[Congressional Record Volume 143, Number 115 (Thursday, September 4, 1997)]
[House]
[Page H6805]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                SPEND EDUCATION DOLLARS IN THE CLASSROOM

  (Mr. COOK asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. COOK. Mr. Speaker, I would just like to quickly go on record 
before I talk for a minute about education to say Al Gore has some 
interesting things in the news today in respect to what my Democratic 
colleague just indicated on campaign finance reform.
  Mr. Speaker, I rise in strong support of the concept that no one 
knows more about the educational needs of a child than his parents and 
his teacher. No one knows more about the educational needs of a 
community than local school boards.
  To most of us, this is just common sense. It is obvious. But it is 
apparently not obvious to those who for decades have poured hundreds of 
millions of dollars into a Federal education bureaucracy that has done 
little, if anything, to improve education in the classroom.
  It is time to turn that around. It is time to focus our attention on 
what goes on in the classroom and the community and not what goes on in 
Washington, DC.
  I support the initiatives in Congress that give parents, teachers, 
and school boards a stronger voice in the education of our children. 
Initiatives like the Dollars for the Classroom resolution, which puts 
children first by calling for 90 percent of Federal education dollars 
to be spent in the classroom and not on the perpetuation of a Federal 
bureaucracy.

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