Our public education system is one of the foundations of our democracy. When our school system works, it levels the playing field and offers our children the opportunity for upward mobility.  When it fails, it often resigns them to poverty and illiteracy.  I am deeply committed to improving our nation’s schools so that every child, regardless of the neighborhood in which they grow up, has every chance to achieve their fullest potential.  
There are a myriad of issues that I would like to discuss, but since time is limited, I will focus my testimony on just two: the mental health of our students and vouchers for children in failing schools.

Mental health of our students.
Today students bring more than their books and pencils to schools; they also bring unresolved personal, emotional, mental health and family problems.  Sadly some students also bring knives, guns, or other weapons to school.  Although an estimated 7.5 million children require mental health services, only 1 out of 5 receive the help they need.  America’s students need help, and today we have the opportunity to provide that assistance. 

No place is immune from school violence and when it happens, it has repercussions all across the country.  Student shootings have occurred in rural Alaska, suburban Colorado, and inner city Atlanta.  Just three weeks ago, Andy Williams shot and killed two of his classmates in Santana High School in Santee, California, and wounded 13 others.  One of the wounded was Melissa McNulty, whose father lives in my district in Wakefield, Rhode Island.  Just weeks before, another of his daughters was named on a sixth-grader's "hit list" of 24 students at South Road Elementary School in my district.  This was the second such “hit list” created by middle school students in my district in the past month.  These incidents highlight the urgent need for intervention. 

I am disappointed that President Bush’s plan eliminates Title X, which contains the Elementary School Counseling Demonstration Act (ESCDA).  This program provides essential support to elementary schools for the development and expansion of counseling activities.  Last year, 500 school districts applied for the $30 million program, but only 58 districts received grants – leaving 442 school districts that have identified a need for this assistance and continue to be denied critical funding.

Now is not the time to end this critical program.  Without it our students may not have access to the mental health professionals that they need.  Currently, the average student-to-counselor ratio nationally is 561:1, more than twice the Institute of Medicine’s recommended ratio of 250:1, and this ratio is often worse in our country’s urban districts.  For instance, in South Kingstown, there is only one school counselor for the entire district, which includes three separate schools.  In many large districts, including the Santee school district in San Diego, the ratio is closer to 1 counselor for every 1000 students.  Such large caseloads effectively prohibit counselors from providing the emotional stability and guidance that our students need, and such vast geographic distances between schools makes timely crisis intervention difficult, if not impossible.

School counselors provide critical proactive services to preempt violent incidents such as those in San Diego.  With funds supplied by the ESCDA, counselors work with classroom teachers and peer counselors to teach students critical coping mechanisms.  Through role-playing, students learn, at a young age, how to deal with the pressures they face daily, including the extraordinary stress associated with divorce or abuse in their families.
President Bush’s proposal also combines the Safe and Drug Free Schools program and the 21st Century Learning Centers program into one grant for before- and after-school learning opportunities, and violence and drug prevention activities.  The President’s proposal does not specifically earmark the money for mental health purposes.  Without such targets, schools may use their grants, as the Santee school district did last year, to hire security guards or install metal detectors.  While metal detectors may make our schools safer by detecting weapons on students entering the building, they obviously are not foolproof.  On the other hand, school counselors can identify children in need, and prevent them from taking out their aggressions with violence.  Together both mental detectors and metal detectors can have a significant impact in stopping violence and addressing our youth’s emotional needs.  

To truly meet the mental health needs of our students we must not only retain, but expand the ESCDA program.  High schools have just as great, if not a greater, need for mental health professionals as do our elementary schools.  The ESCDA program should provide funding to high schools to help prevent incidents such as what happened at Santana High School.  In fact, in order to keep pace with an expanding elementary school population, the ESCDA program should be increased from $30 million to $100 million in fiscal year 2002.  This would enable schools at least to keep the current student-to-counselor ratio of 560:1, which is twice the recommended rate.  I respectfully request that the committee not only fund ESCDA at this level, but ensure that high schools can receive the necessary assistance as well.

Vouchers.
The next topic I would like to discuss is vouchers for students in failing schools.  While I, and virtually every member of the education community, agree that accountability is important, vouchers are not the best way to achieve that end.  

My first objection to vouchers is they violate the spirit of President Bush’s plan.  Throughout the “No Child Left Behind” proposal, the President stresses the importance of assessing student, teacher, and school district success.  Yet, once students obtain vouchers and apply them to private or parochial schools, their performance is no longer measured.  Private and parochial schools are not required to administer the annual tests that are the cornerstone of the President’s plan.  Therefore, we will never know whether the alternative school is any better or worse than the one he or she left.  This system simply assumes that private or parochial schools are better than public schools, and in many cases that assumption may not be valid.

My second concern with vouchers is logistical.  There quite simply are not enough slots in private or parochial schools to accommodate all the public school students who might be eligible to receive vouchers.  The students who would receive the spaces are likely to be better informed and higher achieving than their peers who do not receive spaces.  The President’s plan does not require schools to accept students who wish to transfer.   Schools are allowed to be selective; to pick and choose students who do not have special needs, such as limited English proficiency or mental or physical disabilities.   Due to the lack of available slots in private and parochial schools, even students lucky enough to receive vouchers will not be able to use them.  Vouchers would represent an empty promise by not addressing the crippling problems facing our schools and instead creating the false illusion that all students in failing schools have the opportunity to obtain private school education. 

Furthermore, students who are able to find a slot in a private or parochial must still make up the difference between the cost of tuition and the amount of the voucher.   For the vast majority of low and middle income families, this cost is simply unaffordable.  

The President’s plan could leave the most troubled students in the public schools, while transferring less troubled students to private and parochial schools.  This situation would further discourage good teachers, who already sacrifice higher salaries and more modern classrooms, from teaching in poor public schools.  

Rhode Island is already in the middle of a teacher shortage.  This shortage is exacerbated in Providence, as it is in cities all over the country.  Yet in Providence, only 71% of students graduate from high school, compared with 83% in Rhode Island overall.   Providence needs caring, committed, well-trained teachers.  To take money away from public school districts when schools do not meet certain guidelines is to provide a disincentive to teachers to teach in the inner cities of America.

Finally, I would like to caution the Committee against relying too heavily on standardized tests.  While these tests may offer a useful snapshot of a school or student’s performance, these tests are not perfect measures of scholastic potential.  In Rhode Island, we use a holistic approach to measure our student and teacher outcomes.  Our method involves sending a team of professionally trained surveyors to all the schools, every few years.  This team spends several days at the school and talks with administrators, teachers, and students to develop a complete picture of whether the school is meeting all of its needs.  In addition, Rhode Island uses a variation on the standardized test that the President is advocating.  By testing analytic and problem-solving skills, instead of just memorization, our test assesses the complex skills that are more closely correlated with students’ success later in life.  This approach is costly but much more accurate, and surely such a cost is a worthwhile investment in our children’s future.  It is in fact more costly to society to punish our children on the basis of one’s ability to memorize facts, rather than to think analytically.  Our children must be stimulated to learn and challenge concepts in order to become intellectually capable in college and throughout their professional careers.

Thank you for allowing me the chance to discuss the President’s proposal, how it will affect my home state of Rhode Island, and the lessons we have learned that might contribute to crafting an effective education bill.  We have a truly momentous opportunity this year to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act at a time when the majority of the country sees education as the most important issue facing our nation.  We must seize this opportunity and produce a common sense, bi-partisan approach to strengthening this nation’s educational system.