[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book I)]
[February 14, 1995]
[Pages 202-209]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the American Council on Education in San Francisco, 
California
February 14, 1995

    Thank you very much. Thank you, Juliet, and thank you ladies and 
gentlemen. Your welcome was worth the 5-hour plane ride. [Laughter] I 
want to congratulate you all on this meeting, and I want to thank Juliet 
for her leadership and also say to Frank Jenifer, whom I know will carry 
on the Council's outstanding work and strong leadership in higher 
education, I wish you well, and I'm delighted to see you again.
    I want to thank the entire American Council on Education Board of 
Directors for endorsing our middle class bill of rights. It will build 
education and training across America, and I want to say a little more 
about it in a few moments. You will have to play an important role in 
making it a reality, and I know that you'll be interested in what I 
think you have to do, along with what I have to do.
    Let me say at the outset what an honor it is for me to be here with 
my longtime friend, our Secretary of Education, Dick Riley. He has 
really done a wonderful job, and I am very, very proud of him. And he is 
responsible for the fact that we had the most successful year last year 
in promoting advances in education in the Congress in at least 30 years 
in the United States, and I thank him for that.
    I'm also glad to be here for the second straight year and to have 
Juliet's suggestion that maybe I should think about becoming a college 
president when I am once again unemployed. [Laughter] Now, before we 
came out here, she gave a slightly earthier description of why I should 
think about that. She reminded me that President Kennedy, when asked why 
he wanted to be President, said that the pay was pretty good, a nice 
house came along with the job, and you work close to home, and that was 
like a lot of college presidents' jobs. [Laughter]
    Over New Year's I met a college president who told me that we had a 
lot in common with people who run cemeteries. He said, ``You know, if 
you run a cemetery, you've got a whole lot of people under you, but 
nobody's listening.'' [Laughter] On the hard days, when you're about to 
cry, you can think of that and laugh a little bit about it.
    We have more in common than that. You are the keepers of a great 
trust of this Nation, the most diverse network of learning in the entire 
world. It's a spur for our economy and a magnet for our people and for 
people and ideas from all around the globe. I come today as someone who 
spent some of the happiest years of his life teaching in colleges and 
universities, as someone who worked as a Governor tirelessly to advance 
the cause of education, and now in this job, as your partner in a very 
important mission at a very important time in our country's history.
    Our job, yours and mine together, is to redefine the partnership to 
empower our people through education and through training to face the 
demands of this age. That's really why I ran for President. I believe it 
is the responsibility of our generation to work together to preserve the 
American dream for all Americans and to ensure that we move into the 
next century still the strongest country in the world.
    And I think the best way for us to do that is by building a new 
partnership in our country between Americans and their Government and 
between one another. I've called that partnership the New Covenant, more 
opportunity in return for more responsibility and a renewed sense of 
citizenship and community. In that New Covenant, Government's 
responsibility is to expand opportunity while shrinking bureaucracy, to 
empower people to make the most of their own lives, and to enhance our 
security abroad but here at home as well. At the same time, we have to 
demand more responsibility from every citizen in return, more 
responsibility

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for our country, for our communities, for our families, and for 
ourselves.
    As we end this century, we are facing dramatic changes in our 
economy, our Government, and our daily lives. As we move away from the 
cold war into the information age, we face a world that is both exciting 
and very challenging, a world where knowledge is the basis of wealth, 
creation, and power, and where technology accelerates the pace of 
change. In a world like that, those who have the skills to prosper will 
do far better than any generation of Americans has ever done. But those 
who lack the ability to learn and to adapt may be left behind no matter 
how hard they work.
    That is part of the frustration of America today, that there are so 
many of our fellow Americans who are working harder and harder and 
harder and never feeling that they're rewarded, feeling that they're 
falling further behind, having less time for their children, having less 
time for their spouses, having less time for the things that we know as 
the quality of life, and just plowing ahead. It leads to people having 
too much anxiety and too little hope, and it leads to special 
responsibilities for all of us.
    At the heart of all three of the responsibilities that I said the 
Federal Government has--expanding opportunity, empowering people, 
enhancing security--is your work, education. It is, indeed, the essence 
of the New Covenant. Now more than ever, education and training are the 
keys to opportunity for every American, and the future will only make 
that more true. They will only work, of course, if individuals also 
assume the responsibility for themselves to get themselves educated and 
to impart the value of education to their children, to their families, 
and throughout their communities. But it is clear that the key to 
opening the American dream for all Americans as we move into the next 
century is our ability to broadly spread the benefits of education.
    For more than two decades, I have not budged from this conviction. I 
had, as it turns out for this job, the good fortune of growing up in a 
State which itself was burdened, in America's greatest explosion after 
World War II, for lack of education. And I have worked now for about 20 
years, relentlessly, to constantly change the role of Government so that 
it wastes less money and does fewer things it shouldn't, but so that at 
the same time it serves people better, it insists on accountability, it 
promotes excellence, but it especially emphasizes educating people.
    America now must do that if we have any hope of preserving the 
American dream in terms of all of our people, in terms of an expanding 
middle class instead of one that is shrinking and constantly being 
divided between the haves and have-nots, not in terms of money but in 
terms of education. As a Governor, I invested more in education and in 
higher standards for our students, for our teachers, and for our schools 
and in trying to make it easier for our young people in my State to go 
to college.
    The ``Nation At Risk'' report, back in 1983, confirmed the crying 
need for changes in our public schools, and I was glad to work on trying 
to change the conditions in ours. At the end of the decade, I was proud 
to be one of the Governors who reached out across party lines to work 
with the governors association and with President Bush and his White 
House to craft anew national education goals, goals which we then wrote 
into law in the Goals 2000 program and which we are doing our best to 
help schools all across America to achieve on their own.
    From the first day I became President, we have been committed in 
this administration to reinventing Government in all areas but 
especially in education. Our approach is not--and I repeat, is not--to 
micromanage anything. We have deregulated the Federal Government's role 
in education, in the public schools and elsewhere. We have worked to 
inspire reform at the grassroots level. We have recognized that our job 
is to define a road map, clear standards of excellence, and then to work 
to empower everyone in this society to reach those standards through 
education, to support the educational institutions all across this 
country, to support the students and the families to help them to reach 
those standards of excellence.
    Instead of defending the status quo, we have worked to change it. 
We've abolished 13 of the education programs we inherited. We have cut 
another 38 programs that we thought were less than essential. We have 
consolidated 70 more programs in the budget I have just sent to 
Congress. And all of this is designed to empower students and working 
people, not educational bureaucrats; to help teachers to do their job, 
not to help the Federal Government to regulate more.
    Others have talked about such things, but our administration has 
actually cut over a quarter

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of a trillion dollars in Federal spending. We have reduced more than 300 
domestic programs. We have eliminated more than 100,000 people from the 
Federal payroll, and we have used the savings from the payroll reduction 
to put 100,000 more police officers on our streets in community policing 
settings, not run by the Federal Government but people who work at the 
grassroots level on the problems they confront every day. We are on our 
way, if no other law passes, to cutting more than a quarter of a million 
people from the Federal payroll and putting all those resources back 
into making our communities more secure.
    And the budget I have just sent to Congress proposes another $144 
billion in spending cuts. But my strategy is eliminating yesterday's 
Government to meet the demands of today and tomorrow, to give us a 
leaner but not a meaner Government, to cut Government to reduce the 
deficit and to increase our investments in the future, in education, in 
technology, in research, things like Head Start and Goals 2000 and the 
defense conversion programs we supported and the medical research 
programs we supported. These things make us stronger as a people. They 
build opportunity, and they demand responsibility, and they are good for 
America.
    We should be discriminating in this work we are doing. We should 
move beyond rhetoric to reality. Let others talk about cutting spending. 
We have done it, and we'd like some more help. But we have to realize 
why we're doing it. We're doing it to lift the country up and bring the 
country together and move the country forward, not to find some way to 
divide us in a new and different way so we have more rhetoric, more hot 
air, and less progress. Let that be our commitment: to do better.
    Now, I admit that some in the new Republican Congress see education 
in another way. They think education at the national level is just 
another area to cut and gut. Their proposals will cut investments in our 
future and increase the cost of student loans to our neediest students 
to fund tax cuts for the wealthy. They will limit the availability of 
lower cost direct loans to middle class students to increase profits for 
the middlemen in the student loans, even though that means a higher 
deficit. Indeed, the only thing they have proposed spending more money 
in education on are funds going to middlemen by limiting the amount of 
the direct loan program, by cutting it off just as it's becoming more 
and more successful. And some of them don't want to reinvent the 
Department of Education as I have done to make it stronger and leaner 
and more effective. They want to abolish it altogether. Well, I think 
Dick Riley's worth the money. And so, I want you to know that to all of 
this, I will say no. I will fight these proposals every step of the way. 
And I want you to join me in fighting them, too.
    The fight for education is the fight for the American dream. It is 
the fight for America's middle class. It is the fight for the 21st 
century. It should therefore--and I emphasize--it should therefore be a 
bipartisan fight. When we passed the elementary and secondary education 
act last year, drastically reducing regulation, emphasizing more help to 
poor children in need, giving teachers and school principals more 
flexibility, it had bipartisan support.
    Look, I want to work with this new Republican Congress to help 
America. We support many of the same initiatives. I supported them when 
they passed the bill to apply to Congress all the laws they put on 
private employers. I have supported our common efforts to reduce the 
burden of unfunded mandates on State and local governments. I have 
supported giving more flexibility to the States in pursuing welfare 
reform and health care reform. I've supported the line-item veto. But we 
clearly have our differences.
    Look at the student loan reforms. We eliminated the middlemen and 
got the funds directly to the schools and the borrowers which meant, 
unbelievably, lower fees, lower interest rates, easier repayment choices 
for students. It meant less paperwork, less redtape, less bureaucracy to 
administer the programs for colleges and universities, and it meant 
much, much lower costs to the taxpayers.
    Our proposal, when fully implemented, will save the taxpayers $12 
billion over a 6-year period, while lowering the cost of college loans 
to the student and reducing the hassles to you. That is reinventing 
Government at its best. That is the new Democrat approach. It ought to 
be the new Republican approach, but instead they want to cap these 
loans. I want to expand them. I want to include all the schools and all 
the students who want to be a part of this program by 1997. Your choice, 
but I'll be darned if I want to cut it off from you when I know that it 
will help you.

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    They want to pay for the tax cuts in their contract for America by 
eliminating the student loan subsidy so that we start charging interest 
on the loans to our poorest students while they're in college. That 
costs $2 billion a year. That adds 20 percent on the average to the cost 
of going to college for some of our neediest students to pay for tax 
cuts. It is not right. That would be the biggest cut in student 
financial aid in the history of the United States.
    Our approach is to help students and their hard-working parents, to 
cut bureaucracy, to reduce the deficit by not subsidizing noncompetitive 
middlemen. I might add that those who wish to compete for student loans 
are now doing it in many places for lower cost than they were providing 
when the Government was giving them a lock-down guarantee, because of 
the competition from the direct loan program.
    Now, that is our approach. The other approach would increase the 
cost of education, would keep the bureaucracy and the redtape, and would 
increase the deficit by guaranteeing billions and billions more in no-
risk funds to middlemen in the student loan system. It is wrong. It is 
wrong. And we should not stand for it. And I hope you won't stand for 
it. I hope you'll stand up and fight for it.
    Now, as you well know--and I want to emphasize--we are not talking 
about a give-away. This Department of Education has gotten tougher on 
enforcing laws against default. And the default rate has dropped by one-
third. The net annual cost to the taxpayers has fallen by almost two-
thirds since we have been in office, from $2.8 billion to $1 billion, 
because we're enforcing the laws against default. I think it is wrong to 
default on your student loan. This Department of Education has gotten 
tough with scam operators masquerading as higher education. And every 
one of you wanted us to do that. Now, with this progress, I hope we can 
continue to remove the regulatory burdens from many of the strong 
institutions with proven records of responsibility. That's what you want 
us to do. That's his valentine present to you.
    But that's the way we ought to be doing this. Secretary Riley will 
work with you to find a better way of balancing the flexibility you want 
with our obligations to the taxpayers. But the point is, other people 
talk about this stuff, but when I showed up in town 2 years ago, I found 
a student loan program that was too costly, helping too few people, gave 
too few options to the borrowers with a redtape headache to you, and the 
taxpayers were being ripped off. And we've tried to change it.
    Now, when we proposed these direct student loans, our opponents and 
those who wanted to protect the status quo said that the Federal 
Government was completely incapable of administering a loan program. 
Well, they weren't right. They were wrong.
    I got a letter that was sent to Terry Hartle by Jerome Supple, the 
president of Southwest Texas State in San Marcos. It's a big school now. 
It has 21,000 students. It distributes grants and loans in excess of $23 
million. President Supple wrote about what direct lending has meant to 
his school. He also wrote to me, but Dick Riley gave me this copy of his 
letter to Terry Hartle, and I like it better than what the speechwriters 
put in, so I'm going to write what he actually said. [Laughter]
    This is what he said: ``We are aware of the concern of some members 
of the financial community about the shift to direct lending and can 
understand the concern for a loss of revenue. However, the savings to 
the Government and the improved service to other students offered by 
direct lending are of greater importance. The other argument that the 
Federal Government cannot effectively administer such a program and must 
rely on the expertise of the private sector is counter to our 
experience.''
    Listen to this: ``The results have more than met our expectations. 
We have gone from an institution that was scrambling to meet our 
students' need, often after classes have started, to an institution that 
was one of the first in the State to get awards out last fall, so early, 
in fact, that it had a positive effect on our admissions program.
    ``While the direct lending program must share some of the credit for 
the improvement of our financial aid services with our hard-working and 
talented staff''--there's a good politician--[laughter]--also true--
``there is no doubt that direct lending allows us to serve our students 
better. And finally,'' he says, ``it is legitimate to express concern 
about the ability of the Department of Education to manage the direct 
lending program at full capacity, but the experience to date suggests 
that it can do this very well. It is rare that the Federal Government 
creates a program that both saves money and improves service to its 
constituents.''

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    Listen to what the students say. I got a letter from Marie Lyons, a 
40-year-old student--rather more typical these days. She wrote to me to 
say that she had given up hope on going to college. But with our loan 
reforms, she's been able to go to Murray State University in Kentucky, 
studying criminal justice. She'll be the first person in her family to 
graduate from college.
    You know, we can't take hope away from people like Marie Lyons and 
all the other people now that are flooding back into your institutions, 
into the community colleges, into the 4-year institutions, because they 
know--they're way ahead of the politicians--they know what they need to 
do to make good lives for themselves, and they're coming to you. They're 
coming to you in record numbers. But people like that deserve the best 
opportunity we can give them. They are very responsible. They are 
working hard. They are people from all races and income groups and 
backgrounds with a million different life stories, but they are chasing 
a common dream. Because of people like that, we should not abolish the 
Department of Education, either. We should not do that.
    You know, everybody talks about this being the information age. The 
White House and now the House of Representatives are in this little 
friendly contest to see who can do the most high-techy stuff on 
Internet, and call us on the computer and see what we have to offer, 
read the administration's budget. But if this is true, if the new 
economy really is based more than ever before on knowledge and skills, 
we have to do more of education. And undercutting education at this 
time, saying that this is not a national concern, that would be like 
undercutting the Department of Defense during the cold war. We won the 
cold war because we stayed strong. And we will win the fight for our own 
future and a place in the 21st century if we stay strong with education. 
That is what we should do.
    You know our future depends upon it. You know, as President, as has 
already been said, I've worked pretty hard for us to do well in this new 
war for the minds and hearts of our people and for the future. And I do 
think one of the smartest things I ever did was to appoint Dick Riley as 
the Secretary of Education. One of the reasons is, I find that once you 
become President, sometimes people, even people you think know you very 
well, all of a sudden don't really tell you what's on their minds. It 
drives me nuts since I don't mind hearing what's on people's minds. 
Sometimes they don't want to hear what's on mine in return when they 
tell me, but it's okay. [Laughter] But one of the things you need to 
know about the Secretary of Education is, we've been friends since I was 
barely old enough to shave. He always tells me what's on his mind--
[laughter]--and what's on his mind is you and your students and the 
future of this country.
    So I'll say again, we're cutting inessential education programs. 
We've saved more money by going to the direct student loans than they 
can save by cutting out the people who work at the Department of 
Education. Who are we trying to kid here? He is worth the investment; 
the other people who work there are worth the investment.
    We are not running education, but we are trying to energize it and 
create opportunity and shine a light to the future. This is a classic 
battle, and we ought to fight it and win it together, not just the 
battle to save the Department of Education, not just the battle for the 
direct loan program, not just the battle against increasing the cost of 
student loans but the larger issue. And I will say again, this ought to 
be a bipartisan battle that we fight so that we can meet our 
responsibility to prepare our children for the 21st century and so that 
we can make the most of our own lives.
    For 2 years, we have done everything we could do to prepare our 
people for the new economy. Last year when I came before you, I 
presented a comprehensive agenda for lifelong learning. I'm proud to 
report that with the last Congress, we did produce a tremendously 
successful record in achieving that agenda. We reformed Head Start and 
expanded it by 30,000 more children. And next year, I want to expand it 
again by at least that many. That's why we're cutting inessential 
programs, not only to reduce the deficit but to put the money where the 
people need it. I think the taxpayers want the Head Start program 
expanded.
    We passed the Goals 2000 program, and for the first time we spell 
out a national understanding of what our young people must learn to 
compete in the world. This goes right to the heart of the whole approach 
of the national role in education, not trying to tell people how to 
teach or regulate how they spend every day and every hour or control 
them through a bliz-


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zard of paperwork but to set national standards and then give State and 
local governments the control, the power, the opportunity, and, where we 
can, the resources to get the job done, to give them the flexibility 
through waivers of complex Federal rules and reforms like charter 
schools and public school choice, and to do it with no new Federal 
regulations to diminish State and local control. I'm proud of that.
    The way we're running that program is the way the Federal Government 
ought to relate to the States in the area of public education. We are 
raising the bar for everyone. All of our young people are going to have 
to do better. I think we all know that. All of our parents and 
grandparents are going to have to help our young people to do better. 
All of you in this room now accept as a truism that we have the best 
higher education system in the world, but that we have to do better in 
our school systems K-12, and we are all going to have to teach to higher 
standards, to work to higher standards, to learn to higher standards.
    Our communities, our businesses, they're going to have to pitch in 
and do more. And our young people, we know--and let me say this with all 
sincerity and convictions--we know that too many of them are still 
trying to learn in atmospheres that are too dominated by violence and 
drugs. If they can't walk down the halls or learn in the classrooms 
because they're afraid for their safety, then all the reforms will not 
be successful. That's why making our school environment safe and 
disciplined and drug-free are important to all the other standards being 
achieved, and why we have worked so hard in this administration and in 
this Department of Education to make sure that all of our legislative 
efforts included the safe schools initiatives.
    You know, some young people--I ought to emphasize, too, because I 
know who all is out here--don't plan to go on to 4-year colleges. And 
that's fine. If they don't plan to do that, we also have to make sure 
that they have the academic strength and skills they need to compete.
    That's what our School-to-Work Opportunities Act was all about, to 
reinvent the relationship of high school to the world of work and the 
work of post-high-school education with high standards that enable our 
students to learn in class and to begin to reach out into the real 
world. Along with their classroom learnings, they are learning real 
jobs, dealing with real people, and we expect them to go on for some 
post-high-school education as well.
    We're not doing this with a big national bureaucracy. We're doing it 
with grants and advice and help and support to let every State set up a 
flexible network, working with employers and schools and the 
postsecondary educational institutions to make sure that we fill this 
enormous gap in the American system. There are too many of our young 
people still who neither get a 4-year college degree or at least have a 
good school-to-work transition the way many of our competitors do.
    These reforms, every one of them, will make sure that more capable 
students are coming into your institutions, which means you'll have to 
spend less time bringing them up to speed. I know that would be a relief 
to all of you. A lot of us have been working on it for years and years, 
but I believe it will make a difference.
    Something else we did last year that I'm very proud of that two or 
three of you have already mentioned to me today is our national service 
program, AmeriCorps. It already has 20,000 Americans taking 
responsibility for improving their country at the grassroots level and 
earning some money to go to school. It is a very, very important thing 
for this country, and I am very proud of it.
    Americans like the 16 members at the University of California at 
Berkeley, who have 750 of their classmates tutoring middle school 
students and helping four local police departments set up neighborhood 
watch programs. Now, that's just one example of hundreds I could give 
you of what a modest Federal investment can do to get a big result. 
Eighty-nine members of AmeriCorps in Texas immunized--listen to this--
104,000 infants in Texas two summers ago. In Simpson County, Kentucky, 
AmeriCorps members are teaching second-graders to read, and they've 
already raised the reading levels there from 2 years behind the official 
standard to 1 year ahead of it.
    Now again, some people in the new Republican Congress say that 
AmeriCorps is a waste of money, bribing people to do service, an 
expensive way to send people to college. I say it's about the best thing 
that's happened to this country in a long time. I'm going to fight to 
keep it, and I hope you'll fight for that, too. And for all of you that 
have had AmeriCorps projects on your campuses and with your stu-


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dents, I thank you, and I hope more of you will ask to do it.
    We've got a lot more work to do. We have to protect the Pell grants, 
and as Juliet said, my budget raises the maximum grant by 12 percent. We 
all know the Pell grant program got in trouble, and we had to make it 
solvent again, and it hasn't kept up with the economy. But this is a 
good step in the right direction.
    We've got to preserve the work-study program, the other campus-based 
programs that we all know are important to the students on your 
campuses. And we've got to keep moving forward on university-based 
research with expanded investments and less redtape. I do not believe 
that it is the right thing to do to take universities out of the 
partnerships we now see forming. In defense conversion, for example, 
where we are doing remarkable things with the decline of the defense 
budget, taking some of that decline and putting it into partnerships 
between universities and private companies with some Federal investment 
and a whole lot of private investment. Again, there are some in the new 
Congress who say, let's get rid of all that. That's our competitive 
edge, research, development, mind work, making connections, moving 
forward.
    All of this is an agenda that works. In his state of American 
education address earlier this month, to which Secretary Riley alluded, 
he said that America is turning the corner from being a nation at risk 
in education to being a nation on the move. Well, you've got my word: I 
will fight for the education and training reforms that will keep us on 
the move. And I want you to fight for them, too, and we will win because 
the American people are for us.
    Now, that's why I have proposed this middle class bill of rights, 
because I want to emphasize what we still have to do. We can't just 
preserve what we've got. We've got to keep going forward. All over this 
country there are people who are saying, ``Well, I read about this 
recovery, and I know we've got 6 million new jobs, but it's not 
affecting me. I still feel insecure and uncertain, and I haven't gotten 
a raise. The middle class bill of rights, I think should be called the 
bill of rights and responsibilities because, like all the other things 
we've been talking about today, you can't take advantage of it unless 
you act responsibly. It does offer a tax cut for people, but only if 
they're behaving responsibly, raising their children, educating 
themselves or their children.
    From your point of view, the most important parts of it are a tax 
deduction for the cost of education after high school; an IRA that you 
can withdraw from tax-free for education and for other purposes like 
buying a health insurance policy; and the collapse of 70 of the 
Government's training programs into a program which a person who's 
eligible for Federal training help because he or she is unemployed or 
working for a very low wage can draw on and just take the money, up to 
$2,600 a year, to an institution of his or her choice, getting around 
the Federal bureaucracy, getting around all the programs and going 
direct to a lot of you.
    Now, this is a good thing, and I thank you for endorsing it. But I 
need your help to make it happen. Why is it a good thing? It's a good 
thing, first of all, because it will lower the cost of living for hard-
working people who have gotten no benefit out of this recovery yet. But 
instead of just giving them a quick fix, it lowers their cost of living 
because it increases their standard of living over the long run by 
putting the money into education. It is the right way to give tax relief 
to the middle class. It is consistent with long-term control of the 
deficit. It is consistent with a commitment to long-term economic 
growth. And I ask each of you to do what you do best now--to help teach 
people about this, to talk about it; because this resolution is really 
nice, but what we really need is for every Member of Congress to hear 
from every college president, every dean of students, every member of 
every board of trustees, every student body president, every student 
organization in the country, ``Hey, don't take the interest subsidy 
away.'' ``Hey, don't stop us from getting the direct loans.'' ``Hey, 
pass the middle class bill of rights.''
    Education is the key to our future. It ought not to be a partisan 
issue. If there is one thing in the wide world that ought to unite us on 
the way to the next century, it should be our common commitment to 
explode the potential of our people. I need your help. I want your help. 
You can do it. But the resolution has to be a first step, not the last 
step. Be heard in every office of every Member of Congress in the United 
States, and we will have a great victory. I need you. I want you to do 
it. I'm confident you will.
    Thank you very much.

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Note: The President spoke at 11:45 a.m. in the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero 
Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Juliet Garcia, chair, Franklyn 
Jenifer, incoming chair, and Terry Hartle, vice president for government 
relations, American Council on Education.