    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book I)]
    [April 13, 1993]
    [Pages 425-427]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Town Meeting on Goals 2000
    April 13, 1993

        The President. Thank you very much, Mr. Secretary.
        I'm glad to be here with my friends Dick Riley and Bob Reich, also
    members of my Cabinet, at the headquarters of the Chamber of Commerce to
    support the effort that the chamber is making, along with its Center for
    Work Force Preparation, to help to examine tonight the whole critical
    question of how to move our young people from school to the workplace.
        I want to compliment the chamber on all their efforts, recognizing
    that without an educated work force we can't grow this economy or remain
    competitive and recognizing that we all have to work together, business
    and Government, labor and educators, to make things happen. This
    satellite town meeting is a good example of that kind of working
    together. And if you'll forgive me a little home State pride, I want to
    say a special word of thanks to the Wal-Mart Corporation, headquartered
    in Bentonville, Arkansas, for providing several hundred of the sites for
    this town meeting tonight. I appreciate that a lot, as well as the sites
    that are provided for all the rest of you.
        I have tried as hard as I could to move toward constructive change
    for this country. Secretary Riley talked about this being Thomas
    Jefferson's 250th birthday. If Thomas Jefferson believed in anything, he
    believed in these three things: first, in education; second, in real
    personal liberty, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of
    association, freedom of the press; and third, in the absolute imperative
    of changing as times change.
        If you go to the Jefferson Memorial here in this beautiful city,
    which is now bedecked with all of its wonderful cherry blossoms, you
    will see Jefferson saying that we have to change with changing times.
    For us here in America that means reducing our deficit and increasing
    our investment and putting our people first so that we can compete in
    the world. We're here to talk about that tonight, about what we can do
    to educate and train our people better. Unless we do that, none of the
    efforts that all the rest of us make in Government, even to bring the
    budget into balance, even to increase our investment in other things
    which will grow jobs, will last in the long run.
        We also have to have people who can carry their load. And in a world
    where the average young person will change jobs seven or eight times in
    a lifetime, that begins with the education system and continues into the
    work force where education must go on for a lifetime. It's not just
    important what you know but what you can learn.
        And if I might, I'd like to close just by emphasizing we're doing
    our best to try to have the most innovative partnership between the
    Labor Department and the Education Department and the private sector to
    build a good school-to-work transition. And we're trying to get off to a
    good start this summer with a program that would create more than
    700,000 new summer jobs, including many thousands that have a strong
    education component so our young people can be learning and working at
    the same time.
        Dick, I think I ought to stop there. That's a good place we can
    begin, I think, the discussion.

    [At this point, Secretary of Education Richard W. Riley discussed the
    Summer Youth Challenge program and asked the President to explain the
    importance of educational enrichment in summer jobs.]

        The President. I think it's important for two reasons. First of all,
    a lot of the young people we're trying to reach may have had trouble
    adjusting to school and learning. And while we want them to have a good
    experience with a real job, we also want them to continue to learn
    during the summer because we know from a lot of research that a lot of
    kids that have trouble learning in school may forget as much as 30
    percent of what they learned the previous

    [[Page 426]]

    year over the summertime. And that is a very unproductive thing for
    schools, to have to take up a lot of time teaching what they already
    taught before. Secondly, we want to help these young people progress,
    not only in terms of work but in terms of learning. We want to abolish
    the artificial dividing line between what is work and what is learning
    because we think that the best and most productive workers will have to
    be lifetime learners. And we think that this experience could maybe
    drive that point home and prepare these young people to succeed in
    school or at work or in college as they go on.

    [Secretary Riley and Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich discussed the
    importance of on-the-job experience combined with education. Secretary
    Riley then asked the President to discuss his apprenticeship proposal.]

        The President. Well, first of all, let's talk about why it's
    important. Most new jobs that will be created in this decade will not
    require a 4-year college degree, but most of them will require some
    learning and skills that go well beyond what most people get in a high
    school diploma.
        If you look at the last 10 years, the average salaries of young
    people that had at least 2 years of good post-high school education was
    a good salary that went up over the decade. The young people who had
    less than that tended to have lower wages that did not go up and, in
    many cases, in real terms, fell over the decade because they weren't
    productive, they weren't more valuable to their employers.
        So we think America has a big economic interest in trying to ensure
    that all the young people who get out of high school but don't go on to
    college make a transition to work, which includes 2 years of further
    training either in a community college, a vocational setting, or perhaps
    on the job. And what I have done in this budget, as you know, is to give
    you and Secretary Reich some funds and some incentives to try to work in
    partnership with States and with the private sector to build these
    programs State-by-State in a way that would be customized essentially by
    the business community, based on the needs of the economy in any given
    area. It could revolutionize long term the quality of the American work
    force and the earnings of American workers.

    [Secretary Reich and Secretary Riley discussed community involvement,
    academic excellence, and skills development as necessary components of
    school-to-work transition programs.]

        The President. I think--if I might just interject one point based on
    my personal experience at home--the business community has a critical
    role to play, not simply in saying, ``Here are the job skills that are
    needed, and here's what ought to be taught,'' but also in monitoring
    that excellence. If you have the right sort of partnership there, the
    people who are paying the taxes and who are going to then be hiring the
    workers are not going to permit the second-rate programs to survive if
    they have any way to shape and influence them. So I think that's very
    important.
        And when we try to, if you will, fill in the blanks at the Federal
    level, trying to set some standards and provide some funds, one of the
    things that we want to be sure and do is to make sure that the employer
    has a heavy amount of influence over the quality of these programs,
    because that's really what's going to determine whether the whole thing
    is worthwhile.

    [Secretary Riley asked the President about long-term school reform
    proposals.]

        The President. Well, as you know, back when you and I were both
    Governors, we spent a lot of time working on our public schools, and we
    tried to be very candid with our people in saying that a lot of these
    things were going to take some time to materialize.
        I had a hand in writing the national education goals that the
    Governors drafted, along with representatives of President Bush's
    administration back in 1989. And what we're going to try to do this year
    with your leadership is to introduce legislation in Congress that will
    actually define the things that the National Government ought to do to
    try to help the local schools and the children of this country and the
    adult learners, too, meet those goals: making sure that by 2000, people
    show up for school ready to learn; that we get a 90 percent on-time high
    school graduation rate; that children at the 4th, 8th, and 12th grades
    are confident in the subjects they're supposed to know; that they are
    second to none in math and science; that our schools are safe,
    disciplined, and drug-free. And of course, the fifth goal--I took them
    out of line to say this

    [[Page 427]]

    the last--is that we have a system of lifelong learning in this country.
        And each one of those goals, there's a national role, a State role,
    a school role, school district role, and a private sector role. And what
    you've attempted to do in this bill you're going to introduce with me in
    the next few weeks is to define what our job is and then to give the
    rest of America a way of defining what their job is and seeing whether
    we're actually meeting the standards of quality that we need to meet.
        It's very exciting. So far as I know, nothing quite like it has ever
    been done in the form of Federal legislation before. Not mandating and
    telling people what they have to do with their money, but actually
    setting up a framework for excellence and partnerships so that we can do
    our job. I'm really excited about it.

    [Secretary Riley and Secretary Reich discussed the development of
    national skills standards. Mayor Bruce Todd of Austin, TX, then asked a
    question via satellite about Federal initiatives for school-to-work
    transition programs.]

        Secretary Riley. Mr. President.
        The President. I think I'll give everybody a chance to answer the
    question, Bruce, but let me first thank you for calling and thank you
    for all the great work that you're doing in Austin. I've see some of it,
    and I've always been very impressed.
        First, with regard to the summer program, we hope we can structure
    it in a way that will enable us to continue the summer program and that
    will move a lot of these young people back into schools under
    circumstances that might allow them to do some work in the private
    sector, too. Secretary Reich is going to try to set up a system where we
    create a lot of private sector jobs to be matched with the public sector
    jobs this summer, and we're working on that.
        Secondly, in the program that I have presented to the Congress over
    the next 5 years, what we are attempting to do is to build in an amount
    of investment that's quite substantial for job training programs, for
    school-to-work programs, all of which give heavy, heavy weight to local
    community input--just the question you asked--but do provide some
    Federal investment dollars, which we hope you can put with local dollars
    to keep people working and being trained on a year-round basis.
        And I will say again, to echo what Secretary Reich said a moment
    ago, to try to break down the barrier between what is seen as work and
    what is seen as learning. An awful lot of young people actually have
    quite high IQ's, but actually learn so much better when they're doing
    than when they're reading or just listening. So we hope that the
    community involvement part of it will be permanent. And we hope that if
    the whole budget passes--and we do have 200 budget cuts, and more than
    200, actually, in the budget and some revenue raisers and some new money
    for education and training--that we'll be able to do just what you seem
    to want based on your question.
        Bob, do you want to say anything?

    [Secretary Reich stressed the need for job creation as a prerequisite
    for the success of the program. Secretary Riley stated that the Goals
    2000 program will involve individual State action plans. Dr. Harry
    Heinemann, special assistant to the president of LaGuardia Community
    College, Long Island City, NY, then asked a question via satellite about
    closer integration of school curricula with the transition to work.]

        The President. I'd just like to say, if I might, one thing. I want
    to reemphasize this, and I don't think I'm being as clear about it as
    I'd like, although I think at least one of the people who will be on the
    second panel will be able to say it more explicitly than I. I think this
    whole concept of applied academics is very important. And I think that
    we have to basically abolish what I consider to be a very artificial
    distinction between what is vocational learning and what is academic
    learning. I think we should keep the liberal arts going. I think we
    should have a strong component for people who are in the vocational
    program.

    Note: The town meeting began at 8:30 p.m. The President spoke via
    satellite from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Building.