Too often in the Congress, I confront abstract policy arguments against federal efforts to assure universal educational opportunity. Most critics of an enhanced federal role, however, are themselves beneficiaries of an unequal system of educational privilege.

In his penetrating study, Savage Inequalities: Children in America’s Schools, Jonathan Kozol once observed that, to those whose own educations were constructed upon foundations of affluence, "questions of unfairness feel more like a geometric problem than a matter of humanity and conscience."

Their analyses are theoretical. As if they are "skating over ice," the unfairness of unequal and inadequate schools "safely frozen underneath," they smoothly offer abstract, ideological responses to the aspirations of less fortunate Americans.

Yet, Mr. Kozol concluded, when the privileged "...stop to look beneath the ice, they start to stumble. The verbal competence they have acquired may have been gained by building walls around some regions of the heart...."

36 years ago, in an impoverished South Baltimore elementary school, my parents and a wonderful teacher named Mr. Hollis Posey followed their hearts and championed my right to learn. For too many of my childhood friends, however, the inequalities of our educational system fashioned a different future. Discarded to the streets, the addiction clinics and the jails, their voices call to us from early graves.

When I visit today’s classrooms, I look into hope-filled faces and know we must act with a sense of urgency to rebuild our schools. My life experience and sense of duty preclude intellectual detachment. I simply cannot build a wall around that region of my heart.

National instructional policy must be guided by our hearts as well as our intellect. Schools which serve disadvantaged children currently receive 60% of the $14.5 billion in Title I federal aid. Our sense of right and wrong demands that the Congress re-authorize, and fully fund, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act.

Likewise, school systems in the Congressional District I serve confront staggering, $400-600 million repair costs. There is virtually no chance that local property tax bases and state aid will be able to cover these expenses. That is why I must support interest-paying federal tax credits for school repair and construction bonds.

I agree, however, that increased federal funding will not address our children's needs without a renewed commitment by parents and local communities. Effective parent-teacher associations are as essential to our children’s futures as they were to my own.

Children must be at the center of our educational planning, but their voices are often lost in the heat of our debates. To amplify those voices and support child-centered schools, Governor Glendening's Special Secretary, Dr. Linda Thompson, Baltimore City School Board Chair, Dr. J. Tyson Tildon, BCPSS CEO, Dr. Robert Booker, and I have invited Yale University’s school reform expert, Dr. James P. Comer, to guide an innovative education conference in Baltimore next September.

Dr. Comer’s success in establishing community-based educational partnerships throughout America supports the lessons of my own life experience. Empowered parents, working with increased federal funding, can reestablish successful communities of learning, even after generations of neglect.

Gandhi once observed that we can "...move the heart...by suffering. It opens the inner understanding." We must listen carefully to what our school children are telling us - by their words and their conduct - and we must respond with cooperation and creativity.