    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1994, Book II)]
    [October 20, 1994]
    [Pages 1811-1815]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks on Signing the Improving America's Schools Act of 1994 in
    Framingham, Massachusetts
    October 20, 1994

        Thank you. You know, we wanted to come here because this school has
    a reputation for academic excellence and because it is so diverse,
    because it's a school that really looks like America. But if I had known
    we were going to get such an enthusiastic reception, I would have come
    yesterday instead of today and just waited. [Applause] Thank you.
        I also want to say a special word of appreciation to your student
    council president. I thought he did a fine job up here. I can tell you
    this, if he continues to speak so well, so much to the point, and so
    briefly, he'll win a lot more elections. [Laughter] Very impressive.
        I'd like to thank your principal, Mr. Flaherty, your superintendent,
    Dr. Thayer, your school board chairman, Mr. Petrini, and all the people
    here who made this wonderful visit possible.
        I'd like to thank all the Members of Congress who have joined us. I
    especially want to thank those who have come from other States, Senator
    Pell and Congressman Reed have come from Rhode Island, and Senator and
    Mrs. Jeffords are here. We're glad to see them. I thank Congressman
    Markey for hosting us. And I thank Congressman Kennedy for coming and
    bringing his wife and his mother. I'm glad they're all here. Thank you
    for coming.
        I want to say just a brief word about those who have spoken.
    Governor Kunin, who was the Governor of Vermont, is now the Deputy
    Secretary of Education, spoke on behalf of the Department and Secretary
    Riley, who was the Governor of South Carolina. All three of us served as
    Governors together, working on these education problems. And I think
    we've made a real difference, bringing a whole different approach to
    education to Washington. We look at it from the grassroots up, from the
    point of view of the principals and the teachers and the school board
    members. And we like to think from time to time we even look at it from
    the point of view of the students, from the grassroots up, from
    education at the school level where it should be.
        I want to say a special word of thanks to Senator Jeffords for what
    he said and to Congressman Ford and Senator Kennedy. Let me say that you
    read a lot and hear a lot about all the fights that go on in Washington
    and about how things don't get done. But when the history of this time
    is written, the progress we have made in education will be known chiefly

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    for two things: One is, we really did write new ideas into the law, and
    secondly, we did it in a bipartisan fashion, with Republicans and
    Democrats, for all the children of this country.
        I was sitting up here listening to these fine people speak,
    wondering what all of our words might mean to the students who are here,
    trying to remember what it was like when I used to sit over there in the
    band when I was their age and hold my saxophone. You did a great job
    today, by the way, and I thank you.
        I'd like to try to tell you why this whole thing is important from
    your point of view, because this whole education issue is really about
    your future. Twenty-one months ago, when I moved to Washington to become
    President, I had some very clear ideas. I wanted to rebuild the American
    dream, to restore the health of the American economy, to make sure that
    your future would be the brightest future ever enjoyed by any generation
    of Americans, as you grow into the 21st century, a new and exciting,
    rapidly changing and very different time. I knew that we had to do some
    things that would matter to people in the short run. We had to begin to
    make our Government work for ordinary Americans again.
        And we've done a pretty good job of that. We passed the family and
    medical leave law to protect parents when they need time off from work
    because their children are sick. And we're immunizing all the kids in
    this country under the age of 2 by 1996. [Applause] I see the nurses
    clapping there. Thank you.
        Because we want to reward people who are trying to be good parents
    and good workers, we actually lowered the income taxes of 15 million
    working families, because they make modest wages and we don't want them
    to be in poverty if they're working full time and raising their kids. So
    we began to do these things.
        And we started to work to bring the economy back, to bring the
    deficit down, to invest more in new technologies, to expand trade. And
    it is working, and the economy is coming back. But over the long run,
    the United States of America cannot continue to lead the world
    economically in a world where the average young person will change work
    six, seven, eight times in a lifetime, in a world where what you earn
    depends on not just what you know but what you are capable of learning,
    in a world that is incredibly fast-moving and diverse--we cannot do that
    unless we develop the learning capacities of every person in this
    country. That is the key to the long-term survival and strength of the
    United States.
        When I was a Governor, my administration and especially my wonderful
    wife and I spent most of our time working on what we could do to improve
    our schools: how we could get the test scores up, how we could get more
    kids in foreign language, how we could improve mathematics achievement,
    how more of our young people could be ready to learn when they come to
    school, how we could facilitate more young people going to college. And
    I learned over and over again, as I think Governor Kunin said, that
    there are schools in this country, including this one, that are doing a
    very good job, sometimes against great odds. They are still doing a good
    job teaching and learning.
        But we have some significant challenges we have to face. First of
    all, we are not as good as we ought to be as a country in taking the
    things that work well in some school districts and seeing them spread
    throughout the country. Secondly, we have great challenges because of
    all the great nations in the world, we are by far the most diverse,
    racially, ethnically, religiously, economically. Thirdly, we know that
    schools have become the home away from home for a lot of children who
    have enormous personal challenges to face. And all those things mean
    that we have to be constantly working overtime to try to meet the
    challenges that we face today and the challenges we know you will face
    in your lives tomorrow.
        That's why I worked so hard several years ago to get our country to
    set a mission, a national set of education goals. Most of you may not
    know what they are, but I think they're good goals. They're worth
    repeating: that we will make sure every child shows up for school ready
    to learn; that we will raise the high school graduation rate to at least
    90 percent of all students, which is the international standard, all
    over the country; that we will make sure our young people learn and are
    proficient in, by international standards of excellence, basic subjects
    in English and mathematics and history and geography and languages, and
    we will learn how to measure whether we are doing that or not at least
    three times during the course of a student's career; that we will lead
    the world in math and science achievement, not bring up the rear; that
    our schools will become safe, disciplined, and free of drugs; and that
    we will

    [[Page 1813]]

    develop a system of lifetime learning so that people, no matter how old
    they are, will always be able to develop new skills, acquire new
    knowledge, know what they need to know to move forward with confidence.
        Those are the goals of this Nation educationally. They have been
    adopted by Presidents of both parties, by Governors of both parties.
    They have been embraced by educators all across this country. They are
    now the law of the land, thanks to this Congress.
        The important thing about this bill is that it represents a
    fundamental change in the way the Federal Government looks at how we
    should do our job in helping you students achieve those goals. For 30
    years, the Federal Government has shipped money to the States and the
    local school districts to try to help with problems that needed the
    money. But mostly, they have done it in ways that prescribed in very
    detailed manner the rules and regulations your schools had to follow,
    the rules and regulations your States had to follow in applying for the
    money and in complying with it. And very often, we had teachers at the
    grassroots level who said, ``This doesn't make any sense.''
        This bill changes all that. This bill says the National Government
    will set the goals. We will help develop measurements to see whether
    Framingham School District is meeting the goals. But you will get to
    determine how you're going to meet the goals, because the magic of
    education occurs between the teacher and the students in the classroom,
    with the parents, with the principals, with the schools supporting it.
        And you have to see all this stuff we're talking about up here in
    terms of that. We've expanded the Head Start program, as Senator Kennedy
    said. These goals have now been written into law, and 31 of the 50
    States have asked for our help in devising a State strategy to meet the
    goals.
        The School-to-Work Opportunities Act, which the Senator mentioned,
    has now all 50 States working to try to develop statewide systems of
    apprenticeships so the young people who don't go to college but do want
    to have good jobs will be able to get at least some post-high-school
    training in ways that help them academically, help them practically, and
    give them a good start into the future. And that is a very, very
    important thing. Our Nation is the only advanced nation in the world
    that does not have a system that picks up every single high school
    graduate who doesn't go to college and gives them some further education
    and training so they can make a good living, be good citizens, raise a
    strong family, and contribute to our future. We're going to change that
    with this legislation.
        And the college loan program and the national service programs I
    want to explain in tandem. You know, in the 1980's, the gap between what
    a high school graduate earns in his or her first year of work and what a
    college graduate earns in his or her first year of work doubled--
    doubled. Earnings for high school graduates in their first year of work
    in the United States actually declined in the 1980's, under the pressure
    of a global economy, where there are a lot of people around the world in
    developing countries doing jobs for wages we cannot live on. It is clear
    that it is in the economic interest of the entire United States to get
    as many young people to go on to college as possible. At the same time,
    you know we face even more social challenges, especially among younger
    children.
        So we've done two things: One is, we've changed the college loan
    program to say you can borrow money at lower interest rates; you can pay
    it out over a longer period of time; if you take a job that doesn't pay
    a high wage, you can tie the loan repayment to the salary you make.
    You'll have to pay it back over more years, but there will never be a
    time when because of the cost of your college education, you can't make
    a car payment, you can't make your rent payment, you can't meet the
    basic responsibilities you have.
        And the national service program, which you have well represented
    here in Massachusetts, simply says that if you join a community service
    program that's part of AmeriCorps, you can earn almost $5,000 a year
    against the cost of a college education while helping to solve the
    problems of people here in the United States. It's sort of a domestic
    Peace Corps.
        And this morning I met with a couple of hundred National Service
    Corps volunteers who are in the City Year project in Boston, which a lot
    of you probably know about, each of them telling me about what they're
    doing to try to help solve a human problem in the State of
    Massachusetts, not with some bureaucracy but from the grassroots up,
    just young people helping other people to make their lives better and
    earning some money for a college education.

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    That is the ticket to America's future and the ticket to your future, as
    well.
        Now, let me just say two or three things about this bill, and then
    I'll go sign it, because it's getting warm in here. [Laughter] It's
    getting so warm, I'm about to think I'm in Arkansas, not in
    Massachusetts in October. [Laughter]
        But I have to say a few more things because now I'm getting to the
    part that you have to do something about. And this bill is a challenge
    to you as well. This bill does many things, and I won't tell you all
    about them, but I want to give you just a few examples.
        The first thing this bill does is to encourage schools to take kids
    that are from underprivileged backgrounds and instead of separating them
    out from other students, bring them into the classrooms, have smaller
    classes, work with them, have kids help kids to get everybody into the
    mainstream, and everybody develop to the fullest of their God-given
    capacities. We know now that works better than separating kids out and
    trying to help them, instead of bringing them in and challenging them to
    do the best they can do.
        Let me tell you what that means. That means that every one of you
    has to support that, not just the teachers. The school district needs to
    encourage that, especially for the younger kids. But if you have a
    friend in your class or if you know a student who is not necessarily a
    friend of yours who is struggling, you ought to see whether you or
    somebody else can help that student. We need to have more kids helping
    kids to learn in this country. We've got to have that.
        There are a lot of studies today--and I won't bore you with all of
    them--but basically there are a lot of studies on learning and how
    people learn that show that some people learn best by just going home at
    night, opening the book, and working like crazy. But some people learn
    best in groups, from their friends and neighbors, from being free to ask
    when they don't know, and from getting help and from working through
    problems. There are a lot of young people who think they're not very
    smart who maybe just don't learn very well in the way that they're being
    asked to learn. And you need to try to help them do better.
        The second thing I want to say is something that has already been
    alluded to here by the previous speakers. If we can't make these schools
    in this country safe, if children are not free of fear when they come to
    school, they are not going to learn very well. And this bill has a safe
    schools component, but it must be implemented. All we can do is give the
    means to make schools safe to local school districts. We in the National
    Government don't do anything to make the schools safe; you do that. And
    you must, and every school must. The children of this country, even if
    they are scared to death on the streets, ought to feel safe when they're
    in their schools so they can learn.
        The third thing I want to say is--I'm getting sort of progressively
    more controversial maybe here--is there's an interesting provision of
    this bill that had enormous bipartisan support that provides
    opportunities for schools to get some help from this bill to develop
    what are now being called character education programs, programs that
    basically enable schools to develop values that can be taught to
    students in the public schools based on a consensus of people in the
    community. I made this National Character Counts Week, putting
    Government on the side of having the schools tell children that there is
    a difference between right and wrong. And there are some basic things
    that we ought to teach. There is a bipartisan Character Counts coalition
    in the Congress that's been working on this.
        We disagree about a lot of things, but we ought to be able to agree
    that our schools should say people should tell the truth. They should
    respect themselves and each other. They ought to be good citizens, which
    means that we should assume responsibility for obeying the law and for
    helping others to develop themselves. We ought to practice fairness and
    tolerance and trustworthiness. These things should be taught in our
    schools, and we shouldn't gag our teachers when they try to do it. We
    ought to applaud them instead, and I hope we will be doing more and more
    of that.
        And now I'm going to ask you young people to do one more thing.
    There is a lot of evidence, and there is a new survey that's been put
    out today, saying that in a modest but very clear way, drug use is going
    up again among young people in America--I hope you're clapping because
    you agree with what I said, not because you agree that it's a good
    thing--that more and more young people simply don't believe it's
    dangerous to use marijuana, for example, and that it's okay to do.

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        Let me tell you something: Every single scientific study that has
    been done in the last several years shows alarming increases in the
    toxicity and the danger of using marijuana, especially to young women
    and what might happen to their child-bearing capacity in the future.
        All illegal drugs are dangerous. We have to drive down usage again.
    It has got to be not a good thing to do, not a cool thing to do. It is a
    stupid thing to do, as well as an illegal thing to do, and I want you to
    help bring it back down.
        So this bill is about you. It's not about all of us politicians up
    here, it's about you. It's about your future. The age in which you are
    growing and the world toward which you are going can be the best time
    America ever had. It will be exciting. And our diversity in America is a
    gold mine of opportunity. No other country is so well-positioned to move
    into the 21st century, to live in a global society that is more peaceful
    and more secure--no one. But it all depends upon whether we develop the
    God-given capacity of every boy and girl in this country, no matter
    where they live, no matter what their racial or ethnic or religious
    background is. That is your challenge. Let's do it together.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:25 a.m. in the John F. Kennedy Gymnasium
    at Framingham High School. In his remarks, he referred to Jeremy
    Spector, student council president; Robert Flaherty, principal; Eugene
    Thayer, superintendent, Framingham Public Schools; and Christopher
    Petrini, chairman, Framingham School Committee. H.R. 6, approved October
    20, was assigned Public Law No. 103-382. The National Character Counts
    Week proclamation of October 14 is listed in Appendix D at the end of
    this volume.