Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Hayes), my good friend. Mr. Speaker, I spent 20 years in public education at the university level training young men and women to practice lifelong learning. The field that I was…
Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Hayes), my good friend.
Mr. Speaker, I spent 20 years in public education at the university level training young men and women to practice lifelong learning. The field that I was a part of was in computer and information systems, and I began that adventure in the early 1970s. Between the early 1970s and 2000 the industry changed virtually every 18 months. So it was a constant struggle to keep up with the technology, to keep up with the concepts and the techniques, first as a practicing professional but later as a faculty member at Georgia Southern, to be able to train my students in a discipline that was a constant change.
That is what we face in our Nation today. That is what we face across the spectrum.
I think what I want to talk about tonight, I appreciate my good friend from Georgia (Mr. Gingrey) in his work on the Committee on Education and the Workforce with me and the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Hayes). The bills that came out of the House today were important and significant on higher education. I was glad to be a part of that for both teacher training enhancement, which included a very significant component on centers of excellence for our minority serving schools, but also the Priorities and Graduate Studies Act, which allow us to focus on math and science and special education, those components of our society and our educational environment that we have, unfortunately, neglected all too frequently over the last number of years and we have fallen behind by any measure on world standards. We have got to improve in our education department.
But tonight as a part of lifelong learning I want to shift gears and talk about a concept that maybe does not get as much attention as it should. Many families in America, when faced with the choice of sending their child to a public school, they feel that maybe their needs cannot be met as well as an alternative or two. I want to talk about those alternatives.
We seem to be reinventing the way America learns, how young people are prepared to face today's society. We have alternatives from our public schools to our private schools to our charter schools to our home schools to even our cyber schools. Especially in the technology world, the cyber schools are becoming a major component of that.
But tonight I want to talk about home school, charter schools. I have home schooled constituents in my district, I have charter schools in my district, and there are many reasons why a parent and a family might look to that alternative.
It is amazing, self-learning has really been around a long time. If you go back and you kind of look at the lore of learning and the achievement by individuals who had limited formal education, if any at all, Thomas Edison, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Benjamin Franklin, the Wright brothers, Helen Keller, even Albert Einstein, all self-learners, all life-long learners.
It is amazing that we are beginning to come back to the concept of a family taking responsibility for their child's education, to become a partner in the education process.
I am a teacher, and I have tremendous respect and regard for those in the teaching profession. The dream of the teacher is to help their students achieve their dreams. So that a dream of a teacher is to make the dreams of that student come true, but the partner with the teacher is the parent. And all studies are going to tell us that when parents are involved, students learn. There is more discipline in the challenge. There is more involvement. There is a better environment for learning.
Just recently the Augusta Chronicle in my district in Georgia, the 12th district of Georgia, ran a marvelous article about a young lady who was in a school that failed to meet its annual yearly projects progress as a part of No Child Left Behind. She had a choice. She and her family looked at the amenities, and she changed schools within the public system in Richmond County. And this article went on to describe the positives that were associated with that and the achievement that she received and the way in which she was able to advance so much more, basically because of lack of discipline in the environment that she was having to move from.
Charter schools and home schools oftentimes are able to handle those challenges more effectively. There is a charter school in my district in Savannah, Georgia, that I visited not long ago; and they have two fundamental expectations: appropriate behavior by the student and parental involvement in every case. Now all of a sudden many of the things and the challenges that we face have become of limited concern.
Sometimes parents choose to home school because the alternatives may instill values that they do not agree with. They may instill values that run contrary to those of the traditional family. They kind of feel caught up and bound by their tax dollars to schools that may not meet their child's needs.
Over the last two decades home schools have grown from about 200,000 to over 2 million; and you have to ask yourself, why has there been such a rapid growth in this area? Well, in 1998, there was a study done that in every subject, in every subject in every grade level, K through 12, home school students, are you ready, scored significantly higher than their public or private school counterpart. Some 25 percent of all home school students at the time that they were enrolled at either grade level or beyond, they had an average ACT score of 23, compared to a public ACT score of 21.
Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, Alan Greenspan rejected the Democratic notion that the more money we put into a school the better the school performs. His comment says, ``Putting money in is not necessarily an accurate measure of the output. We are falling behind by any measure in our secondary schools.''
Greenspan went on to say, we have to increase the skills every year, every year, or we will fall behind, we will fall behind.
One of the things that I want us to talk about tonight and maybe share with the rest of House is that how can we take the lessons we have learned from home schooling and apply them to improving our public education system. Primarily, the exponential growth in home schooling is primarily a result of bad public policies and programs in our Nation.
We have unfortunately turned a deaf ear to parental input and the voice of the parent. We have not given it its proper respect and consideration. We have tended to push the parent aside, as opposed to making them a partner. I will tell you that the best schools in my district, the highest-performing schools in my district are those who have active parental involvement in every grade in every classroom.
The President has placed a strong agenda on education and the pillars the educational reform pillars, accountability and testing. We all know No Child Left Behind has four fundamentals: accountability and testing, flexibility and local control, funding that works, funding that provides a return for the investment, and, finally, expanded parental options so that we can indeed move America forward.
We have to close the achievement gap. We have to have a first-class education around our Nation. The report cards that are coming out in Georgia now that show the progress that our schools have made, and they have made great progress. I have been in every school district, in many of the schools in my district, and I will tell you they are making great progress, and I want to congratulate them.
We still have a lot of work to do. But the point is, we have to have qualified teachers. We have to have committed parents. We have to have the fundamentals of education in every environment.
We are turning the corner on success, and we are beginning to see a return on our efforts when it comes to public education. I am proud of that achievement. If we are going to become lifelong learners, if we are going to be able to move from this decade into the next
and the ones beyond, we must all recognize that lifelong learning is a fundamental requirement in today's society.
So if you look at the experiences in higher education, if you look at the experiences in our great technical colleges, if you look at the experiences in our secondary schools, we have to realize that we must continue to improve at every turn in order to achieve a competitiveness and a quality standard second to none in our globe.
Mr. Speaker, there is a significant part of our agenda for America to ensure that no child is left behind regardless of their background, socio-economic, their ethnicities where they happen to live, but we also have to build that mechanism and that desire for learning.
One last illustration. Last week, during the district work week, I met with a family out of Hinesville, Georgia. They were in the military. They had a son, fine young man, 11 years old. He was in a school system that unfortunately was not meeting his needs. Not because he was too slow but because, in reality, he was advanced. He had taken the SAT score at 11. He scored 1,040 on an SAT. This young man had special needs, but they were special needs to be challenged. He was bored. He was bored in a 5th grade classroom when he could perform at 7th and 8th grade levels.
I sat there and I listened to the story, and I have got to work on this challenge. But we do not need to leave any child behind, but we do not need to hold any child back either, because there are folks out there who can really achieve.
After spending a half an hour with this young man and with his father and mother, by the way, his father is in the U.S. Army, Third Infantry Division at Fort Stewart, Georgia. He just came back from a year in Iraq. And I sat there and I listened to this young man and the challenges he faced.
I asked him to do one thing, do not lose your love of learning, because that is what will sustain you throughout your entire life.
We must all have a love for learning, and he assured me that he loved to learn, and that even though in a traditional classroom he might be a bit bored, that he could make up for that as a self-learner, and that is what we must all be.
I want to thank the gentleman from North Carolina (Mr. Hayes), thank the committee for focusing on learning and recognizing the fact that learning is an integral part of all of our lives and we must do it every day if we are to remain competitive.
Mr. Speaker, if the gentleman would yield, I had an opportunity at the university environment to periodically have assignments in the international setting. I spent 6 months in Australia, and my sons were in the fourth grade and the seventh grade, and even though they went to Australian schools, my wife would tutor them in their U.S. subjects.
Four years later, we were in Sweden. My sons did not speak Swedish, but yet their instruction was in Swedish, and my wife, again, assumed the role of parent/teacher, and my sons, because of my wife's dedication, never missed a beat.
Now, not all families can do this. Not all families would select that option. But I think one of the most important things we see in this model is commitment to learning by the family unit and a commitment to assisting their children in achieving very, very positive results; and once that love of learning is instilled, then it carries through for a lifetime.