Mr. LIEBERMAN. I thank the Chair. I thank my friend and colleague from Louisiana.
Mr. President, I commend my friend and colleague from Louisiana, Senator LANDRIEU, and express my strong support for her amendment to better target our Federal education funding to the schools and children who need it most. I know from our collaboration on our comprehensive new Democrat education reform plan, the Three R´s legislation, that Senator LANDRIEU´s commitment to rescuing failing schools and providing every child with a quality education is unsurpassed in this body.
I also want to thank my friend and colleague from Arkansas for her devotion to this cause, and for her very eloquent statement on behalf of this amendment.
As Senator LANDRIEU and many others have rightly pointed out, we are facing an educational crisis in our poorest urban and rural communities, where learning too often is languishing, where dysfunction is too often the norm, and where as a result too many children are being denied the promise of equal opportunity. It is just not right or acceptable that 35 years after the passage of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, that the average 17-year-old black and Latino student reads and performs math at the same level as the average 13-year-old Caucasian American student. We must begin to respond to this emergency with a greater sense of urgency, and that is exactly what the Landrieu amendment aims to do, infusing $1 billion in new funding for FY 2001 into the Title I program for disadvantaged students and allocating those resources to the districts with the highest concentrations of poverty.
We are currently spending $8 billion a year on Title I. No one in this body questions the value or mission of Title I, which was enacted in 1965 to compensate for local funding inequities and help level the playing field for low-income students. But the unpleasant truth is that this well-intentioned program is not nearly as focused on serving poor communities as it is perceived to be, leaving many poor children without any aid or hope whatsoever.
According to the Department of Education, 58 percent of all schools received at least some Title I funding, including many suburban schools with small pockets of low-income students. Of the 42 percent that don´t receive any Title I support, a disturbing number have high concentrations of poor students. In fact, one out of every five schools with poverty rates between 50 percent and 75 percent do not get a dime from Title I. Let me repeat that startling statistic, because the first time I heard it I did not believe it-one of every five schools that have half to three quarters of its children living in poverty receives no Title I funding. None.
How does this happen? The formulas we are using to allocate these funds purposely spreads the money thin and wide. Any school district with at least 2 percent of its students living below the poverty level qualifies for funding under Title I´s Basic Grants formula, through which 85 percent of all Title I funding is distributed. The rest of the money is channeled through the Concentration Grant formula, which is only marginally more targeted than the Basic formula, providing aid to districts with as few as 15 percent of their students at the poverty level. As a result, almost every school district in the country-9 out of every 10-receives some aid from this critical aid pool.
In fairness, Congress did make an effort to correct this imbalance in 1994 through the last reauthorization of the ESA. We approved the creation of a new Targeted formula, which puts a much heavier weight on poverty and therefore would direct a much higher percentage of funds to schools with higher concentrations of poor children. The key word there, of course, is would. Congress has unfortunately never appropriated funding through the Target formula. Not a penny, Instead, we have perpetuated a system that promises one thing and delivers another, that succeeds in letting us bring home funding to each of our districts but fails to meet its fundamental goal of helping those most in need.
That is exactly what this amendment introduced by the junior Senator from Louisiana will do. Once again, I congratulate her on her leadership. This is an amendment which would put our money where the needs generally are. I urge my colleagues to support it.
I thank the Chair. I yield the floor.