Patsy T. Mink: “this amendment is offered out of my very great concern that what we have established by law and what we have built upon…”

“this amendment is offered out of my very great concern that what we have established by law and what we have built upon in H.R. 1 is a formula for the determination of when schools are deemed not to be providing adequate education to the children. They are referred to in a wide variety of ways as failing schools or schools that are not performing up to the standards. Consistent with this policy of trying to bring in accountability to the provision of Federal funds, we have provided for an additional number of tests from third grade to eighth grade, in an effort to try to maintain a steady pool of information as to whether the schools are failing or not. There are processes developed in H.R. 1 to promote efforts that we feel would help to bring these schools up to standard and allow the children to proceed and to achieve in the basic courses of reading and literacy and in math and science. One of the things that we have always discussed in our deliberations about failing schools is that it is the lack of resources in most cases that compound the problems, not just the lack of funding, but the fact that they cannot attract into these schools qualified teachers. They are not connected with the Internet. They lack the assistance of various resource teachers. They do not have the textbooks. They are in remote areas which compounds the problems.”