand more of our teachers, of our parents, of ourselves, and this bill goes a long way to doing exactly that.
Why all the focus on education in the last few years? We have a proud heritage in this country of public education. It has always been the great equalizer providing opportunity to the poorest among us, tapping the human potential of every child, and giving them a chance to succeed, a chance to enjoy the American dream. We are losing that heritage to schools that underperform, with children who fail or drop out or perhaps, saddest of all, who graduate and cannot read, who get a diploma and cannot write. Jefferson once said that "A nation that expects to live both ignorant and free expects what never was and never will be.'' Today's bill does honor to the father of public education, and restores our commitment to public education and civic education.
Mr. Speaker, I commend the work of the gentleman from Washington (Mr. Smith), the gentleman from California (Mr. Dooley), the gentleman from Indiana (Mr. Roemer), and others; and I urge the support of my colleagues.