AMERICA COMPETES ACT

Having the National Academy do a study, resulting in the report called ``Rising Above the Gathering Storm,'' was exactly the right thing to do. I would never have thought we could have such a clear message from the National Academy about what we do right, what we do wrong, what is missing, and what we have to improve.

Norm Augustine, former chairman of the board of Lockheed Corporation, was chairman of the committee. It was a distinguished group, including the former president of Texas A&M who is now Secretary of Defense. There were others. I was so pleased to see that they saw the problem.

The problem is that fewer than 30 percent of U.S. fourth- and eighth-grade students performed at a proficient level or higher in mathematics. The United States placed near the bottom 20 percent of nations in advanced mathematics and physics in testing. The United States is 20th among nations in the proportion of its 24-year-olds with degrees in science or engineering. The United States graduates about 70,000 engineers every year. India is matriculating about 250,000, and in China the number is even greater. Within a few years, approximately 90 percent of all scientists and engineers in the world will live in Asia. If we have fewer innovators, we are going to have fewer innovations.

America has staked its economy on being the creators for the world. We have had the innovators. We have had the engineers, the scientists, the researchers. Yet we are now falling back in K-12, and our institutions of higher education are not getting students with the proper prerequisites to go into those course studies. We have to start from the beginning. The bill before us takes those steps. I am proud to be a cosponsor.

There are three areas: research, education, and innovation.

First, research. The bill increases the research investment by doubling the authorized funding levels for the National Science Foundation. It also substantially increases funding in the Department of Energy's Office of Science, and it brings NASA into the equation, one of our premier research institutions. We are going to increase the emphasis on science in NASA because we already have the infrastructure. We have paid for the infrastructure, but we are shortchanging the science. So that is a part of this bill as well.

The second focus is education, specifically in the fields of science, technology, engineering, math, and critical foreign languages. We offer competitive grants to States to promote better coordination of elementary and secondary education. We want to strengthen the skill of teachers by giving them incentives to major in their course curriculum and then get education certifications in the same college degree but as a secondary part of their degree rather than the primary focus of their degree, because if we have math majors teaching math instead of education majors teaching math, we know the student is going to have a better opportunity to excel. We want to give the people who have already chosen teaching the opportunity to get a higher degree in their course curriculum, go back and get a master's degree and help them with grants to do that, because if they will commit to continuing to teach, then we will have better qualified teachers.

Innovation is the third focus of our bill. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution, America has been the innovator in the world. Economic studies have shown that as much as 85 percent of the measured growth in per capita income has been due to technological change. But these technologies did not appear out of thin air; they were designed and developed by scientists and engineers at innovative companies such as EDS, Dell, Apple, Microsoft, and through Government investment in NASA and the National Science Foundation.

With that in mind, our bill ensures that both NASA and the National Science Foundation are able to expand their strong traditional roles in fostering technological and scientific excellence. We have increased NASA funding to support basic research and foster new innovation, but the NASA budget is being starved with infrastructure requirements. They are not able to do the science that would make the investment in the infrastructure pay off. We have to bring NASA back to its original scientific purpose. We have the Innovative Partnerships Program. We have the NASA Education Program. We are beginning to focus on exactly what we need to do.

This is a bipartisan effort sorely needed in Congress today, something on which we can all agree. America is falling behind. We are falling behind in education. We are falling behind in innovation. We are importing technological jobs that we ought to be creating ourselves with our own American students, but we don't have enough qualified students graduating from our colleges to fill these technical jobs. We need to upgrade our education system. That is exactly what this bill today is trying to do. We are attempting--both sides of the aisle--to make America better, to reclaim our prowess in education, K-12 as well as higher education, and to make sure we continue to be the innovators of the future as we have been in the past.

I urge my colleagues to support this legislation. Let's work on amendments. Let's get them through, but let's come to a conclusion. I know the President would like to sign a bill that moves our country forward in something as important as education.

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