Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, a senior member of the HELP Committee, introduced the Quality Education for All Act. Bingaman's bill recommends changes to Head Start, the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), and Pell grants, among others. The 90-page bill includes many recommendations for increased funding levels, and requests full funding for both NCLB and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). The bill also addresses the shortage of math, science, and special education teachers by suggesting tuition incentives for college students who major in those fields. This bill was referred to the Finance Committee for further consideration.
On January 26, 2005, Senator Bingaman addressed the senate regarding this bill divided the bill into three focuses--early childhood education, K-12 education, and higher education.
I have included excerpts from his speech.
Beginning with early education, the foundation for learning begins very early in life. Early education provides critical opportunities to promote children's physical, cognitive, social, and emotional development.
We know that quality early education improves school readiness and fosters greater academic achievement and motivation in later years. Particularly this is true for children from low-income families.
My colleagues and I believe we need to increase access to early education. We need to strengthen the quality of those programs as well. The first thing this bill does is expand access to early Head Start for our youngest children. It also increases access to Head Start for children and families living at 130 percent of the poverty line.
The bill also seeks to strengthen the quality of these early education programs by making significant improvements to the quality of the teaching workforce. We provide grants to States to attract and retain highly qualified teachers, including grants to tribal colleges and universities to increase the number of postsecondary degrees earned by Indian Head Start staff. Plus, the quality set-aside in childcare will be increased from 4 percent up to 6 percent. With access to quality early education, children can enter school ready to learn, and that is in everyone's interest.
I will move on to the issue of educating our children from kindergarten through grade 12. The main legislation that we have passed at the Federal level related to this, of course, is the No Child Left Behind bill. It is intended to deal with this problem. Unfortunately, we cannot expect States to meet the challenges of the No Child Left Behind Act without providing sufficient resources and guidance to them in how to do that.
The administration assured us that we would be able to fully fund the No Child Left Behind bill when it was enacted. The program in the current fiscal year is underfunded by about $7 billion. There are more than 2.5 million fewer children who are being served through that law than the law promised to serve. In this legislation I have introduced, we provide that the No Child Left Behind bill should be fully funded.
This issue is becoming critical for our schools for the simple reason that we are now in our third year after the enactment of No Child Left Behind, and there are a number of schools that are failing to meet the criteria set out in that law that has to be met, the adequate yearly progress number. They have failed to meet that AYP, adequate yearly progress number, for 2 years in a row. They are in a position now that sanctions will be applied to them for failing to do so.
The bill makes a number of changes to the law to ensure that the No Child Left Behind bill is implemented in the manner that Congress intended. It would give schools the option of recalculating their AYP scores from last year and do so by applying the administration's newly issued rules. This would save thousands of schools from inappropriate sanctions that were caused by the delay in publishing the rules that are called for in that act.
In the final area I wanted to talk about we call for greater access to higher education for all of our students. It is clear that we have many people who would like to be in college, many students who would like to continue with their college education but because of the inability to pay, they are not proceeding with that education. The estimate we have is that there are 180,000 of our young people in this country who are not going to college, to a university, because of their inability to pay.
This is a time when we are worried about too much of the work being done overseas that needs to be done to support our economy. We are worried about outsourcing. We are worried about the immigration of people into this country to take good-paying jobs. The reality is, if we do not educate and train our own young people to take these jobs that outsourcing will continue and will grow over time. So it is very important that we increase resources for higher education.
We are requesting additional Pell grant funds so more students can receive Pell grants. We also need to ensure that students who graduate from high school are ready to go to college, and we have funds for the TRIO Program and the GEAR UP program as well.
This bill is very valuable. I do not have children but I have three step children. I may not be able to affect the quality of their education today other than supplementing the education with help of my own. However, I can support this legislation is an effort to help all children, current and future.