General information, schedules and past Freshmen Forums.
Return to @the Capitol.
Scrutinize the work of several major Congressional committees in online forums with the chairs and ranking members.
Follow the first year in Congress of Freshmen Reps. Kay Granger (R-TX) and Jay Johnson (D-WI)
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Since both members of the Senate and the House returned to Capitol Hill, the 13 individual spending bills have begun to work their way through the Congress. Although none of the bills have evoked the tensions that surrounded the government shutdown of the last session of Congress, some hotly contested issues have arisen. One that the President has indicated may lead to the vetoing of one of the spending bills is national education standards. The proposal, put forth in this year's State of the Union address, would establish voluntary standards that state's would use to rate the progress of students in their educational system. Opponents have said this is a backdoor way to impose mandatory national standards.
 Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) has long worked on education issues on Capitol Hill. Before being elected to the Senate in 1996, the Senator served in the House where he worked extensively on the Goals 2000 educational proposal. A supporter of the President's voluntary educational standards, Senator Reed has also worked to include more money for federal grants to low income students so they could attend college. "Our ancestors grasped a fundamental truth. Education is the engine that powers our economy, and it is the force that sustains our over 200-year experiment in democracy," Reed said in his first Senate speech. "`Yankee ingenuity,' groomed in the schoolrooms of New England and transported across the continent, spurred an era of invention that catapulted America to economic leadership. But education is more than just economic progress. Education has allowed us to keep faith with the basic tenet of our country. At the core of American experience is the commitment to equal opportunity, and education is the greatest source of opportunity in a free society."
 Senator Mike Enzi (R-WY) has also worked on educational issues. With his seat on the Labor and Human Resources Committee, which oversees educational
funding, the Senator has focused on issues such as special education. One measure supported by Enzi would require the federal government to more fully fund the mandated special education programs in local schools. "A serious problem we have seen is that many parents find general education loses out to federally
mandated special education when local resources run scarce," he said. "The law should not be
pitting one group of kids against another."
This forum addresses the following issues: Should there be a set of national standardized tests? Will this improve education? What is the role of the federal government in education?
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