[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.