Ms. PELOSI. Mr. Chairman, I rise in opposition to the school voucher proposal for the District of Columbia.
Our focus as a Federal Government should be on improving our public schools rather than abandoning them. Diverting public money to private schools is not a way to improve education. It is, however, an experiment that is doomed to fail leaving this city's schoolchildren as the casualties.
Not one of us is going to contest the assertion that the D.C. public schools need help. But the way to do this is through efforts like comprehensive school reform, by engaging parents, teachers, and the community in creating and maintaining high performance centers of learning with challenging academic standards.
Creating a voucher system does not solve the problem, it merely shifts the responsibility elsewhere. It also does not guarantee that students from low-performing schools will meet the admission standards of private institutions.
Public school choice, magnet schools, charter schools, and comprehensive school reform efforts can provide effective alternatives to passing our problems off on private schools.
The GOP voucher plan offers this ill-conceived alternative to 2,000 of the school system's 78,000 students. General Julius Becton, the superintendent of the D.C. Public Schools has set out on a serious effort to provide the best education we can for all of the children of the District of Columbia.
Our Federal responsibility in education is to support States and local school districts in their efforts to make better public schools and better learners. It is not an acceptable solution to engage in misguided social engineering by draining funds that would be used to improve the public schools. The Democrats of this House have a plan, a good plan that raises the prospects for all of America's public schoolchildren, not just a select few at the expense of all the rest.