[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 145 (1999), Part 3]
[House]
[Page 4060]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                  CALL FOR BIPARTISAN EDUCATION REFORM

  (Mr. WEINER asked and was given permission to address the House for 1 
minute and to revise and extend his remarks.)
  Mr. WEINER. Mr. Speaker, some might wonder when it became a partisan 
issue to support our children and our schools. If you recall after 
World War II there was truly a bipartisan spirit in this country that 
we needed to invest in education at all levels. We built more schools 
in communities all around this country, we encouraged more people to go 
into teaching, and we hired tens of thousands of new teachers. We need 
to do the same type of bipartisan plan now that the Cold War has ended, 
now that we have realized that our battles that we are going to be 
fighting in the future will be on the economic battlefield, not the 
military battlefield, thank God.
  Now we have to do the same: we have to invest in modernizing those 
schools, we have to invest in hiring more teachers. We have to take 
that kind of approach. I think that we can all agree that it should be 
a bipartisan effort.
  When a youngster in PS 254 in my district, which is dramatically 
overcrowded, is trying to figure out why they are learning in a 
gymnasium and a lunchroom, they are not thinking because it is a 
Democrat or a Republican, they are thinking because we simply need new 
spaces. This is the kind of thing we must do. We need to hire teachers, 
modernize schools, and make college tax deductible. We should do it in 
a bipartisan fashion.

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