[Congressional Record Volume 144, Number 143 (Sunday, October 11, 1998)]
[House]
[Pages H10520-H10521]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                    REPORT ON BIPARTISAN LEGISLATION

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under a previous order of the House, the 
gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. Goodling) is recognized for 5 minutes.
  Mr. GOODLING. Mr. Speaker, I will lower the decibels. I do not have 
any reason to make any political statements. I do not have that need. 
The President, on the other hand, has misled the American people with a 
radio address yesterday, and I think I should try to make sure the 
American people truly understand what is going on. In his speech, in 
which he dealt primarily with education, he said we should be able to 
make real bipartisan progress on education.
  Well, Mr. President, in the entire history of this body, there has 
never been a greater effort at bipartisan legislation in relationship 
to education, and in the last 24 years, I can assure you there has 
never been a better effort.
  So, Mr. President, we sent you the Higher Education Act, a bipartisan 
effort. We sent you special education, IDEA. We sent you the Workforce 
Investment Act. We sent you loan forgiveness for new teachers. We sent 
you

[[Page H10521]]

quality teaching grants. We sent you emergency student loan. They are 
all law, Mr. President. We sent you seven.
  We also have awaiting on your desk school nutrition, including help 
after school, so that we can try to deal with the problems of juvenile 
delinquency. We sent you charter school legislation, Mr. President, in 
bipartisan fashion, $100 million extra every year for five years. We 
sent you quality Head Start. And what are your people trying to do? 
They are trying to eliminate the quality from the Head Start bill that 
we sent to you.
  We have sent you vocational education for the 21st Century, not the 
20th or the 19th. We sent you community service block grant. We sent 
you $500 million extra for special education, and you sent a budget up 
here which as a matter of fact reduced spending for special education.
  We have a Reading Excellence Act waiting for you to sign, Mr. 
President. All you have to do is decide whether that is truly your 
first priority, and it surely should be your first priority. All of 
those bills, 14, and a lot of them in a bipartisan fashion.
  Well, you said in your speech that our Nation needs 100,000 new 
highly qualified teachers to reduce class size in the early grades. Mr. 
President, where do you get your statistics? Every study I have seen 
has indicated that there is no shortage of elementary teachers now or 
in the foreseeable future. We have more than 100,000 elementary 
teachers now who are working in department stores, who are working at 
fast food places, who are working in offices, because they cannot get a 
teaching job.
  Now, Mr. President, there are some places where they need teachers, 
but these 150,000 who are out there who do not have a teaching job did 
not want to go to center city, did not want to go to rural America. So 
what did we do to try to help that situation? If you read our higher 
education bill, Mr. President, you will discover that we give some 
breaks in relationship to your loan that you have if you will go to 
center city, if you will go to rural America.
  Now, Mr. President, if you know the Elementary Secondary Education 
Act, you also know that Title I allows them to employ teachers. If you 
wanted to do that, why not increase that amount of money?
  You see, as I said at the White House, who gets credit is not 
important if you are trying to help improve the quality of education. 
So you do not need something special that says, ``I get credit because 
I did this.'' It is there. It is in Title I. All you have to do is put 
more money in that particular area.
  In the higher education bill we also dealt with quality, because you 
mentioned quality. We made it very clear to all teaching training 
institutions, this is the 21st Century and we expect you to turn out 
quality teachers for that 21st Century. Right in the bill, Mr. 
President. You signed it. I was there.

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