Providing for Consideration of H.R. 2218, empowering Parents Through Quality Charter Schools Act, and Providing for Consideration of H.R. 1892, Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2012

Floor Speech

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Mr. POLIS. I yield myself such time as I may consume.

Mr. Speaker, today we will be discussing two good bills. Both bills under this rule are bipartisan bills. One will support students across this Nation, give parents better choices, improve the quality of our charter schools in our country; and so, too, we will improve and enhance the intelligence gathering of our Nation that keeps us safe under the authorization bill.

The Quality Charter Schools Act will improve our global economic standing by improving student access to quality and effective public charter schools.

I find, Mr. Speaker, sometimes it is necessary to help educate some of our colleagues on the definition of what charter schools are. Charter schools are established by school districts or other authorizers. They are public schools and have to accept all students equally. The concept of these schools is that they have site-based management. So, again, they are public schools with site-based management. That, in brief, is the definition of a charter school.

Now, that is not better or worse than a district running a school. It can be better; it can be worse. And as we look across the country, we see examples of good charter schools and bad charter schools. Just because something is a charter school certainly doesn't mean it is good.

What we've tried to do with this bill is improve the quality of the authorizing practices of the States and the districts as they go into: A, initially evaluating charter schools and making sure they serve at-risk students and show demonstrated success in closing the achievement gap; and, B, making sure that they follow through on what their charter contains.

A charter is a synonym for a contract. Effectively, these schools operate through contracts with public authorities, namely authorizers, States, State charter institutes, regions, and school districts, and they are able to operate under those contracts and fulfill their role as public schools.

What are charter schools not? And I sometimes hear from my colleagues, is this corporate control of our schools? Is this some for-profit thing? No, it is actually irrelevant to that discussion, the discussion of charter schools.

Sometimes for-profit companies are brought in as vendors to run schools. Now, this can happen with school districts just as surely as it can happen with charter schools. Some of the larger instances of this have been school

districts because, of course, charter schools are much more mom and pop. But that is a separate discussion about what vendors can and cannot be brought in to actually run public schools.

In the State of Colorado, as an example, we don't allow any for-profit institutions to hold a charter. Now, certainly we don't restrict charters to school districts, and they bring in a variety of vendors. I think every school district in the country uses private, for-profit textbook vendors as an example. But we would be against managing out of D.C. what vendors they bring in. In fact, charter schools and school districts have great discretion about what vendors they use.

But what this bill does is it effectively ups the ante on the accountability, the oversight, and also assisting with the growth of quality charter schools. Many charter schools across the country focus on particular areas of learning or emphasize particular aspects of curriculum. We have excellent art charter schools, college prep charter schools, Montessori charter schools, core knowledge, English language acquisition, outdoor learning, and education charter schools.

They can function more independently than a large district because they do have site-based management that allows for operational flexibility. They can have different school calendars, different school days, and different curriculums. This freedom allows the charters to function autonomously in areas that can benefit children's success in school.

And again, with experimentation, not everything you try is going to work. And, of course, for every example of a charter school that successfully serves at-risk kids, there are also counterexamples of charter schools that are doing as poorly, or more so, than some of the failing neighborhood schools that the children were in before.

I have direct experience founding and running several charter schools in Colorado that filled particular education niches. I founded and served as superintendent of New America School. When I saw that many school districts in my State were dropping funding for older students that were still learning English and there weren't the types of programs to keep new immigrants in high school through a diploma, I approached several school districts about approving a charter school for this population, for 16- to 21-year-old English language learners. We were granted several charters. New America School now operates in Colorado and New Mexico and has served thousands of English language learners, helping them achieve a high school diploma through meeting their real-life needs.

Again, we really worked backwards from where the customers were. Why weren't these students in school in the first place? Many of them had real-life obstacles. They had day jobs; so they needed a night school. Forty percent of the young women had children; so they needed either on-site daycare or some sort of daycare voucher that we were able to help them supply.

And just as importantly, we made sure that every member of the staff, the teachers at the school, every single one of them, is passionate about helping new immigrants learn English; and that is what brought them to our school and actually improved the faculty morale because they were able to practice their passion rather than it being an afterthought as it was in some of the other conventional schools.

I also founded the Academy of Urban Learning, which is focused on educating homeless students in Denver.

Right here in Washington, D.C., we have seen the success of several excellent charter schools that have outperformed other public schools, including the KIPP schools.

So we have seen across this country, as a result of the charter school movement, great experimentation, some successes and some failures. It's time, 10 years on, to learn from our experiences with charter schools and replace the Federal authorizing act with one that can really up the ante, take the learning that has occurred over the last decade into account and improve both the quality of charter schools generally and the quantity of good charter schools across our country.

This bill would update the existing Federal initiatives. We provide critical investment in quality alternatives. The bill carves out 15 percent of the funding for facilities, capital, and credit enhancements, and the remaining 80 percent would go to start new charter schools. The bill would require States to provide 90 percent of their grants to charter school authorizers and operators. It also incorporates much of the language from a bill that Mr. Paulsen of Minnesota and I introduced last session and this session, the All-STAR Act, which would add for the first time Federal law State-level funding for expansion of successful charter schools.

So, again, when we have examples of what works in public education, why not do more of it? Yes, we want to turn around failing schools. Yes, we need to improve upon what doesn't work. And yes, we need to hold charter schools that are not working fully accountable under the law. But when we have an example of something that works, we should support serving more kids. As a simple example, in my State and district, the Ricardo Flores Magon Academy in Westminster is a K-8 charter school that opened just 4 years ago. I'm glad, by the way, that one of the amendments made in order under this rule is an amendment from Mr. Paulsen and I that would specify that schools that have 3 years of demonstrated success are eligible for expansion grants, because this school has only been around for 4 years. It has an extended year, extended day program. It provides after-school tutoring, full-day kindergarten. Every student studies chess and tennis. The student population maps the kind of a traditional at-risk population, with 95 percent Latino, 86 percent English language learners, 93 percent free and reduced lunch. This means these are poor and working families. Yet, the Ricardo Flores Magon Academy has scored far above the State average, including our wealthy suburban districts like some of the other areas that I represent, in the past 3 years. They scored 95 to 100 percent proficient in math, between 77 and 97 percent proficient in reading and writing, and for third- and fifth-graders they've averaged 20 percent higher than the State averages. Other successful charter schools in Colorado, like the Denver School of Science and Technology, have also achieved positive outcomes with low-income students.

I'm sure we'll have the opportunity to talk about many of the amendments made in order under this bill. We did in the Rules Committee propose an open rule for these bills, and it would have been nice to have a more thorough discussion, which is why I'll be opposing this rule. But I am glad I did make in order several amendments, including one of mine.

Mr. Speaker, this rule also brings another very important bill to the floor, the Fiscal Year 2012 Intelligence Authorization Act. This bill continues the recent bipartisan tradition of passing authorization bills in order to reform and conduct oversight of our intelligence community. Every Member of this body believes strongly in keeping our country safe. When we're discussing the threats to our Nation and the war on terror, the front line of that war is our intelligence-gathering apparatus and our intelligence community. In this time of budget constraint we know we need to spend our money wisely. I've often argued that instead of wasting hundreds of billions of dollars invading countries preemptively, we should use our force selectively, including targeted collection of intelligence about where threats arise.

This bill makes a balanced compromise between budget realities and our national security need. This authorization did find savings in various aspects of the intelligence community. It proposes to curb post-personnel growth while protecting our capabilities. While it invests in select high-priority needs, it also achieves savings by handling contractors similar to the way the President handles pay for civilian employees.

Mr. Speaker, I'm glad that this body was able to come together with both of the committees of jurisdiction, Intelligence and Education and Workforce, around strong bipartisan compromise under these two bills. And while I wish we had the opportunity to further discuss additional recommendations for amendments on the floor, I am appreciative that in fact there will be a robust discussion with regard to the charter school bill under this rule.

I reserve the balance of my time.

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Mr. POLIS. I yield myself the balance of my time.

Mr. Speaker, the Intelligence Authorization Act is not perfect. There are some provisions that have already received a veto threat from the President that need to be amended. Thankfully, the chairman and the ranking member have worked together to submit a manager's amendment that would do just that.

It is vital that this manager's amendment pass because of two provisions in particular.

The first would make the Director of the National Security Agency a Senate-confirmed position. This would unnecessarily politicize one of our most critical intelligence needs. Traditionally, this position has already been indirectly subject to confirmation through the Senate's confirmation of military officers who have been promoted into the position. We can't afford to damage the management of the intelligence community in this manner.

The second provision would modify the reporting requirements regarding Guantanamo detainees. This would require the Director of National Intelligence to provide State Department cables to the Intelligence Committees. While effective oversight is an essential role of Congress, we also must not interfere with the ability of the State Department to conduct effective diplomatic negotiations. Therefore, I call on my colleagues to support the manager's amendment as well as the amended version of the underlying bill.

I also want to thank, with regard to the Charter School bill, Chairman Kline and Ranking Member Miller for their excellent work both on the bill as well as their manager's amendment that would improve the bill in a wide variety of ways, including prioritizing States that authorize charters to be their own School Food Authority so that they can serve healthy meals to their students, including transportation considerations to help ensure that kids have access, and that choice is made more meaningful by ensuring that families who don't have the ability to carpool or transport their kids to school also have choices within the public education system.

This truly bipartisan bill and manager's amendment really exemplifies what the House can do to support good public education and improve student outcome.

I agree with my colleague, Mr. Hoyer, who said that this is a start. While many of us would rather see a full reauthorization of ESEA, this is a very promising start to what will hopefully be a very productive session with regard to education, one of the most important goals of this Congress as well as absolutely necessary to improve the economy in the long run.

Unfortunately, one of the amendments disallowed by the Republican majority under this rule is one that I proposed to help facilitate charter schools in obtaining Federal competitive grant funding by adding priority for States that allow charter schools to be LEAs, or Local Education Agencies. Effectively, my amendment would have reduced paperwork and overhead. If the school districts and charter schools agree, the charter schools themselves could effectively function as their own fiscal agent for Federal purposes and to compete for Federal grants.

What happens now, and it works in most cases 9 out of 10 times--unfortunately it's the cases where it doesn't work out that cause the difficulty--is charter schools have to go through their LEA, their authorizing institute, or their school district in order to apply for Federal grants.

What does this mean? It means there's another set of bureaucrat's eyes that have to see every proposal, another person that has to sign off. Sometimes this can lead to unnecessary delays. At worst, it can lead to missing deadlines if funding applications are submitted to districts and not turned around in enough time to meet Federal deadlines for grant funding.

So it would be nice to continue to work on this with the committee, and I think that many of us would like to see charter schools recognized as LEAs for purposes of Federal funding.

I am proud to say that, in my home State of Colorado, we were able to get this fixed in the last legislative session, and now charter schools are recognized as LEAs. In fact, about half of the States allow charter schools to be LEAs for Federal purposes.

A key goal of the bill is to ensure charter schools have equitable funding as well. Mr. Speaker, if we defeat the previous question, I will offer an amendment to the rule to make in order an amendment by Mr. Garamendi of California, one which would give priority to eligible entities working with charter schools that plan to use materials made in America for the construction or renovation of school facilities. Once again, it would make that amendment in order and allow for a discussion and vote by the House on that amendment. Republicans blocked this germane amendment last night in the Rules Committee by a party-line vote.

Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to insert the text of the amendment into the Record, along with extraneous material immediately prior to the vote on the previous question.

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