[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

[[Page 1812]]

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.

[[Page 1814]]

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.