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We won a skirmish in that process of moving the money and the decision-making back to the local level, but there are many here who believe that we know best what needs to go on in the local school districts. I have this litany that says we have a group of people here in Washington who believe that Washington ought to build our schools, hire our teachers, develop the curriculum, test our kids, buy technology, teach them about the arts, teach them about sex, teach them about drugs, feed them lunch, feed them breakfast, provide them with an after-school snack and have midnight

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   Mr. CUNNINGHAM. If the gentleman will continue to yield to me for two quick examples. I want to give two quick examples in the way Federal regulations take the money away from the schools.

   First of all, the IDEA program. We could put in more money. We could put the 40 percent. But according to Alan Burson, a Clinton appointee, now the superintendent of San Diego City schools, he said the trial lawyers are eating up the money that we are giving special education and we are losing good teachers because they are having to go to the courts. They are not lawyers, but they are being forced out of special education. Teachers that just want to help kids.

   The second is that we had a bill that offered construction companies a tax incentive for school construction. The President vetoed that. We talk about smoke and mirrors, and they say, well, we are for the children. I asked them in the D.C. bill and also in the President's bill. He wants construction. He wants the Federal dollars to pay for it, not local dollars or tax breaks, because then it falls under Davis-Bacon. The union wage . That costs 35 percent more than letting private contractors do it.

   Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman will yield only so that we can explain what Davis-Bacon is. Davis-Bacon means that there are bureaucrats here in the Labor Department who send out forms all around the country and say that in Detroit the prevailing wage for an asphalt layer is X amount of dollars, and in Holland, Michigan, where I am from, it is X amount of dollars. And then if the school builds a project using even $1 dollar of Federal money, they have to pay these ``prevailing wages''. They are inflated wages.

   I believe that the average age of one of these surveys is 7 years old. I mean it is not even up-to-date data.

   Mr. CUNNINGHAM. The point that is important is that it is an inflated wage . In Washington, D.C. we could have saved millions of dollars for waiving Davis-Bacon for school construction here because the schools were falling apart.

   What I am going to do is offer an amendment. The President wants school construction. If he really wants to help the children, let us waive Davis-Bacon for school construction. Let the schools on the local level save the 35 percent and let them decide if they

   need more teachers, or if they need more school construction, of if they need money for special education. Give them the freedom.

   Do my colleagues think the unions and the trial lawyers are going to support that? No. They will tell everyone they are for the children, but when it comes down to it, they will support the unions and the trial lawyers over the children, and that is what is upsetting about this. We want people to do it. They want to waste the money here through bureaucracy and they want to waste it through unions and they want to waste it through trial lawyers that take away the money we give to the schools.

   Mr. HOEKSTRA. I think we need to take the same kind of fresh approach on education that we took on welfare.

   In the welfare debate, if my colleagues will remember, the governors came to us and said we have plans and ideas to help those people who are on welfare, but we have to go to Health and Human Services and we have to ask for waivers. We have plans that are approved by our State legislature, a lot of times in a bipartisan way. The executive in the State has agreed to it, and we come here to Washington and we have a bureaucrat who says, no, we cannot do that.

   Now, I have to say, wait a minute, who do we think is going to take better care of the people in our States, those who are elected and serving in that State legislature or in the Governor's mansion or some bureaucrat here in Washington?

   We really need to do the same kind of thing on education, where there are governors that are coming here and they are saying we get 7 to 10 percent of our money from Washington and we get 50 percent of our paperwork, all of our rules and regulations, from Washington. We have some States that are experimenting with one form of charter schools, others are experimenting with scholarships to students or tax credits for extra instructional assistance, and they say we have great ideas that are having an impact, but the Federal Government is holding us back from what we really think will help our kids.

   So we need to bring the same kind of fresh thinking to reforming education or the education monster here in Washington so that we can actually go out and effectively help children at the local level.

[Time: 23:10]

   I think we are on our way to begin that process, but we do definitely have a significant way to go.

   Mr. SCHAFFER. I would like to point out, my colleague mentioned the welfare model as a perfect example of what we can anticipate by focusing on a decentralized strong State approach to education reform. Again, using welfare as a model, just even a year or so after the Welfare Reform Bill was passed, we saw headlines like these that I saved from Colorado: ``Welfare Rolls Dropped 25 Percent.'' That was in one year. Welfare rolls have now dropped 43 percent in 18 months.

   Mr. HOEKSTRA. If the gentleman would continue to yield, would it not be great if we did education reform and we started reading headlines that said, test scores improve by 25 percent, math and science scores up by 25 percent?

   Mr. SCHAFFER. That was my point exactly. 6,730 fewer families on welfare. This was in Colorado. And this was just 12 months after the Welfare Reform Bill pass. ``Workers Coming Off Welfare to Get Job Help'' is another of headline.

   I just use these as examples. Because what we saw is, when the Congress moved authority out of Washington with respect to welfare, put governors and state legislators in charge to apply local values, local solutions to local problems, we saw welfare numbers drop dramatically throughout the country, about a 35 percent reduction in the welfare case load nationwide, 43 percent in Colorado.

   I again use that as an example to show that freedom works, that liberating States works. And we can see our low test scores come up if we give States the authority to help them come up. We can see crime in schools and discipline problems in schools be reduced if we give local authorities the ability to create and design programs that they know will work locally.

   Mr. HOEKSTRA. I want to play off the welfare thing, because as we are doing welfare correctly and improving the system, I really want the gentleman from California (Mr. CUNNINGHAM) to reinforce the point that he made earlier that says, as we are reducing the amount of money that we are spending in welfare, maybe we are freeing up some of that money so that it can be used on education.

   Mr. CUNNINGHAM. Mr. Speaker, I would. And not a single one of the Members that I spoke about on that DSAUSA.org and the 58 Members that are listed in that in the progressive caucus, not a single one of them voted for the balanced budget. Not a single one of them voted for welfare reform. They all voted against tax relief. And that is there agenda.

   Mr. Speaker, this is an easy way to remember what we are going to do over the next 2 years, and I want my colleagues to remember this. It is called best schools in military. B is for balanced budget. E is for education reform. S is for saving Social Security. T is for tax relief. Schools, different from education, is the infrastructure in schools construction to get the money there to do that. And military is to beef up, which we have not talked about, which is in sad shape and emergency shape. It is our defense. Those are the agenda items that we are going to focus on in this next Congress.

   Mr. SCHAFFER. Mr. Speaker, I once again want to reemphasize the general theme that we have spoken about tonight, whether it was the opening remarks I had made about property rights or discussion about Social Security, balancing the budget, tax reform, fixing our schools, or even providing a national defense, which is something we did not discuss much tonight.

   But that is the focus of a Republican party who has taken the majority here since 1995 and moving forward boldly in an effort to get our Government back to its constitutional authority, to move authority out of Washington, D.C., return authority back to the

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   In the end, that is the truest expression of compassion and a caring, humanitarian, conservative agenda that we stand for here on the House floor, to treat families as though they matter, to treat children like real Americans, and treat teachers like real professionals.

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