FOR RELEASE Contact: Julie Green (202)401-3026
June 24, 1998
STATEMENT BY U.S. SECRETARY OF EDUCATION RICHARD W. RILEY On the actions of the House Labor, HHS, and Education Appropriations Subcommittee
The action taken yesterday by the subcommittee ignores the American people's call for stepped-up action to make schools safer and improve learning. By making deep and painful cuts in the President's budget request for education, the subcommittee voted against the interests of millions of children, parents and teachers. This is not a serious appropriations bill for the Information Age.
At a time when the safety of children and teachers is uppermost in everyone's mind, the subcommittee chose to ignore the President's proposal to put drug and violence prevention coordinators into 6,500 middle schools -- a critical time to put young people on the right track. And it also cut by $140 million the President's proposal for expanding after-school activities, denying expanded learning opportunities in safe havens to hundreds of thousands of students.
The decision to cut our efforts to set high standards in our schools through funding reductions for Goals 2000 is equally inappropriate. At a time when these federal funds are being used by states and local schools to raise standards, the subcommittee has voted to virtually end support for this critically important reform. I am also deeply concerned about the decision to eliminate the focus on upgrading teacher training . We will never improve education until we support better teaching.
And when four out of 10 4th-graders cannot read at grade level, the subcommittee also ignored one of the greatest challenges facing us in education -- making sure that children are good readers. There is nothing new in the bill to support the America Reads Challenge to help children learn to read, and it rejects proposals to expand Title I and provide extra help to an additional 540,000 educationally disadvantaged students to help them master the basics of reading and math.
The subcommittee also refused to add one more penny to the budget to put computers into classrooms and it turned its back on a proposal to help teachers learn to use technology to prepare students for success in the 21st Century. It also makes unacceptably deep cuts in the school-to-work program that is helping so many students to prepare for productive citizenship.
The President and I will continue to fight for all of these initiatives, as well as our proposals to build, repair and modernize schools; reduce class size; help disadvantaged children prepare to go to college; and develop national standards of excellence through voluntary national tests in 4th-grade reading and 8th-grade math.
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