[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 71 (Thursday, April 27, 2023)] [House] [Pages H2072-H2077] From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
Date: 2023-04-27
Chamber: HOUSE
Mr. MIKE GARCIA : I rise today because all levels of government need to do a better job of getting taxpayer dollars to the classrooms and teachers instead of bureaucrats in Washington, D.C., and the capitals of our respective States. From Washington, D.C., to Sacramento to county governments, far too much educational money is squandered on administrators and central planning bureaucracies. I see a path, Mr. Speaker, to paying our teachers up to 12 percent more without spending an additional dollar from current Federal or State budgets. This week, I am introducing a bill that I hope eases the pain for teachers and students in the classroom. My Cash to Classrooms Act will ensure States are not allowed to use a backward, regressive formula for school funding called average daily allowance, or ADA. In California, statewide data for the 2021-2022 school year shows an ADA-to-enrollment ratio of 91.4 percent. That means that 8.6 percent of what should be the average school's budget is withheld because of absentee rates at the State level. That is an 8.6 percent reduction to their full funding because of a metric that, frankly, the schools and teachers can't control. The teachers and principals largely can't control who comes to school on a given day. In many cases, the students and parents themselves can't control when they come to school. In California, there was a waiver that allowed schools to be fully funded despite absences because of COVID, but that waiver itself is now gone. Also in California, many schools still today require students to stay home if they test positive for COVID, regardless of the symptoms. So, students aren't allowed to come to school, but the schools are forced to eat the costs. I have heard from parents in Lancaster, California, and Palmdale, California, in my district, that they actually won't let their kids walk to school on certain days because they would have to walk there alone. The neighborhoods aren't safe enough for them to do so, and there are not enough busing options for them. So, on the days when the parents are unable to drive their kids to school, they keep them home. Again, this is not within the control of the schools or teachers, so we can't blame the parents or the teachers or the students for any of this. That is a policy failure on the part of Sacramento. Part of this is making sure that we keep our communities safe and give our communities busing options. However, again, schools pay the price when kids don't show up for school. In reality, this average daily attendance policy is actually very regressive. It is particularly regressive for disadvantaged groups. It hurts the underfunded districts, the poorer neighborhoods, and the schools with higher percentages of minorities the most. These are the schools that need the funding the most, the schools that have the highest ratios of students to teachers, and the schools that have the toughest challenges with recruiting and retaining teachers in the classroom. These are especially the districts that can't afford to pay for the buses and additional costs to adequately provide for special ed children. These poor teachers and principals are calling parents nonstop after school to try to get their kids to come back to school. They do so many times on their own dime and their own time, and some schools have even gone so far as to put extra people on the payroll for the sole purpose of ensuring accurate attendance counts, not for the student's sake but to prevent more money from being lost from the capitals. This, in turn, pulls even more resources and funding that could be used for teacher pay or class enrichment. Schools are having attendance competitions in the classrooms now. I have seen it firsthand at my own child's school. Having attendance competitions as a teacher is like having passengers have an on-time departure competition on a commercial airline. You can root for an on- time departure as a passenger, Mr. Speaker, but, in reality, you have no say whether the flight takes off on time. Teachers and principals can root for higher attendance rates, but the reality is that they can't really control it. Yet, they pay for it when there are absences.  Mr. Speaker, if you want better quality teachers and more of them, don't defund school budgets because of attendance. This is actually an evil practice. Only seven States, including my State of California, unfortunately, utilize this average daily attendance, or ADA, method. There is a reason why 85 percent of the States don't do this. It is because it aggravates the problems of attendance in our public schools and because it doesn't make sense. Let's pay our teachers more, not less. Let's get more resources into the classroom, not fewer. Let's not let bureaucratic agencies pocket the cash on underruns that are created as a result of absentees in the classroom. In my district alone, local schools are getting only about 90 percent of their funding because of this archaic way of funding schools. We can give the teachers a 10 percent pay raise with that money if we didn't fund schools this way. This would actually attract more talent and a better quality workforce and keep that talent in the classrooms longer.  Here is another lever, Mr. Speaker. Administrators at the Department of Education here in Washington, D.C., on average make two times more than teachers in classrooms in California. The administrators here--the bureaucrats in D.C. within the Department of Education--make $120,000, on average, every year. Let's pay the bureaucrats less and the teachers more. Mr. Speaker, I am committed to ensuring money is spent at the lowest levels of government. One dollar spent from the Federal Government behaves like 15 cents by the time it gets to the classroom. Let's download the funds to the local districts, get it out of the State bureaucrats and the D.C. bureaucrats, and let's ensure the States fully fund their schools despite attendance rates.  {time}  1700  Celebrating Bishop Hearns 90th Birthday