Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded. Mr. President, I rise this evening, along with many of my colleagues, to speak in opposition to the nomination of Betsy DeVos to be U.S. Secretary of…
Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that the order for the quorum call be rescinded.
Mr. President, I rise this evening, along with many of my colleagues, to speak in opposition to the nomination of Betsy DeVos to be U.S. Secretary of Education.
I oppose Mrs. DeVos, whom I had the chance to see at her confirmation hearing before the HELP Committee, for three basic reasons. I think the children and parents and teachers of this country are entitled to a Secretary of Education who is a champion for public education. They can be a supporter of choice, charters, vouchers, home schooling, but 90 percent of our kids go to public schools and they need a champion.
Second, I want a Secretary of Education who is pro-accountability and has the idea and view that if any school, whether public or private, receives taxpayer funding, they should be held to the same accountability standards for their students.
And third, very particularly, I am deeply concerned about Mrs. DeVos's commitment to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act which, in my view, is one of the best pieces of legislation that Congress ever passed.
In my 4-plus years in the Senate, I have not had a single issue that has generated so much effort to contact my office as the nomination of Betsy DeVos. Last week, we passed 25,000 contacts by constituents-- letters, emails, phone calls--and those have continued to ratchet up over the weekend with voice mails and more letters in our system and more emails coming into the office, and we have dealt with some contentious issues over the last 4 years.
For example, we shut the government down in October of 2013 because
of the inability of the House and the Senate to sit down at a conference table and work out a budget. That is a hugely important issue to the Nation, and especially in Virginia, where we have nearly 200,000 Federal employees. Even a shutdown of the government for 13 days didn't lead to as much contact in my office as the DeVos nomination.
I want to spend some time on those three reasons for which I will oppose her, but before I do, I wish to speak about why this is personally so very important to me. It is important to me because of the Commonwealth I represent. It is important to me because of the personal histories of my wife and I and our kids in the public schools of Kansas, where I grew up, and in the Commonwealth of Virginia. It is important to me because of my previous public service as a mayor and Governor, where education was the largest line item in the budgets of my city and my Commonwealth. Finally, it is important to me because I have recently been added as a member of the HELP Committee--Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committee--that shepherded this nomination through a challenging but very illuminating confirmation hearing a couple of weeks ago.
So let me start there. Why does this matter a lot to me? I will begin with Virginia.
Thomas Jefferson, when he was Ambassador to Paris in the early 1780s, wrote one of the great early works of American literature: ``Notes on the State of Virginia.'' It was an effort to describe the Virginia of the day but also his dreams for Virginia--his dreams for the Virginia economy and the Virginia society, even looking into the future. Jefferson became the first person to really lay out a vision for compulsory public education in the United States. He had a very detailed plan in that book for the division of the State into small school districts and that education would be compulsory at least for young people--men and women--who were White.
He used the phrase to promote his educational plan that is still--a paraphrase of it is still in the Virginia Constitution, talking about why public education was so important. He said: ``Progress in government and all else depends upon the broadest possible diffusion of knowledge among the general population.'' If you want to have a great government, if you want to have a great economy, if you want to have great happiness, what you should do is diffuse knowledge among the general population. It was for that reason that he said we needed a public education system.
Jefferson wouldn't have imagined an Internet and search engines, where all knowledge would be digitized and at the fingertips of people all around the planet, but that is kind of what he was talking about. If you diffuse knowledge among the general population, that is the best guarantee of the success of society, and so he laid out this very ambitious plan in the 1780s.
Sadly, Virginia didn't adopt it. The first early adopter of a compulsory public education I think was Massachusetts, and other States did as well. Jefferson stayed active in promoting education not just through his proposal for a K-12 system, but he also hatched the idea for the University of Virginia--one of the three things on his tombstone at Monticello: Author of the statute of religious freedom, author of the Declaration of Independence, founder of the University of Virginia. He did not even see fit to put that he was President of the United States or Governor of Virginia on his tombstone. Education was what he was passionate about and he founded the University of Virginia.
So we had some great educational thinkers in our Commonwealth who understood from our earliest days that education would be the key to our success.
Sadly, the great ideas weren't carried into practice, and Virginia, as was the case with many States in the country, ran a very segregated education system. When I was born in 1958--I am 58 years old right now; I turn 59 in 2\1/2\ weeks--you could not go to school in Virginia with somebody whose skin color was different. Women couldn't go to the University of Virginia, and many of our major universities were segregated on the grounds of sex. So we had a tradition where we recognized the power of education, but even though our great Founders did, we really thwarted the dreams and achievements of our students by not allowing them to be all they could be.
In 1951, a young high school student by the name of Barbara Johns was attending a segregated public high school in Prince Edward County, VA. She was 16 years old. Her school was overcrowded. It was poorly heated. She saw White students in her community having a great new high school built for them. Some kids in her high school, because of poor transportation, were killed in a bus accident, and in April of 1951 she said: I am tired of this. I am a kid, but I am not going to accept second-class citizenship, and she, encouraged one day with a fake note to the principal of her school to go to the administrative office--and then she gathered all the students in the auditorium at Moton High School in Farmville, VA, and said: We are going to walk out. We are going to walk out of our high school because we are tired of being treated as second-class students and we are going to call civil rights lawyers and ask them to represent us.
Barbara Johns and her classmates did that, and the Virginia case became part of Brown v. Board of Education that in 1954 led to the Supreme Court ruling saying that all children were entitled to an education; we couldn't segregate kids based on the color of their skin. It was the only one of these civil rights cases that was actually led by schoolkids advocating for themselves.
Barbara Johns shared the same vision that Thomas Jefferson did: Progress in government and all else depends upon the broadest possible diffusion of knowledge among the general population. And she stood up and said: I have the right to it just like everybody else does, and I am not going to take second-class status.
Well, the Prince Edward story is one of the most powerful stories in American educational history because after the Brown v. Board decision was resolved, many Southern States fought against integration for a number of years. In 1959, finally, 5 years after Brown, Federal courts ruled that you have to integrate your schools. If you have public schools, you have to integrate them, and Prince Edward County did something that no other jurisdiction in the United States did. They decided, OK, if we have public schools, we are required to treat kids equally based on the color of their skin. I have an idea: We will close all of our public schools. So Prince Edward County, for a period of 5 years, shut down all of their public schools. Do you know what they did? They used county funds and State funds to support vouchers to private schools, and they gave those vouchers to students who were White so they could go to private schools. They called them segregation academies and they set them up all over Virginia. In Prince Edward County, White students, if they were wealthy enough, could go to these academies with some State support, but poor White students and African- American students were deprived of education for 5 years.
I think you can start to see why supporting public education today is very important in Virginia because in my lifetime, we didn't. In my lifetime, we closed down public schools rather than let kids learn together if their skin colors were different. In my lifetime, we put State dollars into private schools so they could set up and allow segregation to go forward and avoid the law of the land that kids could learn together because of the color of their skin.
This was Virginia at the time I was born. It will not surprise you that a State that didn't want kids to learn together because their skin colors were different and a State that allowed schools to close down was a State with very poor educational performance. The Virginia in the 1950s, forget about test scores, forget about SAT scores, forget about AP exams, we were one of the worst States in the country in the percentage of our kids that attended school. It will not surprise you to know that in addition to having a poor record of attending school, our economy was bad. Those things are directly connected. If you don't value education, if you say kids can't learn together if their skin colors are different, if you say women can't go to major universities, your economy is not going to be very strong. So Virginia was a low- education, low-income State when I was born.
Today, it is very different. The officials in Virginia continued to battle to try to resist the integration of schools. My father-in-law, my wife's dad, was the first elected Republican Governor in the history of the Commonwealth, elected in 1969. He came into office in January of 1970. The previous Governors, who had been Democrats, had fought against integration, had used all kinds of tricks and strategies to avoid integrating schools, and my father-in-law, as Governor, took a historic stand. He said: In this Commonwealth, we are putting segregation behind us. We are now going to be an aristocracy of merit, regardless of race or creed, and he embraced a court busing order in the fall of 1970. He escorted my wife's sister into what had been a primarily African-American high school in downtown Richmond, and his wife, the First Lady, escorted my wife into a similar middle school. The picture of my father-in-law Linwood Holton, this courageous Republican Governor, and my sister-in-law Tayloe walking into the school on that day was the front page of the New York Times. It was the front page of the New York Times because in the civil rights era, there were so many pictures of Southern Governors standing in a schoolhouse door blocking kids who were African American from coming into schools with White students. That was a common picture. There is only one picture of a Southern Governor escorting a child--his child--into a school that was predominantly African American with a big smile on his face saying, finally, Virginia is going to embrace the vision of Thomas Jefferson. Education should be for everybody. We shouldn't segregate it based on race. During the time he was Governor, I think immediately before, we dropped the segregation based on gender in our States' colleges. And surprise, with those two moves, Virginia started to move. Virginia started to move from a low-education, poor State to a high- education State that now has top 10 median income.
Now we are a State known for our educational system. Now we are a State where we are always in the top five in the percentage of our kids who take and pass AP exams. Our SAT scores are very strong relative to other States. Our higher education system is viewed as very powerful, and it is because we, in the words of the letter of Corinthians, put away childish things. We put away segregation, we put away gender division, we put away using public dollars to support private academies so kids and their families could erase the law of the land, and as we did that, as we embraced the Jeffersonian vision to improve education, the State's economy improved, and now we are the top 10 in the country.
In my lifetime, no State in this country has moved further economically from low median income, back of the pack, to front of the pack than Virginia has, and our State has moved because we have embraced that everybody has God-given talent. We have embraced investments in our education system, beginning with this Barbara Johns walkout and then with the courageous Republican Governor and then Governors who followed--Democrats and Republicans, business leaders, teachers, communities leaders. We were late to the game, but we eventually embraced the Jeffersonian vision, and now we have an education system we can be proud of. It is a public education K-12 that educates about 1.2 million kids. We have great private schools. We have a vigorous home school network in Virginia. We don't do vouchers for private schools because of our painful history of the way vouchers were used to support segregation and avoid integration in the 1950s and 1960s, but we have a system that is public and private and home school and charter. It is a system that isn't perfect, it is a system we need to always battle to improve, but it is a system we are so proud of, we have gone from back of the pack to front of the pack.
We care about public education in my Commonwealth, and we do not take kindly to people who trash the state of public education today because we know how far we have come. We know how far we have come. That is who my State is. Personally, I went through 13 years of education K-12; 7 public education, 6 Catholic education. My wife Anne was educated in the public schools of Virginia--in Roanoke, Richmond, and Fairfax County--as were her siblings. We have been married for 32 years. Our three children have all graduated from Richmond public schools. They have had wonderful careers. I wrote a piece a few years ago when my daughter, my youngest, graduated called ``Forty Years as a Public School Parent'' because my three children spent a combined 40 years in the Richmond public schools.
The Richmond public schools are like a lot of school systems. There are 25,000 kids or so in an urban environment. It is a high-poverty school district; probably nearly 80 to 90 percent of the children in the school system are on free or reduced lunch. It is overwhelmingly a minority school system; three quarters or more of the students are minority. But my kids got a fantastic public education in these public schools of Virginia. They have all graduated and gone on, one to graduate from George Washington, an infantry commander in the Marine Corps; one to graduate from Carleton College, a visual artist; and one is about to graduate from New York University--all built on the foundation of a great public education in the public schools of my city.
I told you about my wife being part of the generation of kids who integrated the public schools of Virginia. Then, in the wonderful arc of history, she went from a kid living in the Governor's mansion and integrating Virginia's public schools to a First Lady working on foster care reform and recently stepped down as secretary of education in Virginia. I watched my wife grapple with exactly the same kinds of challenges at a State level that the current Secretary of Education will grapple with at the Federal level. I think I know a little bit about what it takes to do this job and to do it well.
In addition to our personal connections in the history of our State, let me talk about my professional connection to our schools and why I view this as such an important position. I mentioned that I have been a mayor and I have been a Governor. I am a little bit unusual. There have only been 30 people in the history of the United States who have been a mayor, a Governor, and a U.S. Senator. There have been a lot of Governors who are Senators, but being mayor will kill you. That is why there are so few who can do all three.
But when you are a mayor, as I was--the biggest line item in my budget was public schools. At the time I was mayor, we had about 53 public schools. I had a goal when I was mayor: I would go to a school every week. On a Thursday morning, I would go visit one of our schools to see what is being done. If it was the biggest line item, that means it was the most important thing. I wanted to make sure I understood not just my kids' schools but the schools that all the kids in our city went to. I wanted to know what was working and what wasn't.
Then I got elected to statewide office as Lieutenant Governor and Governor. I made a vow when I was Lieutenant Governor. Just like I went to a school a week when I was mayor until I visited them all, I made a vow when I was Lieutenant Governor that I would to go to a school in every one of Virginia's cities and counties to make sure I understood public education in my Commonwealth. I should have thought before I made that pledge because there are 134 cities and counties in Virginia. It took me 4\1/2\ years to travel to every one of our cities and counties to try to understand public education in my Commonwealth. I am not aware of anybody who has made that pledge, and after I did it, I can understand why nobody would ever make that pledge again. But I wanted to make sure that I understood not just the schools my own kids went to but the schools other kids went to all around our Commonwealth.
Northern Virginia and its high-tech suburbs, Wise County, where my wife is from, the coalfields of Appalachia, the tobacco-growing regions of Southside Virginia, manufacturing regions south of Richmond, oystermen and watermen and tourism on the Eastern Shore of Virginia--I wanted to see the schools in every part of my Commonwealth. I wanted to see them because I was writing budgets. The biggest line item in the State budget was education. The biggest line item in the city was for education. I didn't want to know our schools just from a budget or just from
a newspaper article. I wanted to know them from seeing them. I wanted to know them from seeing what came out of my kids' backpacks every day in terms of the curricula requirements and other things my kids would do in the Virginia public schools.
I am saying all this first because I am just trying to convey why this is so important. There is nothing that we do as a society that is more important to our future than the way we educate our young. The most precious resource in the world today is not oil, it is not water; it is talent. The cities or States or countries that know how to raise talent, grow talent, attract talent, reward talent, encourage talent, and celebrate talent are going to be the most successful because they will attract and grow and reward their own talent and bring other people here, but they will also attract the institutions that want to be around talent--great companies, great think tanks, great universities.
There is an inextricable causal link between your commitment to a system of public education and the success of your city or your State or your country. There is nothing we do in this Chamber or in the Federal Government that will be more likely to affect our economic outcome than the care with which we direct attention to our education system.
The last reason it is important to me is because of my new membership on the HELP Committee. I have had my family background. I care deeply about my State. I professionally worked on education, and my wife has too. But now I have a platform in the Senate. I tried to get on the committee right when I got here. I wasn't able to. I couldn't complain because I got great committees. I am on the Armed Services, Foreign Relations, and Budget Committees. But I really wanted to be on the HELP Committee because education has been at the core of what both my wife and I have tried to do in Virginia for the last 32 years. Now I am fortunate enough to be on the committee.
In one of my first meetings on the committee, we had a confirmation hearing for Betsy DeVos for Secretary of Education. We didn't have all the information at the time we had the hearing for Mrs. DeVos, but we had done our homework. I have a wonderful staffer, Krishna Merchant, who had helped prepare me. We had done our homework. We were put under some pretty tight time constraints: We each only got 5 minutes to ask questions. Five minutes isn't a lot of time when you are talking about something as important as the educational mission of the Federal Government to help our society succeed in educating our kids. I decided that in my 5 minutes, I wanted to ask Mrs. DeVos about three things. I wanted to ask her whether she could be a champion for public schools. That is a simple kind of a question. I wanted to ask her whether she believed in equal accountability for all schools if they receive taxpayer dollars. I wanted to ask her about her thoughts on the education of kids with disabilities because I care deeply about that topic but also because I believe that the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act points a direction for the future of American public education, and I wanted to see what she thought about it.
I had three test questions. I had three test questions for our nominee, and she did not satisfy me on any of them. Let me start with the first one.
Can you be a champion for our public schools?
There are 1.2 million kids in Virginia. Ninety percent of the children who are educated in this country are educated in public schools.
I am a huge supporter of private schools. I went to Catholic schools for 6 years. When I was Governor, I did a lot of great work with kids and their parents who chose homeschooling as an option. I like options. But just as a matter of fact, 90 percent of the kids in this country go to public schools, and it is going to be at that number or near it for as long as we can see.
In Richmond, we have some great private schools. Richmond has 1 million people, and so private schools can set up and find enough students. But there are corners of my Commonwealth where it is very hard to start a private school because there are just not enough students. That is not just the case for Virginia; my colleagues on the HELP Committee from Alaska or from Maine share this. There are parts of their States where, talking about vouchers for private schools, you might as well be talking Esperanto. That is just not going to happen in some of these very rural communities. So you have to have a champion for public schools.
In my research on Betsy DeVos, she gave a speech in 2015 that troubled me. It was a speech about the state of American public education. Here are two direct quotes, one of which is not the greatest language for the Congressional Record, but she said that when it comes to education, ``government really sucks.'' She also said public schools are a ``dead end.'' This is not something she said 10 or 20 years ago; this is something she said about a year and a half ago. This is her view of public education in this country. Betsy DeVos never attended public school for a day, never taught at a public school, and didn't send her children to public schools. That is not a disqualifier. I think you can have a great Secretary of Education who hadn't attended public schools, who had come from private schools and had good private school examples to learn from. I think that is fine. But if you have never attended public school for a day, if your children have never attended for a day, if you never taught at a public school, I kind of have the attitude: What gives the right to stand up and say public schools are a ``dead end''? Really? There are 1.2 million kids in Virginia. Ninety percent of kids in this country. Public schools are a ``dead end.'' Government education ``really sucks.'' What gives you the right to say that?
So I asked her some questions about these statements. I asked her: Is the morale of the workforce important? How important are teachers?
Teachers are very important.
Is morale an important thing for teachers? Should they have good morale to do their job?
Yes, absolutely.
Does the attitude of a leader affect the morale of people who are doing a job in the organization?
Absolutely.
Well, what does it say to a teacher teaching these tens of millions of kids in this country--or the 1.2 million kids in Virginia--what does it say to a teacher that the Federal Secretary of Education says that government education sucks and public schools are a dead end? I would submit, it transmits a horrible message.
I think we need a Secretary of Education who will empower kids, who will empower teachers, who will celebrate what is great about public education, who isn't afraid to point out what is bad about it, who isn't afraid to point out the things that need to be improved. But if you just paint it all with a broad brush and it is all bad, you are going to miss an awful lot of really good things about American public education.
I sometimes get down on some of my colleagues on my side about this. There is kind of an anti-business attitude: Businesses are bad. There are some bad businesses, but most businesses are really good. You shouldn't paint with a broad brush, whether talking about business or any institution, but you definitely should not paint with a broad brush and say that public schools in this country are a dead end when you have hundreds of thousands of great teachers and counselors and busdrivers and cafeteria workers and people going to work every day. They are not going there because their salaries are great; they are going there because they care deeply about students, and they want to either teach them or in other ways impress life lessons upon them so their kids can have happy lives.
So the first test I found Betsy DeVos wanting in my examination of her in the HELP Committee was that simple one. If you cannot be a champion for public schools, you should not be Secretary of Education.
When we were having a discussion in the committee, some of the colleagues who were kind of coming back at us a little bit were saying: Well, OK, we get it. You are against charters, or you are against vouchers, or you are against Betsy DeVos because she wants to expand choice.
But most of us are from States that have significant choice. I pointed out that Virginia doesn't do vouchers, but
we have a very robust homeschooling network. I have been a huge supporter of it. Choice is fine, but you have to be a champion for public schools, and if you are not, you shouldn't be Secretary of Education. That is reason No. 1.
Second, I wanted to interview Betsy DeVos about accountability. Accountability. Should schools be accountable for the success of their students, for outcomes? This is very important, and it is very important to get this right.
Sometimes my wife, as secretary of education in a State, would sometimes tear her hair out about the Federal mandates and strings and regulations and rules. The HELP Committee did a good job last year before I was on the committee rewriting No Child Left Behind--the Every Student Succeeds Act--to try to reshift the balance a little bit to allow cities, counties, and States more flexibility in trying to determine how to educate their students, while holding them accountable for outcomes. I wanted to ask Betsy DeVos: Will you hold all schools accountable for outcomes--particularly because when he was a candidate, President Trump said some things about what he wanted to do with public education. President Trump as a candidate said that he wanted to take $20 billion of Federal money and give it to private schools to allow them to run voucher programs of the kind that Mrs. DeVos has promoted in Michigan, Indiana, and other States. That is a lot of money, $20 billion. That is money that is taken out of the allocation for public schools. If you take $20 billion out of public schools, especially in some rural areas--in my view, having done a lot of budgets and worked on this as a mayor and Governor--you are potentially going to weaken the public schools.
(Mrs. ERNST assumed the Chair.)
I wanted to understand from Mrs. DeVos how we are going to do this. You take the $20 billion out of the public schools; I think that is going to weaken public schools. What I wanted to ask her is, When you give the $20 billion to private schools, as President Trump wants to do--and I asked her this question over and over again. I think I asked her four times. If you give Federal taxpayer dollars to private schools, will you hold them equally accountable to the public schools that are getting this money, equally accountable for the outcomes of the students, for the need to report disciplinary incidents, for working on important issues like education and kids with disabilities? Will you hold any school that gets Federal money equally accountable? I asked her this.
She said: I believe in accountability.
I said: That is not my question. I believe in accountability too. But I am asking you, Should you hold all schools equally accountable if they receive Federal taxpayer money?
Well, I believe in accountability.
I asked her again, Should you hold schools equally accountable?
Well, they are not all held equally accountable now.
I am not asking about what you think about the situation right now. I am asking you what you think is the right policy. Is it the right policy, if we are going to give $20 billion to private schools, to hold all schools equally accountable?
Well, I believe in accountability.
She wouldn't answer my question.
I phrased it a different way. I said: Let me tell you this, Mrs. DeVos. I believe all schools that get Federal money should be held equally accountable. Do you agree with me?
She said: No.
She doesn't believe that schools that get Federal money should be held equally accountable. I have a big problem with that. The whole goal of the choice movement is to provide choices so that students can learn in environments that are best suited to them. Choice is also supposed to promote some competition that will encourage everybody to up their game.
If you hold the public schools accountable while you are taking some of their money away and you give that money to private schools and you don't hold them accountable, you are not promoting fair competition. You are not promoting student outcomes. You are basically taking money away from public schools and giving it to private schools.
Again, in Virginia, we had a painful experience with that--closing schools down, defunding public schools, and giving money to private schools. That is a second reason that is very, very important to me. I don't think that she supports the notion of equal accountability for both public and private schools that receive taxpayer funding.
If we are going to do the proposal that President Trump says--we haven't seen a budget yet, but we may see one at the end of February, early March. If we are going to suddenly start taking billions and billions of dollars away from public schools and giving them to private schools, I want to know they are going to be equally accountable.
The third issue that I asked Mrs. DeVos about was education and kids with disabilities. Let me tell you why this one is so important to me. It is important because it is right. It is also important because it points a path to the future of education in this country.
Before the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act was passed in 1975, we had hundreds of thousands of children with a gap between their potential and what they were doing because schools were very spotty, communities were very spotty, States were very spotty in providing meaningful educational opportunities to kids who had disabilities.
Generation after generation of kids would go to school, but they wouldn't get an education that was tailored to their needs. They would finish their education not having the skills they needed to be all they could be. If you think about that collective delta between what these kids could do and what they could have done had they had the best education, it is tragic. That was the genesis behind the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act in 1975.
It is as if we have all these children who are capable of so much more if this society will only work to help them achieve, and the core of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act is a simple thing. If a student is identified as having a disability of some kind, the student gets an IEP, an individualized education plan. If you have a diagnosed disability, then you are entitled under Federal law to an IEP where you get an education that is tailored to your particular circumstance.
My three kids went through the Richmond Public Schools. One had an IEP for a couple of years. That is pretty common. It is pretty common that you get an IEP, and with a tailored education, you don't need it for your whole 13 years of K-12 education. You need it for a couple of years of speech therapy or a couple of years of something else. Then, within a few years, you are completely mainstreamed, and you don't need IEP anymore. The individualized attention helps you climb up and then be completely competitive with your colleagues and with your peers.
There are other students who need an IEP for their entire educational career, and that is fine too. They are entitled to it under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act.
What it has meant from 1975 to today--it is 40-plus years--is that this massive cohort of kids with special needs are not in the shadows. They are not shunted aside. They are not pushed into classes where the expectations for them are low. Instead, they are challenged to be all they can be, and they are happier, and their families are happier, and society is better off as a result. This is a very important thing, and I know this to be the case.
Every family in this country has somebody in the family with a disability--or will at some point in the life of a family--and every person in this country has a friend with a disability. The issues dealing with the education of students with disabilities are important morally, but they are important because this is about our friends and our family and our neighbors.
The other thing about the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act that I find so powerful is I think it has been the best single idea about K-12 education we have come up with. It is better than testing. It is better than choice. It is better than all the other strategies because the nub of the idea is you should have an individualized education. It raises the question, Why do you have to have a diagnosed disability to get an individualized education?
With computer technology and so many other tools that a teacher can
use in a class of 20 or even 30 students, there is an awful lot that you can do to tailor the education to each individual student. I was a teacher. I ran a vocational school in Honduras that taught kids to be welders and carpenters. We individualized the education. I put together a list of 60 carpentry projects from the simplest one to the most complicated one, and all the students started on the same project the first day of school, but then they proceeded at their own pace. Only when they did the first one to the carpenter's satisfaction could they go to the second one. That meant it was individualized because everybody worked at a different pace until they got it right and they could move to the next one. That is what the IDEA basically is: Education should be individualized to the student, and more and more, that is what we are doing in education all around the country.
I asked Mrs. DeVos questions about the IDEA because of the fairness and justice issues for students with disabilities but also because the notion of individualized education is the greatest single idea out there that will ultimately be the idea that I think will be the revolutionary next step in American public education.
I asked her a pretty simple question. Once again, if the President pursues his plan to take $20 billion and invest it in private schools, should the private schools receiving those dollars have to follow the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act? Should they have to work with students with disabilities, diagnose the disability they have, and then offer them a fair and appropriate education tailored to that disability?
It is a pretty simple question. You get the money from the Feds. Should you have to follow the law? Remember, this is a Federal civil rights law. It applies to every ZIP Code in this country. It applies to every school district in this country.
My question of Mrs. DeVos was, If a private school gets Federal money, should they have to follow this important civil rights law?
Her answer to me was: I think the States should make that decision. I think that should be up to the States.
I said: It is a Federal civil rights law. It applies everywhere.
The States should make the decision.
We struggled in my State of Virginia with States' rights arguments because after the Supreme Court decided on another really important civil rights principle, you couldn't segregate schools. Barbara Johns' walkout of Moton High School, and Brown v. Board of Education--and now it is the law of the land. You can't segregate kids on basis of race. It is unconstitutional under the 14th Amendment.
The leaders of my State stood up in court for years and said: You can't tell us what to do; education is a States' rights thing. We don't have to follow the Supreme Court. We don't have to follow civil rights statutes at the national level. We believe in States' rights.
States' rights arguments have been used throughout our history to rebut the notion that Congress or the Supreme Court can pass civil rights laws of applicability all around the country.
I was surprised. I did not know what Mrs. DeVos's history would be, unlike reading her speeches where she says the public schools are a dead end and government is soft. I didn't know what her position would be on the IDEA. When she told me that a Federal civil rights law should be a State decision, I was very, very troubled. I was surprised.
I blurted out: Well, what do you mean it should be a State decision? If you are a parent and you have kids with disabilities and the State isn't treating them right, you are supposed to move around the country until you find a State that treats your kids well? You are not entitled to have the law apply to you in the community where you live and you are going to have to move somewhere until you find a State that is going to treat your kid OK?
I think it should be a State decision.
Later on in the hearing, one of my other colleagues, Maggie Hassan, the Senator from New Hampshire, who has a child with cerebral palsy, followed up on this, and Mrs. DeVos tried to back out of it: Well, I wasn't sure we were talking about a Federal or State law.
I was very, very troubled by this. I was troubled by it again because of the peculiar history that we have had in Virginia and other States where people have used States' rights arguments to try to trump Federal civil rights statutes.
I would say that the answers to the questions about students with disabilities became kind of a pivotal part of that hearing because both Senators Collins and Murkowski, who have since said they are going to vote against the nominee, at that hearing and then in the markup session we had last week talked about that as one of the things that they found troubling.
Another member of our committee, who is supporting Mrs. DeVos, Senator Isakson of Georgia, also found it of enough concern that he had a written exchange with her. He wrote her a letter and asked her a question: Do you really understand what the IDEA is?
She wrote a letter back, which I have had the opportunity to review, but I still don't believe that the letter she wrote demonstrates a real understanding for this issue of the rights of kids with disabilities.
This is a really important point. Some of the States that have voucher programs--we don't have these programs in Virginia for the reasons I have described, but there are States that do--Indiana, Florida. Some of the States that have voucher programs and receive public money for kids make children sign away their rights under the IDEA as a condition of being admitted to the school. You want to come to our private school and you want to use voucher money to do it? We will let you in, but you have to sign saying you will never take us to court for violating your rights, for not treating you fairly under the IDEA, and only if you sign such a waiver, will we allow you to come to our school. I just don't think that is fair. I don't think that is right. Especially if we are now going to give $20 billion of Federal money to private schools, I think they should have to follow the law.
Many private school principals in Richmond--I talked to them about this issue long before the hearing on Mrs. DeVos, and they are pretty candid often with parents of kids with disabilities. My longtime secretary in my office--who has worked for me for nearly 30 years--has a daughter with a disability. She was going to parochial schools for a while in the early grades, but as she was progressing up into late elementary school, there just weren't the programs in the parochial school that were tailored to her particular situation, partly because the school was just too small. In a really small school, it is tough to do education of kids with disabilities. You have to have some particular training to be able to do it. The difference of a small K-8 parochial school and a larger county school is pretty big. The principal was candid and honest in a way that my secretary appreciated and I did too. ``We just don't have the kind of educational program for somebody of your daughter's special needs that the public high school has. You really should think about that.'' My secretary agreed and made the change to the public school. It was actually a better environment because the resources--which are not cheap--the resources to help do disability-specific education were there.
Imagine now what would happen if we start to invest money in private schools, and we don't make them follow the disabilities law. Follow this through. We take $20 billion away from public schools. That is weakening public schools' ability to do a lot of things, including educating kids with disabilities. We give the money to private schools. We don't require them to follow the Disabilities Act. So families--like many we know--say, I might like to go to private school, but there is not enough appropriate education, so I am not going to. I am going to stay with the public school. So we have just taken the dollars away from the public school, but all the kids with the significant needs, the needs that are really costly to deal with, are going to stay in the public school. It is a spiral that is a bad spiral.
We will defund you, but all the kids with the significant needs that are costly, they are going to stay. That will dilute and hurt the quality of the education they will get, while the private school is getting the money and not having to follow the requirements of the IDEA. They get the money. They don't have to be equally accountable for it. They don't have to follow the requirements of the IDEA. This is very troubling stuff.
Those were the three questions I got to ask her in 5 minutes. Can you be a champion of public schools, do you believe that any school receiving Federal taxpayer dollars should be equally accountable for student outcomes, and should schools receiving Federal taxpayer dollars have to follow the requirements of the IDEA? With each of those questions, I was prepared to get an answer I liked, but I got an answer I didn't like.
I don't think Mrs. DeVos can be a champion of public schools. She has told me she doesn't think all schools should be equally accountable to receive Federal taxpayer dollars, and she is not committed to schools that are receiving Federal moneys following the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. This explains to me why the volume of calls into my office over this have been so high--higher than the government shutdown, higher than any other nominee, higher than any other issue. We have been at war with ISIS for two and a half years. I have been trying to make the case that we shouldn't be at war without a vote of Congress. I get a lot of calls in my office about it, but it is not ringing off the hook like it has been ringing off the hook with respect to the DeVos nomination. While I credit Mrs. DeVos for being philanthropic, and I credit her for caring about kids--that is very sincere. I see that in her philanthropy and her care. I don't see in her an understanding of the role that public schools play for 90 percent of our kids. Using arguments like States' rights arguments, that brings up a real painful history in my State. I don't want to see that return and especially be at the pinnacle of educational policy.
I mentioned the volume of calls we are receiving. We all asked ourselves in the office, what has explained this volume? I think the thing that explains the volume is the disability issue. Because a lot of folks with disabilities are not used to their issues ever being made front and center in anything. It matters so much to them. As we said, every family has somebody with a disability or who will have a disability. People know folks with disabilities. But the disability community--which are Democrats, Republicans, Independents and every ZIP Code in this country--they are not used to their issue being the front and center issue in something. They are more used to being ignored or being marginalized.
At this hearing, when the disability issue became front and center--I think that is one of the reasons the uptick of concern has been so significant, because people who otherwise are not that into politics or otherwise not that into who is the Cabinet Secretary going to be, there is one thing they do know, which is they want Americans with disabilities to receive equal treatment. They want them to be all they can be. It is good for their happiness and good for our economy and good for our society.
I was honored last week to write an op-ed about this issue with a former member of this body, Senator Harkin of Iowa, somebody the Presiding Officer knows very well. Senator Harkin was one of the congressional authors of the Americans with Disabilities Act. Senator Harkin was a champion of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. All the issues surrounding Americans with disabilities were very close to his heart. We really miss that because he was such a champion, and I am not sure anybody can really fill his shoes on that issue. But we wrote an op-ed about this disabilities point in Time magazine that has gotten a lot of attention because it touches every family.
I will start to recap a little bit now as I await my colleague who is going to be following me. I will just go back to where I started. This is not a minor matter. It is a little bit unusual to be on the floor at 10 to 4 in the morning. It is a little unusual to be speaking 30 hours in a row. I had some folks ask me: Why would you do 30 hours of speeches on this? I said: Well, don't you think the Secretary of Education is important enough--education in our country is important enough to spend a day and a half, a day and a quarter talking about it?
I go back to that Jeffersonian vision: Progress in government and all else depends upon the broadest possible diffusion of knowledge among the general population. The United States, beginning in the early 1900s--then after the GI bill it really accelerated. We became the educational leader in the world. We weren't necessarily that during the 1800s--Germany, other nations, England were--but we really became the educational leader. We made education available to all. The GI bill helped democratize higher education and make it available to many more.
Our education system is still one of our crown jewels. The number of foreign students who come to our country to go to college, compared to the reverse, is still a tribute to the fact our education system is so strong. I haven't really talked about higher education at all. That is also within the province of the Secretary of Education. The basic point I am making is, of anything we do that is about whether we will be successful as a country tomorrow, education is key. That is why we are taking 30 hours to dig into issues of concern.
I put three questions on the table. The three I put on the table are all about K-12 education. I had colleagues at the hearing who asked searching questions about higher education, the cost of higher education, student loan debt, what is the right way to deal with debt, how do we make college less expensive. These are critical issues too. I am very passionate about a career in technical education. My dad was a welder, and I ran a school in Honduras that taught kids to be carpenters and welders. This is a big and important job. It is such a big and important job, it would be wrong to expect any person to be an expert on all of it. That would not be a fair hurdle to set for somebody. You are going to have to come in and bring expertise in and hire good people to work with you, but I think there are some fundamental threshold questions: Can you support and be a champion for public education? That seems fundamental. Do you believe in equal accountability for everybody that gets Federal dollars? That seems fundamental. Do you believe that kids with disabilities should be able to get this kind of education? That seems fundamental. And in those areas, Mrs. DeVos did not succeed.
I voted for a number of the Cabinet nominees of President Trump. I am not standing here taking the position that I am voting against all of them. In fact, I voted for quite a few because even if they would not be people who I would nominate, President Trump is the President. He is entitled to have his own team, but the advice and consent function of the Senate means, in certain cases, if people do not seem to meet the threshold criteria for being able to do the job and do it well--that is how you exercise advice and consent and express opposition to a nominee. That is what I am going to do in this case.
I yield the floor.
Madam President, I suggest the absence of a quorum.