A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Statement of Richard W. Riley, U.S. Secretary of Education

before the Subcommittee on Human Resources and Intergovernmental Affairs of the House Committee on Government Reform and Oversight

March 13, 1995

Introduction

Mr. Chairman, I welcome the opportunity to come before this oversight Committee to explain the many reforms that we are undertaking to transform this agency into a Department of Education for the new Information Age we are now entering. I would like to submit my prepared statement for the record and make a short summary statement.

Let me begin by telling you who we serve and what we do. The purpose of this Department, the smallest cabinet agency in the Federal government, is to ensure equal access to education and to promote educational excellence throughout the nation.

I believe that in today's global economy, education has to be seen as a national priority. The knowledge and skills individuals learn in school to a large extent determine their level of economic success.

In 1992, for example, the average annual earnings for those with a bachelor's degree were 74 percent higher than those with a high school diploma, and 155 percent higher than those who had not graduated from high school (Chart 1).

Turning the Corner: Positive New Trends

As the Committee reviews our efforts, I want to place what we do in a larger context by telling you that it is my strong belief that American education is starting to turn the corner.

Just over a decade ago, Dr. Terrel Bell, then the U.S. Secretary of Education, released "A Nation At Risk," the report which sounded the alarm that American education was sliding toward mediocrity. Today, we are starting to see the positive results for our efforts since then to improve education.

Student performance in science and math is on the rise (Charts 2 and 3) and we have made up much of the ground we lost in the 1970s and 1980s. The number of high school students taking the core academic courses has tripled since 1983, and is still rising (Chart 4). Many more students, particularly minority students, are participating in the advanced placement process (Chart 5).

The drop out rate has declined in the last decade, and young people are getting the message that graduating from high school is only the stepping stone for more learning. There is a new seriousness and appreciation for the value of education. As a result, community colleges are filling up as never before. And our great institutions of higher learning continue to produce world class graduates.

I will be the first person to tell you that we still have many problems. Overall achievement is still too low; violence remains a destructive force in some of our schools; the gap in the performance of poor children is still too large; and too many college freshmen are in remedial classes.

I am also greatly concerned about the growing trend from state to state to de-emphasize the jewel of our Nation's education system -- our wonderful system of higher education. But overall, we are turning the corner and moving in the right direction. The American people are increasingly determined that our children get a first-class education. They want results.

This is why I am a strong supporter of applying ample doses of American ingenuity and creativity to our educational system. We need to encourage ideas such as charter schools and public school choice; be flexible and recognize that students learn in so many different ways; and carefully think through how we use time in the school day.

Why We Need to Think Long-Term

Above all, we need to avoid the trap that has so often befallen American education, the inability to maintain a sustained drive for excellence. Too often we get distracted by the fad of the moment or change direction in mid-stream, even as the American people become more and more convinced that improving education has to be seen as a national priority.

In 1995 the link between education and our Nation's future economic competitiveness is absolutely clear. Between 1992 and the year 2000, for example, 89 percent of the jobs being created will require some postsecondary training.

This may explain why 50 percent of all 16-to-24-year-olds who lack a high school diploma are now unemployed and over 80 percent of prison inmates were high school dropouts. If we want to reduce dependency, we have to invest in education, and we need to think long-term.

We aren't going to save money in the long run if we start cutting back on education at the Federal level, and at the State level as well. If schools start producing more dropouts, all we are going to do is to produce more people who go on welfare or go down the road to crime and violence.

Crowded Classrooms: 7 Million Additional Children

I want to point out to the Committee that the so-called "baby boom echo" is now beginning to hit our Nation's classrooms in full force. In the next ten years, over 7 million additional children are going to get up in the morning to go to school. Let me cite some projections that should capture your attention regarding enrollments in elementary and secondary education.

Connecticut will see a 10 percent increase in the number of young people going to school, Maryland will see a 24 percent increase, and Virginia and New Jersey are both projected to have 20 percent increases in school enrollments. California can expect a 30 percent increase at the K-12 level while Texas and Florida are projected to have 17 percent increases.

Here, I want to dig a little deeper and tell you that much of this increase will take place in our Nation's high schools. California, for example, will have a 44 percent jump in the number of high school students it will educate.

In Maryland and Virginia, high school enrollments will rise 35 percent. Florida will see a 36 percent increase. New Jersey will be up 28 percent. Connecticut projections are at 21 percent and Texas can expect a 25 percent increase.

That's a lot of teenagers. The vast majority of our young people are growing in a responsible way, but crime experts are already sounding the alarm that the sheer numbers of young people will lead to rising homicides and other youth violence. I get worried when I see a headline that reads, "Teen Bloodbath Looms." If we have any sense at all, we need to give all of these young people the hope of a good, first-class education based on high academic standards.

The surest way I know to create an angry 16-year-old illiterate dropout is to give that young person a watered down curriculum from first grade on which tells him in no uncertain terms: young student, you aren't good enough to learn anything hard, so why even try.

We are going to have our hands full as a Nation: first in raising standards so these young people can do college work and get high- skilled jobs; second, in keeping them out of trouble, away from guns and drugs; third, making sure we help middle- and lower-income families finance their children's college education or some other form of postsecondary education.

I believe the American people have a clear view of the future -- that the reduction of the deficit and investing in education are two of the most important and essential ways we can secure this Nation's future economic prosperity.

Education as a National Priority

If you look at our nation's history -- going all the way back to Morrill Act in 1862 during the middle of the Civil War -- the American people have always turned to the Federal government for support in education during times of great economic transition -- just like the one we are going through now -- or times of national emergency when our national security was at risk.

In 1917, during the middle of World War I, the Congress passed the Smith/Hughes Act to advance vocational education as the United States fully entered the industrial era.

When millions of GIs came back from World War II, we sent 2.2 million of them to college on the GI Bill and started to expand the American middle class. Between 1948 and 1973, for example, one fifth of our Nation's growth in GNP was directly related to access to higher levels of education.

When the Russians woke us up by flying Sputnik over our heads late at night -- a few of you may remember that experience -- Congress passed the 1958 National Defense Education Act, which sent millions of Americans to college and educated a generation of scientists who helped us to win the Cold War.

In the 1960s, this country faced up to its civil rights obligations and started helping disadvantaged and poor Americans to learn their way out of poverty. Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act in 1965, the Higher Education Act in the same year, and created Pell Grants in 1972. What was the result?

Well, one result was that the achievement gap between blacks and whites, as measured by reading and math scores, began to shrink through the mid-1980s, and the high school graduation rate for African Americans doubled over the past 20 years.

The Federal government provided the means to give millions of Americans a first opportunity to go to college. Between 1964 and 1993, college enrollment nearly tripled, from 5 million to 14 million, and the number of bachelor's degrees awarded to black and Hispanic students rose by more than 50 percent.

Today, the Department of Education provides 75 percent of all postsecondary student aid, continuing a national commitment dating back to the 1944 GI Bill. Here's another way to think about it -- in the last 20 years, 40 million Americans have used a Federal student loan to finance their postsecondary education. That's a lot of people.

I want to suggest to the Committee that the American middle class is what it is today, in large part, because the American people have made access to a higher education a national priority. Approximately 7 million students are currently going to college or getting some other form of postsecondary education with our help.

The Department of Education also makes a strong effort to help parents prepare their children for college. We publish a "Preparing Your Child for College" resource book and every year we publish a very popular guide to Student Financial Aid.

The Department translates the American commitment to access, equity and excellence in other ways as well. In a given year this Department will:

We also provide easy-to-understand information that parents and schools can use every day. We have distributed 35 million copies of our "Parents Guide" on talking to children about drugs. We have just produced a new video on Attention Deficit Disorder that has received national attention.

The flip-side of this equation is what happens when this country does not invest in education, or when some of our young people get disconnected from education. We know that about 44 percent of all the people on welfare rolls are high school dropouts, and that 82 percent of all the people in this Nation's prisons and jails are also high school dropouts.

That should tell us something. If we want to end welfare -- if we want to keep people from going on welfare in the first place -- and keep them from going down the road to violence and spiritual numbness, we need to invest in education.

And here I mean "invest" in the broadest sense: connecting families to the learning process; making sure children know their basics; helping good teachers become better teachers; and making sure our schools are safe, disciplined, and drug-free.

If the strength of this country is the self-reliance of our citizens, if we want the "locus of power" to be the self-reliant American and not the government, then that self-reliance comes in large part because they are educated and thinking Americans.

We know, for a fact, that people at the lowest level of literacy are ten times more likely to be in poverty than persons at the highest level of literacy. We also know that the sheer drag of poverty can have a detrimental effect on even the brightest young person in a high-poverty school.

More importantly, we now know that changing our expectations of what poor and disadvantaged children can achieve is central to helping them to learn their way out of poverty. Two decades of research tells us that all children can learn to challenging standards. In the 1990s equity and excellence must be seen as one and the same. One cannot happen without the other.

The Department's Goals

Overall, the Department's goals are defined by the eight National Education Goals, first proposed by the Nation's governors under the leadership of then-Governor Clinton and President Bush and most recently adopted by Congress in the Goals 2000 legislation. The goals are intended to focus the Federal government, States, local communities, schools, businesses, and parents as they work together to improve the education system in the United States in such areas as achievement in core subjects, parental involvement, and school safety.

To help reach these goals, the Department has for the first time recently developed and begun implementing a strategic plan. Madeleine Kunin, the Deputy Secretary, has taken a strong leadership role in developing this plan and she is here with me today to answer any specific questions you may have.

This strategic plan reflects our efforts to restructure the Federal role in education, focus on performance, streamline and reduce the number of our programs, and improve internal Department management. Our strategic plan makes us a leader in implementing the Government Performance and Results Act.

The strategic plan establishes four key priorities. The first three focus on our programs and initiatives:

  1. To help States and communities enable all elementary and secondary students to reach challenging academic standards.
  2. To create a comprehensive school-to-work opportunities system in every State.
  3. To ensure access to high-quality postsecondary education and life-long learning.

    In order to accomplish these priorities, we recognized that we had to change the way the Department does business, leading to the plan's fourth priority:

  4. To transform the Department into a customer-responsive, high-performance organization to support the three substantive priorities.
The inclusion of performance indicators in the strategic plan holds this Department accountable for results. I think we need to be held accountable if we are spending the taxpayers' money. Examples of our performance goals include:

How We are Radically Transforming this Department to Save $16 Billion

To hold ourselves accountable we are using our new strategic plan to radically transform the way this agency does its business. When I got to Washington even the fans in my office didn't work. But we have begun to turn the Department around, and we have taken some credible first steps in reinventing the Department. I am not wedded to the past and I didn't come to Washington to save the job of a bureaucrat. We shouldn't feel compelled to hold on to 1960s thinking, just because it is the way we have done business, if the programs aren't working the way they should for the children. Here, I want to stress that just 2 cents of every "education" dollar the Department spends goes to administrative costs, and we are working hard to reduce these costs even further.

We have been aggressive in streamlining our services, reducing regulation, consolidating programs, terminating programs and lowering the student loan default rate -- from 22 percent in 1990 to 15 percent in 1992, which is saving taxpayers $1 billion a year. In addition, loan collections rose from $1 billion in 1993 to $1.5 billion in 1994 (Chart 6).

We proposed the elimination of 34 programs in last year's budget and for 1996 we are proposing to terminate or phase out funding for 41 programs, saving over $700 million.

All together, we have enacted or proposed legislation or made policy changes which would save $16.7 billion between fiscal year 1995 and fiscal year 2000:

A New Flexible Regulatory Philosophy

We have also radically changed our approach to regulations. Broad waiver provisions, whole-school approaches, fewer regulations, charter schools, and investing in teams of teachers, parents, and school and community leaders to find high-quality solutions are all elements of our new flexibility.

We now ask some very basic questions when it comes to regulatory practices -- whether to regulate at all, and how best to regulate to give our customers the maximum flexibility they need. This really is new thinking. You will see at the end of this testimony a one page attachment that spells out the principles of this new flexible regulatory policy (Chart 7).

In my opinion, the GOALS 2000: EDUCATE AMERICA ACT is a model of our new thinking. There are no regulations for this new legislation, and the application form is only four pages long. Equally important, we have not created any new administrative structures to manage Goals 2000.

Goals 2000 is what I like to call a "responsible block grant" -- the very type of creative, flexible legislation that supports local schools districts to achieve reform in their own way. Goals 2000 helps States and school districts set their own high standards and design their own programs for reaching them. In the second year of each grant, 90 percent of all funding flows directly to local school districts. Yet, Goals 2000 still holds us accountable for results, and we need to be held accountable if we are spending the taxpayers money. As of today, 44 states are participating in the program.

In addition, Goals 2000 allows me to give six states the power to waive the statutory and regulatory requirements of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and the Perkins Vocational Education Act without having to seek my approval. Oregon, for example, has already put this "Ed-Flex" plan into place.

The School-to-Work Opportunities Act also represents a radical departure from traditional Federal and State roles. This regulation-free program provides Federal seed money over a five- year period to get school-to-work systems up and running in every State, and then the program sunsets.

Another example of our new flexible regulatory approach was demonstrated in last year's reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA). In totally revamping Title I-- at $7 billion the largest program in the ESEA -- we promoted new approaches that enable staff in individual schools to decide on the best strategies for improving teaching and learning.

The new Title I also expands the schoolwide option to 20,000 low- income schools, enabling them to blend their Federal funds with state and local resources to upgrade entire schools, and not just target Federal funds on individual students.

We have a new management goal of eliminating 25 percent of grant regulations for fiscal year 1996 and an additional 25 percent for 1997. We are reaching these new management goals by giving grantees much earlier notification of their status, by distributing grant funds electronically, and by eliminating unnecessary negotiations affecting 6,000 grant continuations a year.

So we are making good progress. We plan on minimal regulations for the Title I program, no regulations for the Goals 2000 and School- to-Work initiatives, and a broad new waiver authority that I fully intend to use.

In addition, we have gone a step further by beginning a thorough Department-wide review of all of our regulations to sort out those that are needed and those we can do without.

Good Management Practices

As we continue our work to redesign this agency, one of my chief goals has been to instill a sense of good management. As a result we are becoming a more efficient operation. Our current ceiling of about 5,100 FTE is significant reduction from the 7,700 employed in 1979 by comparable offices within HEW and six other agencies. We are making progress on a number of fronts.

A new core financial management system is currently being developed to put the Department's payment, grant and contract, and audit tracking systems in the mainstream of business practice. This system will be fully in place by 1998.

We have used sound and up-to-date management practices to implement our new direct lending program, including the competitive selection of private contractors to handle loan processing and servicing. We have cut the time it takes for a student to get a loan from three weeks to one day, and we have received strong support from our customers. As you can see from Chart 8, we have reduced and simplified the student loan process in a dramatic way.

We have combined many separate, and often duplicative, program monitoring activities into a few coordinated monitoring teams, and refocused the emphasis of monitoring from compliance to performance.

We are integrating our various educational research laboratories and technical assistance centers into a coordinated support system for states and districts.

We have brought this agency into the Information Age. Today, the Department's has become one of the prime sources of information on the Internet for information about education and technology. As "PC Computing" magazine has observed, "There may well be more K through 12 information on the Net than anything else." Each week, for example, the Department's online library is visited by 15,000 people.

Our "Low Hanging Apples" Team has worked hard to identify unnecessary or burdensome day-to-day procedures, practices, or conditions in the Department that could be easily corrected by quick changes to internal administrative activities. In the last three years, over 500 such changes have been made.

For the first time in its history, the Department has issued Customer Service Standards to help ensure that our staff provide the services that our customers want and need. These standards require prompt, high-quality service; timely and accurate information; easy access to services and information; and a pledge to make customer input the driving force for organizational change.

And, we are strongly committed to the idea that you cannot spend taxpayer money and operate programs without conducting objective and rigorous program evaluations. We have used evaluation findings extensively in the past to shape our efforts to improve the quality of the services we provide.

This is why I am concerned that our entire evaluation budget for the Title I program and the School-to-Work Opportunities program is now part of the rescission package that the full House will vote on this week. You cannot really open up the regulatory process unless you have a strong evaluation system that keep you accountable for results. This rescission jeopardizes our whole effort to focus on performance and implement needed reforms.

Staying Focused on the Essentials

In conclusion, I would like to suggest that our efforts represent real change -- significant change -- from the way this Department has been managed in the past. We have been doing business differently.

I will do all I can to work with the Committee and the Congress as a whole to make the Department of Education more effective. We can always do a better job and I am open to any good, positive suggestions by Committee members to find real savings. But I want to urge this Committee to support our efforts to put these reforms in place and make them stick.

The last thing we need is to get side-tracked or caught up in some new organizational chart debate that will make the American people think we aren't focused on the essentials of raising standards, improving teaching and learning, and making sure their children are safe in school.

The American people have made education a national priority, and I see no diminishment of public support for investing in education. We need to be bipartisan and high-minded, to think long-term -- something that the American people expect of us when it comes to educating their children. We are not educating our children as Republicans, Democrats, or Independents, but as Americans who represent the future of our great country.

I will be happy to answer any questions. Thank you.

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