[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 146 (2000), Part 14]
[House]
[Page 20530]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]



                THE RETIREMENT OF HON. WILLIAM GOODLING

  The SPEAKER pro tempore. Under the Speaker's announced policy of 
January 19, 1999, the gentleman from California (Mr. Lewis) is 
recognized during morning hour debates for 5 minutes.
  Mr. LEWIS of California. Mr. Speaker, I could not help but notice as 
I walked in the Chambers that the gentleman from Pennsylvania (Mr. 
Murtha) was speaking and he talked about our interest in national 
defense. He probably does not know that I entered public affairs some 
years ago as a member of a local school board, running for that school 
board largely because at the time I had four children in the public 
schools.
  Mr. Speaker, I must say that the job that was being done for those 
kids and with those kids at a local public elementary school was truly 
just short of fantastic, and I ran for the school board in order to try 
to extend that kind of local education in my local community.
  Over the years, all of us have seen some significant change in 
education and the way it works and sometimes does not work so well. 
Upon arriving in the Congress, that interest in education continued. 
The first thing I did was to look for leadership on my side of the 
aisle. The first person I looked to was Bill Goodling.
  So it is a great privilege for me to rise today and express my strong 
feelings of not just support, but the reality that the House will 
dearly miss his leadership in this very, very important field.
  Bill has taught many of us many things. I remember in that first 
term, I was asking some of my colleagues about who provided the kind of 
leadership we needed in education, and I had a conversation with my 
friend, Dick Cheney, who was then a part of my freshman class, but he 
had been around Washington for a while. He pointed to Bill Goodling as 
the guy to seek out if I wanted some counsel.
  I wanted to share with Bill probably the most important lesson I 
think he has reminded me of during these years by way of a story that 
relates to my comments about Dick Cheney. Not very long ago in my home 
town of Redlands, Dick Cheney and his wife, Lynn, were present and they 
were involved in a panel in a classroom with about 90 people present, 
and of course the media is always there. But on the right-hand side 
there was this very interesting panel made up of two administrators, a 
Hispanic and an Anglo, a second grade teacher of Asian descent and a 
Hispanic mother.
  The reason they were there is because they had recently participated 
in a program where for some weeks they went to Texas to look at what 
was going on in education there and they brought it back to Redlands to 
implement those programs in our schools. They described the fantastic 
result of this effort, making the point that Bill Goodling has made for 
me that local schools run best when they are run by local people, and 
that we at the Federal level need to make sure we are careful about the 
way we spend those 10 cents on the dollar that we give to the schools 
and not try to dominate those schools from Washington, D.C.
  Mr. Speaker, I thank Bill Goodling for that and for all of his 
leadership for years in the Congress.

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