12/14/00 11:20 a.m.
ABC’s in the House
Hoekstra for Education Committee chairman.

By Jim Boulet Jr., executive director, English First

f House Republicans are serious about reforming federal education policies, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R., MI) will be the next chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce.

The next two years promise a crucial battle over education issues, including the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, including the Bilingual Education Act.

Bilingual-education teachers (and teachers' unions generally) live and die by what the Education Committee does. The result: Conservatives from either party are as scarce as snail darters on the committee's roster.

The ideological extremism of Education Committee Democrats is borne out by a review of their lifetime American Conservative Union (ACU) vote rating. Their combined average lifetime ACU rating is 11.25. (The maximum possible score is 100).

This abysmal average score actually makes Education Committee Democrats appear more moderate as a group than many of them are as individuals.

Two of them — Donald Payne (D., NJ) and Major Owens (D., NY) — earned a zero from the ACU for their voting records in 2000. This is more unusual than you might suspect. Just 15 of the House's 209 Democrats managed to avoid casting a single ACU-approved vote this year.

Some Education Committee members have chosen to fight for absurd causes. In 1994, Patsy Mink (D., HI) forced Congress to apologize for making Hawaii a state. George Miller (D., CA) tried to force every home-schooling parent to be state-certified in every subject that parent wished to teach his own children.

Three committee members--Payne, Bill Clay (D., MO), and Bobby Scott (D., VA) — voted against any audit of the Department of Education's books on June 6th of this year. That bill, H.R. 4079, passed the U.S. House of Representatives by a vote of 380–19.

H.R. 4079 and the successful vote that followed were the product of a two-year effort led by Congressman Hoekstra (lifetime ACU rating 90).

On October 29, 1999, Hoekstra, along with two of his colleagues, conducted an unannounced review of the Department of Education's account books. It turned out those accounts were impossible to audit.

Hoekstra's initial investigation revealed that the Department of Education had mismanaged at least $600 million. The department claimed that the mislaid funds amounted to a mere $200 million. This happened during the same week that the Secretary of Education, Richard Riley, blasted efforts to trim his department's budget by a mere $279 million.

(Memo to the 107th Congress: The next time you are told that the federal government isn't spending enough money on education, remember what the government does with the money it has already spent.)

Hoekstra's Oversight Subcommittee later discovered that the Department of Education was treating the taxpayers' money as a virtual slush fund, which even led to criminal schemes. A theft ring involving collaboration between outside contractors and department employees operated for at least three years, stealing more than $300,000 worth of electronic equipment (computers, televisions, VCRs, etc.) and collecting more than $600,000 in false overtime pay.

Hoekstra has also demonstrated a sophisticated knowledge of the dangers of certain education reforms. The notion that achievement-test results must be broken down by income, English-proficiency, race, and sex ("disaggregation") is popular among some Republicans. It shouldn't be.

In America in Black and White, Abigail and Steven Thernstrom note that a 1996 Rockford (IL) desegregation case resulted in a judicial mandate on test-score gaps:

[T]he gap in standardized test scores…must be narrowed by at least 50% within five years. The precision with which he stated the target was novel, but the means of reaching it were familiar ones that had not had that effect anywhere else — racial quotas for every classroom and even on the cheerleading squad.

Any measurable differences of achievement test results among demographic groups allow for unlimited federal and judicial intervention.

On October 6, 1999, Hoekstra offered an amendment in committee to eliminate disaggregation requirements for school data. Hoekstra insisted on a roll-call vote on his amendment, which lost. This determination to force people to go on record has been unfortunately all too rare among conservatives in Congress.