Page:Congressional Record - 2010-12-10.pdf/32

S8760 reading today—I do not remember the guy's name, who it was—a basketball player or a baseball player just signing a contract for untold tens of millions of dollars. Yet you have teachers starting off at $30,000, $32,000. Is anyone going to suggest in a serious way we reward people who become childcare workers or teachers?

We have childcare workers taking care of little kids—which may be the most important job in our society because there is the brain development that takes place between zero and 3 that has a large part to do with what a human being becomes—people leaving early childhood education in order to move up the economic ladder and get a job at McDonald's because pay is so low, benefits are so low. What are we doing as a nation?

She writes:

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So I think her point is that if we are not going to become a Third World nation, we have to start investing in this country—in our physical infrastructure, in our human infrastructure, and in our educational infrastructure.

Let me give you some examples of what this means in real terms. Today, unemployment in our country—the official unemployment rate is 9.8 percent. For those without a high school diploma, it is 15.6 percent, compared to 5.6 percent for college graduates. Mr. President, 67 percent of high school graduates do not have enough of the skills required for success in college and the 21st century workforce.

As many as 170,000 high school graduates each year are prepared to go on to college but cannot afford that. Let me repeat that. About 170,000 young people in this country, who graduate high school, who want to go to college, are unable to do it because they cannot afford it.

Are we nuts? What are we doing in wasting the extraordinary intellectual potential of all of these young people? What we are saying to them is because you don't have the money and because college is so expensive, and because our Federal Government is more busy giving tax breaks to billionaires and fighting two wars, we are not investing in you.

That makes no sense at all. When you invest in your kids, you are investing in the future of America. They are America. And if they are not well educated, how are they going to become productive members of society? How are we going to compete against China and Europe and other countries around the world that are investing in education?

Here is something we don't talk about enough: The fastest growing occupations are those that require higher levels of education and greater technical competency. So we have a problem—it is true in Vermont and it is true all over the country—which is we have jobs out there, good jobs, and those jobs cannot be filled because our young people don't have the job skills to fill them. How absurd is that?

I remember there was a piece in one of the papers, I think it was in Ohio, where after the worst of the recession, a lot of layoffs—I think it was Ohio— they were beginning to hire workers and these were for sophisticated, high-tech jobs. They brought workers in and brought them in and brought them in, and they couldn't come up with the number of workers they needed to fill the jobs they had. What does that say about our educational system?

Data from Alliance for Excellent Education, 2009: 1,800 Vermont dropouts cost the State $459 million of lost lifetime earnings for the State and $19.4 million in health care costs. In other words, what everybody understands is if you don't invest in your young people, they are not going to become productive, tax-paying workers. As often as not, they will get involved in self-destructive activity—drugs, crime, whatever. They will end up in jail, and we end up spending tens of thousands of dollars keeping them in jail rather than seeing them out there as productive members of society contributing their fair share in taxes.

The Urban Institute says we can reduce child poverty—which I mentioned earlier is the highest in the industrialized world—by 35 percent if we provide childcare subsidies to families with income less than 50 percent of State median.

This is an issue I feel very strongly about. It is, to me, beyond comprehension that in Vermont and throughout this country, it is extremely difficult for working-class families to find affordable, good quality childcare. We are not back in the 1950s where daddy went to work and mommy stayed home taking care of the kids. Mom is at work as well. And we have families all over this country—middle-class, working-class families—saying, I cannot find quality childcare. We are uncomfortable leaving our 2-year-old or 3year-old. We can't find childcare at a rate we can afford.

In this area, again, we are far behind many other countries around the world. Kids who do not get intellectually challenging early childhood education, kids who do not get the emotional support they need from zero to 3 to 4, will enter school already quite behind other kids. Then, 5 years later, 10 years later, they will be dropping out of school and they will be doing drugs and they will be ending up in jail at great expense. How long does it take us to understand that investing in our children, our youngest children, is enormously important for our country? It is a good investment. It is much better to invest in childcare than in keeping people locked up in jails.

Seventy-five percent of American youth who apply to the military are ineligible to serve because of low cognitive capacities, criminal records, or obesity. This is quite unbelievable. Now we are not only talking about not being able to compete internationally because we are not bringing forth the kind of educated people we need, because of the inadequacies of our schools and childcare and so forth— this almost becomes a national security issue, if you like. Seventy-five percent of American youth who apply to the military are ineligible to serve because of low cognitive capacities, criminal records, or obesity. It gives me no pride, no happiness, to bring forth these statistics. But as a nation, we are going to have to grasp these things. Either we can ignore these things, either we can run away from reality, put our heads underneath the carpet, or we can say we are not going to allow America to become a Third World nation, that we are going to turn this country around.

But we are not going to turn the country around unless we rethink our priorities. One of our priorities cannot be more tax breaks for the richest people in this country.

From the 1960s to 2006, the United States fell from first to 18th out of 24 industrialized nations in high school graduation rates. What happens in today's economy if a kid does not graduate high school? If my memory is correct, about 30 percent of our kids—and I know these figures are fuzzy because it is hard to determine who is dropping out and who is not, but my understanding is about 30 percent of our kids drop out of high school. What happens to those kids? Where do they go? How many of them end up in jail? How many of them do drugs? As a nation, I think we can do a lot better than that. We should not have gone from first to 18th out of 24 industrialized nations in high school graduation rates. Dropouts are eight times more likely to be incarcerated. In other words, when kids fail in school, they are going to end up in jail—eight times more likely. Eighty-two percent of those in prison are high school dropouts.

I will tell my colleagues a funny experience. I was in Burlington last week. I met this fellow. He came up and was chatting with me. He said, I just got out of jail. What struck me is he was a well educated young man. He was very articulate. I suspect he had gone to college. What struck me is how rare that is, as the statistics aptly demonstrate. The people who end up in jail overwhelmingly are high school dropouts, people who don't have the education to make it in the world.

When we talk about the need to substantially increase funding for early childhood education, we should understand that State-funded, pre-K programs currently serve 24 percent of 4year-olds and 4 percent of 3-year-olds. In other words, there are millions of families who would like to see their kids be able to access good quality childcare but can't find that in their States—again, in contrast to giving tax