Bob Schaffer: “One of the expert witnesses we heard from today, Dr. Karen Effrem, who is an M.D., a pediatrician, put that figure at…”

“One of the expert witnesses we heard from today, Dr. Karen Effrem, who is an M.D., a pediatrician, put that figure at about 70 percent Federal mandate percentage. She said, paraphrasing her words: essentially, what Washington is doing to States is providing somewhere around 6 to 7 percent of the total funding that actually gets to a classroom, and in exchange for that is attaching about 75 percent of all the rules, regulations, and mandates that a local school has to deal with. So the effect of the Clinton-Gore administration in Washington on education is just as the gentleman from Wisconsin (Mr. Ryan) has described. It has been one to pump more cash into the Department of Education, not to classrooms, but to the Department, the bureaucracy, to spread that bureaucracy wider and to more and more Federal programs, none of which work very well. I might add that the end result at the end of the day is that the few important legitimate programs that Washington ought to be concerned about, Individuals with Disabilities Education Act being primary, is diffused in this morass of waste, fraud, and abuse of bureaucratic expenditures.”