[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1995, Book II)]
[July 28, 1995]
[Pages 1165-1171]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the American Federation of Teachers
July 28, 1995

    I must say I enjoyed the class being a little rowdy this afternoon. 
[Laughter] I thank you for your welcome. I thank you for your support. 
Most important of all, I thank you for the work you do every day. Thank 
you, Al Shanker, for the introduction and for being here and for being a 
consistent and clear voice for opportunity and excellence in education. 
Thank you, Ed McElroy; thank you, Sandy Feldman; thanks to all of my 
friends in the AFT. And thank you for bringing these children up on the 
stage today to remind us what this is all about.
    You know, if you go in any classroom in America you see the infinite 
promise of our country in a beautiful essay or a difficult math problem 
solved or just an act of kindness from one child to another. And you 
come face to face with the terrible challenges confronting this country, 
in children who are old beyond their years because of what they've had 
to endure, too tired or hurt or closed off from each other and the world 
to learn.
    You also know that what happens to your students in the classroom 
depends a lot on what happens to them before they get there and after 
they leave. And I must say in that connection, I've often thought it 
ironic that some of the people that bewail the loss of family values in 
our country are all too eager to criticize teachers for the problems in 
our schools, when the truth is that oftentimes the school is the only 
coherent, consistent direction, family-oriented, value time that a lot 
of our kids get.
    It is true that this administration has worked hard to be a friend 
to education. Secretary Riley, Deputy Secretary Kunin, and all the fine 
people at the Department of Education I think have done an excellent job 
in working with you and in broadening their reach; working with 
Secretary Reich and the people in the Labor Department; working with the 
private sector all over the country, trying to build a grassroots 
consensus for what is best about education in our country, trying to 
build this country up instead of using education as yet one more issue

[[Page 1166]]

to divide the American people and to distract us from our real problems.
    Today I want to talk to you really seriously about what happens to 
the kids in this country, mostly before and after school in the context 
of this big family values debate we're having again this year. I don't 
regret the fact that we're having it, and I believe the debate has been 
too polarized between the opposite sides that I believe have a lot to 
say to each other. And if you want any evidence of that, read your own 
bill of rights and responsibilities. I just got a great copy of it. It's 
two sides of the debate raging today about family values.
    There are those who see family problems and children's problems as 
primarily matters of personal and social morality. And they believe that 
all the Government has to do is to encourage good behavior like praying 
in school or sexual abstinence, or to punish bad behavior like criminal 
conduct or the unwillingness to move from welfare to work, even when a 
job's available.
    Then there are others who see family problems primarily as a result 
of the unbelievable economic and social difficulties facing Americans 
today. And they believe the role of Government is to develop policies 
that help all of us make the most of our own abilities and to reward 
people who are working hard and playing by the rules.
    But on a lot of issues, these two sides really aren't as far apart 
as they may seem. Again, I say, read your own bill of rights and 
responsibilities and you see both sides of that argument coming at you.
    A moral problem can quickly become an economic problem. The epidemic 
rates of teen pregnancy in our country, for example, mean that an awful 
lot of kids who are born into poverty and never escape it, and an awful 
lot of parents who don't escape it because they don't have education and 
child care. On the other hand, an economic problem can rapidly become a 
moral problem.
    Parents, on the whole, are working harder today than they were 25 
years ago--literally, more hours at work for about the same or lower 
wages than they were making 15 years ago. That means you don't have much 
time for your kids, to teach them the things that they can only learn 
from their families. So economic problems can spill over into the family 
area as well and have a moral dimension. So I argue to you that what we 
really need is an American family values agenda, kind of like the bill 
of rights and responsibilities you've articulated for the schools, that 
basically takes the best of both of these approaches and, more 
importantly, lifts this debate up, gets it beyond partisan strategies to 
divide the American people for short-term gain, because too often these 
issues are raised in that way. If we really want family values, we've 
really got to value families.
    Think about the bewildering array of problems faced by families 
today. Young couples, both of them working, they have a child, they 
desperately want one of the parents to stay home for a few weeks with 
the child--good solid family values. Will they lose one of the jobs if 
that happens?
    You've got people who look out their windows at playgrounds and 
wonder if they can let their children play on them because they'll be 
violating family values if their kids aren't safe. You have fathers 
cooking dinners for children right before they go to work all night. And 
then they have to sleep all day while mother goes to work. So it never 
quite gets worked out that both the family parents get to work with the 
children the way they wish. This happens all the time.
    I never will forget, I used to--every election in Arkansas when I 
was Governor, I used to make the earliest factory gate in my State--the 
Campbell's Soup plant in Fayetteville, Arkansas. People started going to 
work at 4:30 in the morning. And I figured that I'd get some votes just 
for being fool enough for showing up at 4:30. [Laughter] And sure 
enough, I did. [Laughter] I never will forget, one day--and I'd go 
there, stay there from 4:30 to 5:30, and shake hands with everybody that 
showed up. I never will forget it--at a quarter to 5 one day, a pickup 
pulled up and the door opens, the light came on inside the pickup, and 
there was a fine-looking young man and his fine-looking young wife and 
three little babies sitting between them in the pickup. And she had to 
be at work, punched in, at 5 every morning. Then he had to be at work at 
7. And they had to figure out somebody that had day care by a quarter to 
7 in the morning so that he could drop those kids off and get there.
    Now, we talk about family values--that is the typical experience--
it's earlier in the morning, but most families in this country are 
working their fingers to the bone doing the best they can up against 
very difficult odds. And we need

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to talk about this in terms of the real experience of real people.
    There are a whole lot of families that are spending their money 
trying to take care of their elderly parents and keep them out of 
nursing homes, and so they don't think they'll be able to send their 
kids to college. That also stretches family values.
    There are a lot of children who are losing hope. And a recent study 
was published on rising rates of casual drug use among young people, 
pointing out that the ones who tend to get into drugs early are young 
people who have either no strong religious values or no real hope for 
their own personal future or no strong relationship with their own 
parents.
    So there really are serious issues here, but we need to see it in 
the real world. How many teachers do we know who have students of 
exceptional promise that they're afraid will never live up to the 
promise because of the economic handicaps on the family of the student.
    So I say this to make the following point: Families do not eat and 
breathe and sleep political slogans; they do not. Most families couldn't 
tell you for the life of them whether I'm up or down in the polls this 
week, and they couldn't care less. They just know whether they're up or 
down in their real life struggle this week. And that's what we ought to 
think about.
    If you add all these family stories together, you see that America 
is kind of a good news-bad news story. This is remarkable--in the last 
2\1/2\ years--when I came here and I campaigned to you for President, I 
said, if you vote for me, I will do my best to revive the middle class 
in this country, to give poor people a chance to get into the middle 
class, and to pave the way for a brighter future for all of our people. 
I will emphasize creating more opportunity, I will insist on more 
responsibility to the American people, and I'll try to bring the people 
together without regard to race or region or religion or other things 
that divide us.
    And in the last 2\1/2\ years, we've put into effect an aggressive 
economic program, an aggressive education program, an aggressive trade 
program, an aggressive anticrime program. We have today 7 million more 
jobs, a lower unemployment rate, a lower inflation rate. The crime rate 
is down in virtually every major urban area of the country. We are 
moving on our problems. But with a record business profits, a record 
stock market, a record number of new businesses, a record number of new 
millionaires, most Americans are working harder for the same amount of 
money they were making 2\1/2\ years ago, feeling somewhat more insecure 
on the job, a little bit uncertain about their retirement and their 
family's health care, and worried sick they won't be able to educate 
their kids.
    How did this happen? We're moving into a global economy, an 
information society. A smaller percentage of the work force are 
protected by organizations like yours. And there is more uncertainty out 
there. So I believe we do need to ask ourselves, if we believe that the 
stability of our society and the strength of our country and the future 
of our children depend upon our families, then what are our family 
values? And how are we going to reward good family conduct? How are we 
going to stabilize life for families who are willing to do the right 
thing? How are we going to attack the real problems? How are we going to 
avoid this kind of phony debate?
    And I'll just give you a short agenda here. I'm going to give a test 
on this at the end of this. [Laughter] Here are 14 things we could do to 
help families. Brief.
    One, help people care for their elderly parents and, for sure, don't 
make it harder. Two, reform the health insurance system so that at least 
people don't lost their health insurance if they change jobs or if 
somebody's sick in their family. Three, keep the family and medical 
leave law and make sure everybody in America knows what it is and knows 
how to take advantage of it.
    Four, have tougher national standards for child support enforcement. 
Five, figure out who's been successful in preventing teen pregnancy and 
organize a national campaign to do the same thing in every community in 
the country. Six, build on what works to prevent drug abuse and drug 
use, and do it. Don't just talk about--invest money, time, and effort in 
consistent commitment to drug abuse prevention.
    Seven, if you want to cut health care costs and increase life 
expectancy, do something to stop all these kids who are beginning to 
smoke at early ages. It's killing them. Eight, expose our children to 
less violence by enforcing the Brady law and keeping the ban on assault 
weapons and passing the ban on cop-killer bullets.
    Nine, if you're concerned about violence and children and the role 
the media is contributing to it, instead of giving a speech about it, do

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something about it. When Congress passes a telecommunications law that's 
going to make a bunch of money for a bunch of people, and it will be all 
right if it creates a lot of jobs and helps us get more information, 
tell them to put in the law the simple provision to give everybody 
that's got a cable hookup a V-chip so that the parents can decide what 
comes across to the television to the kids. And by the way, don't get 
rid of public broadcasting. At least parents have an alternative.
    Ten, do something about family incomes for people who are doing the 
right thing. Raise the minimum wage to $5.00 an hour. Eleven, if you 
want to give a tax cut, give a family-oriented tax cut to help people 
raise their children and educate their children. That's the kind of tax 
cut we ought to have in this country.
    Twelve, remember that adults need education, too. And take all these 
Government programs that were enacted with the best of intentions over a 
long period of time and consolidate them, and instead, when somebody 
loses their job or they're working for a minimum wage and they want to 
get a new training program, send them a check to take to the local 
community college so they can get a decent education that will lead them 
to a job.
    Thirteen--don't get nervous, I'm saving you for last. [Laughter] 
Thirteen, every list of civic values ever given to kids in school that I 
have ever seen says, teach young people respect for themselves, respect 
for other people, respect for our country, and respect for our natural 
environment. Thirteen, do no harm--stop this crazy effort to dismantle 
all the environmental and public health protection in the United States 
Congress today.
    Fourteen, education: Don't cut it. Don't cut Head Start. Don't take 
a million kids out of Chapter 1. Don't get rid of Goals 2000, which 
gives teachers the chance to really do something significant. Do not 
increase the cost of a college loan; that is the dumbest thing I ever 
heard of in my life. It is not necessary to cut education to balance the 
budget. It is only necessary to cut education to balance the budget if 
you're determined to do it in 7 years instead of 10, with a tax cut 
nobody can justify with a deficit this high and an education deficit at 
the same time. Put the money into education and into our future. The 
wealthiest Americans support this approach; they know it's the right 
thing to do.
    So I want to amplify on a couple of these, not all 14, but I want to 
say them again. Help people care for their elderly parents. Reform the 
health insurance system so fathers and mothers don't lose the health 
insurance for themselves and their kids if somebody in the family has 
been sick or they change jobs. Keep the enforcement of the family and 
medical leave law; don't support the Congress taking out all the funds 
for enforcement. More people need to know about it, not fewer. Not a 
single business has gone broke since we protected family and medical 
leave in 1993.
    Tougher child support enforcement; prevent teen pregnancy; reduce 
drug abuse among young people; prevent teens from starting smoking; 
handgun and assault weapons, keep those bills in there on the Brady bill 
and the assault weapons bill, and pass the cop-killer bullet ban; raise 
the minimum wage; have a reform of the family tax system so we give the 
tax breaks to people raising their kids and educating them; put the V-
chip in the cable TV if you want to do something about culture and 
violence; pass the ``GI bill'' for America's workers, give people who 
are unemployed a check, not a list of 70 programs they'll find at the 
local community college; protect the environment; and do not cut 
education. Now, that is an agenda that we can live with--I think I left 
out the minimum wage, but I won't forget it when we get to the budget.
    Now, let me tell you, Sunday--Saturday or Sunday, sometime over the 
weekend, will be the exact day of the 30th anniversary of Medicare. We 
need to reform Medicare. We can't have medical costs going up at 2 and 3 
and 4 times the rate of inflation. But let's not forget, before 
Medicare, fewer than half the elderly people in this country had any 
health insurance, and 97 percent of them do.
    And if any of you have been through what I have--and I imagine most 
of your have been. If you had, as I had, your mother and your father-in-
law desperately ill for long periods of time, you think, my goodness, 
what would we do without Medicare? And I realize how much better off I 
am than most Americans, and it would have bankrupted me. What would most 
Americans do? What would the elderly do?
    So can we slow the rate of increase? Sure we can. But to pick an 
arbitrary number just because we've got to balance the budget in 7 years 
instead of 10 and have this huge tax cut

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that, by the way, is about the amount of money we're going to save out 
of Medicare. That's wrong.
    Instead, we ought to reform the system. And we could save money over 
the long run by taking a little of that money and helping States to set 
up opportunities for people like you to help your parents stay out of 
nursing homes as well as to pay for them when they go in. That is the 
better way to approach that problem. And I'd like to see us do it.
    I mentioned family and medical leave. I couldn't believe it when I 
saw there were people in the Congress who wanted to strip the Government 
of the ability to enforce the law. Nobody has gone broke doing this. 
Nobody has. I want to tell you, the most moving personal encounters I 
think I've had, except with children, since I've been President, have 
come from adults who have taken advantage of the family and medical 
leave law.
    Here is a letter my wife got this week. I want to read this to you. 
This is a law some people in Congress say we shouldn't enforce anymore: 
``Dear Mrs. Clinton, I am writing to let you know that 2 months ago my 
husband died of congestive heart failure after a prolonged period of 
several years of illness. Because your husband signed into law the 
Family and Medical Leave Act, I was able to transport him to doctor 
appointments and hospital visits. The act enabled me to keep my job and 
bring him comfort at the end of his life. I will be eternally 
grateful.'' Signed, Lynn Wade Tomko, of Highland Ranch, Colorado.
    There's a lot of people out there like that. And every one of you 
deserves it. Every one of you.
    Now, there is a bipartisan bill on health insurance reform. There's 
a bipartisan bill in the Congress right now, a bipartisan bill, saying 
at least if we can't give everybody health insurance, if we can't do 
that, at least we ought to be able to say when parents change jobs they 
and their children don't lose their health care, coverage shouldn't be 
tied to whether somebody in their family's been sick once or twice. And 
people who work for small businesses ought to be able to get--in every 
State in the country, they ought to be able to go into a pool that is 
big so they can buy insurance on the same rates that people like us who 
work for government or big units do. Simple, basic things. And there 
ought to be a longer period of time where people keep their health 
insurance if they lose their jobs.
    On the child support enforcement, all the Governors, even the most 
pro-State's rights Governors, have understood and supported our efforts 
to have national standards of child support enforcement. Why? Because 
over a third of all the child support orders that are delinquent are for 
people who have crossed State lines. So we need a national approach to 
this. The welfare reform bill I have sent to Congress has that. We have 
to have this.
    Here are the things that it has, and ask yourself if you think it's 
reasonable: employer reporting of new hires to catch deadbeat dads who 
move from job to job; uniform interstate child support laws; 
computerized collection of speeding up payments; streamlined efforts to 
identify the father in every case when the child is born; and tough new 
penalties, like professional license revocation for people who 
repeatedly refuse to pay their child support--or driver's license.
    Let me tell you, I don't think most Americans--we estimate that if 
everybody paid the child support they owe, there would be 800,000 fewer 
people in this country off of welfare. You have no idea how much money 
you're paying as taxpayers to support children that their parents could 
legally be supporting and have the money to support. You don't have any 
idea. It's a lot of money, money that could be going into Head Start, 
money that could be going into Goals 2000, money that could be going 
into college loans. It's not right.
    I could go on and on. I'm going to have more to say about the drug 
abuse prevention and the teen pregnancy issues later on. I will say 
this--we'd be down the road a little bit if the Senate hadn't played 
politics with Dr. Henry Foster's nomination. But I'm going to bring him 
back in some way and get him to help us on this because it's so 
important, it's a big issue.
    On the drug issue, everybody talks about being tough on drugs. But 
you've got to do four things if you want to make a difference. You have 
got to work with foreign governments to cut drugs off at the source. We 
are busting a lot of big gangs, and we're making some real progress. And 
we're getting more help from foreign governments than the United States 
has enjoyed in many years. We've worked hard at it, and a lot of people 
in other countries risk

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their lives every day to keep your kids free of cocaine and crack. And 
you need to know that.
    We say, why don't they do more? A lot of them put their lives on the 
line every day to do it. And more than ever before, we're making 
progress on it. We also have to break the cycle of drugs and crime by 
providing treatment to people who need it. It works; it does work. It 
doesn't always work, but two-thirds of the time, the treatment works. 
Now, would you rather spend a little money to have it work two-thirds of 
the time, or put 100 percent of those people behind bars at a greater 
cost to you? It does work.
    We also have to punish people properly who break the law. But 
finally, we've got to do something to try to keep our kids off of drugs 
in the first place. And therefore, I think it is a mistake for the 
Congress to eliminate the money we're giving to your schools to promote 
safe and drug-free schools. Those are good programs and we shouldn't get 
rid of it.
    I'm going to say more in the next several days about this issue of 
teenage smoking. But you just think about the number of people every 
year in America we lose because of smoking-related illnesses. And you 
realize that having a whole lot of young kids get into that pipeline is 
pretty significant. And all the evidence is that if people don't start 
smoking until they're adults, that even if they smoke a little, they 
don't become really hooked. They don't do it a lot. They quit after a 
little while, and they go on and live normal lives. This is a big deal.
    Most people who have serious problems with smoking started when they 
were children. It is now illegal to sell children cigarettes, but it 
happens all the time. And we have to do more to stop it. That's a family 
values issue--cut the cost of health care, help us meet our budget 
targets, keep people healthier longer, and make for more alert, 
effective students in your classrooms.
    I just want to mention one or two other issues. Let me just say, 
about the minimum wage, you all clapped and I realize you agree with 
me--[laughter]--but a lot of Americans, every time we raise the minimum 
wage, there's this great hue and cry about how we're going to lose jobs, 
and it has never happened. And 40 percent of the people on minimum wage 
are women who are the sole support of their kids. And if we don't raise 
the minimum wage next year, it will reach in real dollar terms a 40-

year low. That's the problem in America. We should be having a high-
opportunity, smart-work, high-wage future, not a hard-work, low-wage 
future. There is no percentage in it for us to support those kind of low 
wages.
    Let me just say a couple of words about some specific things in the 
education area. I wouldn't be up here if people hadn't helped me get an 
education. I had college loans, I had scholarships. I had six jobs--
never more than three at once. [Laughter] All of that was opportunity 
and responsibility. The same kinds of things that are in your bill of 
rights and responsibility.
    We know now there is a greater difference in the ability of people 
to earn more successively and to live out the American dream based on 
their level of education than ever in the entire history of the country. 
We know that. We know, too, that in the 1980's the only item in a 
family's budget that went up faster than the cost of health care was the 
cost of college education. We know that. Now, our administration has 
done two things that I'm real proud of.
    First of all, we started the AmeriCorps program, which gives people 
a chance to serve their local communities and earn money to go to 
college. I thought it was sort of a Republican-like program, you know--
it was a grassroots program. There's no bureaucracy; we fund preexisting 
local projects in a highly competitive way. It's an empowerment program. 
You can't even get any money from the Government unless you work 
yourself to death for trying to help people solve their problems. Sounds 
to me like the kind of thing they're always talking about. [Laughter] 
Sometimes I wonder if a Republican President had proposed it, I don't 
think it would be a target in this budget cycle. But why would you get 
rid of that?
    More importantly, we found--I found before I became President--when 
I was Governor, I met young people who were dropping out of college 
because they thought that the careers for which they were being trained, 
including many of them who wanted to be school teachers--they thought 
they would not be able to earn enough to meet their college loan 
repayment obligations.
    And so, we did something remarkable, Secretary Riley, Deputy 
Secretary Kunin, the Education Department, we discovered that if we set 
up a system for the Federal Government to make direct loans, that we 
could loan the money at lower cost to the students and give

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them four different options to repay the loans so that you could--if you 
chose one option, you would always repay it at a certain percentage of 
your salary, whatever it was. So there would never be a time when 
repaying a loan would be a deterrent to taking it out in the first place 
or finishing your college education or serving the public as a teacher 
or a police officer or a nurse or doing something else that might not 
pay all the money in the world but was immensely rewarding and immensely 
important to the rest of society.

    This direct loan program is reducing the cost to the Government, 
reducing the deficit, increasing the number of people who can have 
college loans and improving their repayment terms. It's also much less 
hassle for the college administrators. Who doesn't like it? The 
middlemen who were cut out. What are they doing? They're up in the 
Congress right now trying to get rid of it. Who wants to get rid of it? 
Not the kids who have got them, not the college administrators who 
administer them, not the people who are worried about the budget but the 
special interests that have too much influence in this Congress say, 
``We lost our money; we want it back. We don't care what happens to 
these kids.'' That is wrong, and you ought to stand up against it.

    Now, we don't have to have a partisan, divisive fight about family 
values. And we don't have to argue whether we need improvements in 
personal conduct or political policies and economic policies. The truth 
is, we need a whole bunch of both. And nobody is smart enough to do 
everything we need to do politically and economically, and nobody will 
ever be good enough so that they won't be able to stand a little 
improvement. So this is a bogus debate.

    What we must not do is let one group take one side of this debate 
and use it as an excuse to divide the American people and walk away from 
our real responsibilities to the real families that are working their 
hearts out to do the best they can by their children in this country. 
That's what we must not do.

    So, let us stand together in fighting for the cause of education, 
the right kind of education, your kind of education--opportunity and 
high standards of excellence and accountability--the things you have 
stood for for years and years and years. That is a very important part 
of our Nation's family values agenda.

    And let us stand together to do things about the time that the kids 
have to spend before they come to you and after they leave you. This 
does not have to be a big divide. All we have to do is to find the 
common ground that is already out there in every neighborhood, in every 
community, in every city, town, and rural area in this country. All we 
have to do is bring what people know in their hearts to be true in the 
heartland here to the halls of Government. If we do that, we can really 
have a family values agenda.

    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 1:33 p.m. at the Sheraton Washington Hotel. 
In his remarks, he referred to Albert Shanker, president, and Edward 
McElroy, secretary-treasurer, American Federation of Teachers; and 
Sandra Feldman, president, United Federation of Teachers.