    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
    [May 30, 1996]
    [Pages 838-845]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Louisiana State Legislature in Baton Rouge
    May 30, 1996

        Thank you very much. I always enjoy coming to Louisiana and coming
    to this capitol building. I keep thinking I will somehow capture the
    secret of how you do it here. I thank you for that warm welcome.
    Governor Foster, thank you for your introduction. Mrs. Foster, Mr.
    Speaker, Senator Ewing, to your statewide elected officials, Senator
    Breaux and Congressman Jefferson, Congressman Fields, members of the
    Supreme Court, members of the State House and Senate, and all the guests
    who are here: I am very honored to be invited to speak to the Louisiana
    Legislature.
        I thank the Governor for coming up here with me. It's nice to see
    Republicans and Democrats standing together on the same little piece of
    ground here. [Laughter] I hope somebody got a picture of this. We're
    going to show it in Washington, DC.
        Somebody asked me if this was a good idea. I said, ``I don't know if
    it's a good idea for him, but anybody that comes to work in a camouflage
    hunting outfit is my kind of guy.'' I like it. [Laughter]
        I do want you to know that I have not been in Baton Rouge all day; I
    started the morning in New Orleans. And we all went to lunch there, and
    I paid some good sales tax in Louisiana--[laughter]--had a wonderful
    meal, ate too much food. And what I ate was Louisiana crawfish, not
    Chinese crawfish.
        I'm happy to be here in a State I've spent a lot of time in, my
    neighboring State, a State that has shared so many of the challenges
    that we faced in the dozen years I was Governor of Arkansas and in the
    last 20 years that I've been in public life. Indeed, you could argue
    that we've made a conscious effort, ever since the end of World War II,
    in our States and in other States throughout the South to catch up to
    the rest of America in providing opportunity in terms of jobs and
    education and working together to get beyond the divisions of race, to
    go to a time when we could ask everybody to be more responsible and
    everybody to work together more and put their divisions aside.
        And it's very interesting that now I think you can make a serious
    case that the whole country has to be on the mission that those of us in
    Southern States have been on for the last 50 years, because we know
    we've moved from the cold war to the global village; we know we've moved
    from an information age to one dominated by--I mean from an industrial
    age to one in which industry, agriculture, and all forms of human
    endeavor are dominated by information and technology. We know that the
    world is changing economically as much as it has in 100 years. And Bill
    Gates, the founder of Microsoft,

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    in his recent book says that in terms of how we communicate with one
    another and share information, we're going through the biggest period of
    change in 500 years, since Gutenberg printed the first Bible in Europe.
        And that means that if we want to preserve the American dream for
    our children and our grandchildren, that the whole country now has to
    work on the mission that arguably has been the mission of those who have
    been in the South for the last 50 years. We've got to have a system of
    education that is second to none in the world if we want our people to
    be able to compete and win in the global economy. And we have to find
    ways to create jobs in a competitive way. And we have to find ways for
    everyone to assume more responsibility for our common future and to do
    it together. We can't afford to be divided by race or gender or income
    or party or anything else anymore if it undermines the fundamental
    American mission of preserving the American dream for all of our people
    in a new world.
        And I see that so clearly as I travel around the world. I see that
    Americans are still looked up to by people around the world who think
    that we don't want to control their lives and we want to use our power
    to help everybody live in peace, who think that we are struggling to
    find ways for all of our folks to live together instead of defining our
    lives by who we're against and who we're not.
        In the South, you know, we see it in pretty stark racial terms, but
    it's gotten a lot more complicated than that. Our largest county in
    America, Los Angeles County, now has over 150 different racial and
    ethnic groups represented in one county in the United States. And the
    only way we're going to do well is if we all tack the same Constitution
    up on the wall, the same Bill of Rights on the wall, and say that's what
    we're going to live by; and if you will stand up and work hard and obey
    the law and share the same constitutional values and say we're all going
    to be responsible and do our best and work together, this country is
    going to do fine. We're going to do fine, but we have to do that.
        I do believe that the most important thing we can be doing today as
    a nation to create opportunity for our people is to give them the tools
    they need to succeed. In a global economy, the Government cannot give
    anybody a guaranteed success story, but you can give people the tools to
    make the most of their own lives. And education is the most important of
    all those tools.
        I'd like to talk just a few minutes about how education fits into
    building a structure of opportunity for the 21st century and what I
    believe the Nation's role is to the National Government, what I believe
    we should be doing through State and local government instead, and what
    we ought to leave to the private sector, both to groups like business
    and labor and just to individual citizens on their own. Because I think
    we need--in addition to a commitment to education, about which I want to
    say a little more in a minute--we need a system which will produce a
    growing economy, safe streets, a clean environment, and a Government in
    Washington that talks a lot more about what we need to do and a lot less
    about how we need to do it, that is leaner and more effective and
    focuses on those things which only we can do at the national level, and
    then does everything we can do to make it possible for people to do what
    should be done properly at the State level or the local level or in the
    private sector.
        Now, I think it's clear that we're moving in that direction. If you
    look at where we are now compared to 3\1/2\ years ago, the country was
    mired in a recession, the slowest job growth since the Great Depression;
    we had quadrupled the national debt in 12 years; the deficit was
    projected to be about $300 billion a year. Now it is less than half of
    what it was when I took office. And I know you all see us fighting all
    the time over the balanced budget, but let me tell you something: We've
    now had 4 years of deficit reduction in a row for the first time since
    Harry Truman was President. We're going to balance the budget.
        We have these big differences about how we should do it, and we
    might still get an agreement this year. We can still do that. But
    whatever happens, with or without an agreement, that deficit is going to
    keep coming down. And we're going to take the burden of debt off of you
    and off of our children. And we're going to stop taking so much money
    out of the capital accounts of the country, so interest rates will stay
    down, and we can grow this economy. It is terribly important.
        The second thing we've been committed to doing is expanding our
    exports. And I know the Chinese crawfish story is a sore story, and I
    can tell you, I'll do what I can to address

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    it. I wasn't just whistling ``Dixie'' when I said that. But if you look
    at the big picture, our exports have gone up more than a third in the
    last 3 years. They're at an all-time high. The jobs we have tied to
    exports on balance tend to pay more.
        If you go down to the Port of New Orleans and just look at what's
    happened there, just in the last couple of years, it is obvious that our
    ability to trade with other countries is critical to our future. We've
    had more than 200 separate trade agreements, 21 with Japan alone. We're
    selling everything from United States rice in Japan to
    telecommunications equipment and cars, and in the 21 areas where we've
    made deals with them, our exports are up 85 percent in 3 years.
        So America can compete with anybody anywhere in the world if we get
    not only freer trade but fair trade. That has to be our goal. That ought
    to be our goal with China. That's our goal with Japan. That's our goal
    with our neighbors in Latin America. That's our goal with everybody. We
    ask for no special treatment, but we do want fair rules that everybody
    follows. And we want to keep expanding America's ability to sell its
    products and services around the world.
        The third thing I believe we have to do is to continue to invest in
    the technologies of the future. You read a lot about the partisan
    squabbling in Washington, but I'd like to give the Congress credit for
    doing something almost unanimously in a completely bipartisan way in
    passing the telecommunications bill that we worked on for 3 years just a
    couple of months ago. That bill will literally create hundreds of
    thousands of jobs in the United States, good jobs, over the next few
    years, by making sure that we stay ahead of the curve in the
    technologies of the future. And we have to continue to do that.
        In Washington, one of our particular responsibilities, I believe, is
    in the whole area of biotechnology and how that relates to the whole
    communications and information revolution. We have to continue to invest
    in medical research, for example. We know that the 21st century, in
    large measure, will be the age of biology. We have people seriously
    telling us that we can raise the average life expectancy of people
    within a matter of a few decades to 100 years or more if we do it in the
    proper way. And we know that a lot of private enterprise cannot afford
    to do that unless we lead the way.
        So we have to keep doing that, looking to the future, expanding
    frontiers. Just as we went into space, we can't stop before we have
    explored the full frontiers of our ability to heal people and restore
    life and the capacity of people to do well and live out the fullest
    measure of their days. So we have to keep doing these things. And if we
    do, they'll have good results.
        We've got 8\1/2\ million more jobs than we had 3\1/2\ years ago, and
    we need more. But I say to you, this proves that we can move forward and
    do it together. And that's a responsibility in Washington, to keep
    interest rates low, to keep the deficit coming down, to balance the
    budget, and then to target the money we do have in the best possible
    way.
        The other thing we've got to do, as I said, is to kind of reform the
    way the Government works. One of the things that all of the Governors
    wanted us to do, and the State legislators, was to pass the unfunded
    mandates law, which I signed a year or so ago, which says that we can't
    pass laws anymore in Washington and tell you what to do and, by the way,
    we want you to pay for it. Now, I hope that you will feel that in the--I
    hope you're feeling it now; I hope you'll feel it in the years ahead. I
    think it's a very important bill. I do not believe, having served 12
    years as a Governor, longer than I can legally serve as President, I
    will never forget what it was like to put my budget together every year
    and have to start with the bill I was getting from Washington, first.
        So we say if Washington wants to ask the States to do something, we
    need to help you pay for it. We need to pay for our own mandates and not
    ask you to pick up the tab. I think that's important.
        Perhaps more important, we're also reducing the size and the way the
    Government operates. The Government in Washington is 237,000, to be
    exact, 237,000 people smaller today than it was the day I took the oath
    of office. It's now the smallest Federal Government in 30 years. As a
    percentage of the national work force, the Federal Government is the
    smallest it's been since 1933, before the New Deal.
        The era of big Government has been ended. We are reducing the size
    of Government. We are eliminating 16,000 of the 80,000 pages of Federal
    regulations outright, getting rid of them. We are changing a lot of the
    other regulations

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    in ways that make it easier for people in the private sector to live
    with. We're cutting by 25 percent the total amount of hours businesses
    are going to have to spend complying with EPA paperwork requirements
    without lowering any environmental standards whatever. We have given now
    about 80 different businesses and State governments permission to throw
    out the EPA rulebook if they can prove they're meeting the same clean
    air and clean water standards that the rules require. These are the
    kinds of things that we need to look at. How can we preserve our
    environment and grow our economy and be more efficient? And if there are
    ways to do it, Washington ought to be willing to let people do it.
        Let me just give you the agency that I'm proudest of. We know that
    most new jobs are going to be created by small and middle-sized
    businesses. We have cut the budget of the Small Business Administration
    by 25 percent and doubled the loan volume. We have dramatically
    increased loans to women and minorities with no requirements in advance
    and without making a single loan to a single unqualified person and
    without undermining loans available for other people who would get them
    in the ordinary course of business, just by aggressively reaching out
    and saying to everybody we have to create more small businesses. That's
    the way we ought to grow this country: Put the programs where the needs
    are, let people meet the needs, and do it in a way that is most
    efficient.
        I'm very proud of what the SBA is doing, and I think 10 years from
    now we're going to have hundreds and hundreds of thousands of jobs
    because people, like the people who have gotten these loans, had a
    chance to get their start. That's how Federal Express got started,
    Intel, and a lot of other places.
        Let me give you a few more examples. If you look at the crime bill,
    we're committed to a national goal of putting 100,000 police on the
    street, but we don't tell the police--the law enforcement officers how
    to do it. New Orleans has had a big drop in their crime rate. Jefferson
    Parish has had a big drop in their crime rate, a huge drop.
        I was with Sheriff Lee today; he said that he had gotten, I think,
    28 new officers the first go-around and 21 the second. I don't have any
    idea who they are, how they were trained, or how they were deployed.
    That's not the business of the Federal Government. We just knew that we
    tripled violent crime in 30 years and only increased by 10 percent the
    number of law enforcement officials. So police officers were having to
    drive around in cars more when what we really needed to do was walk on
    the streets more, to be in the neighborhoods more, to work with people,
    to stop crime from happening in the first place, to deal with the
    community crime watch groups and the children and try to give them good,
    positive role models.
        So we said, ``Here's our goal; now you figure out how to meet it and
    see if it will work.'' And we've had 3 years in a row now of declining
    crime rates all across America because we had the right kind of
    partnership: a national goal of 100,000 more police officers; let the
    people at the local level decide how to do it. It is working. That is
    the sort of thing we need more doing. And I can't help but say if we
    can't provide safe streets in this country, no one will ever trust
    Government to do anything else. People have to feel secure in their
    homes and on their streets and in their schools.
        So these are the sort of things that I think we need to be doing. I
    want to make just one remark about the whole issue of welfare reform and
    how we're going to change the Medicare and the Medicaid programs. Our
    administration has also given more freedom from Federal rules for States
    to experiment in the health care area than previous ones have. A lot of
    States have wanted to go, for example, to managed care programs for all
    their low-income folks on Medicaid, and we approved a number of those
    experiments.
        I have not been for a block grant program for Medicaid because I
    believe it is in the national interest to provide health care to seniors
    who have to go into nursing homes, to families with children with
    disabilities who might be cut out in hard economic times if we didn't
    have a national guarantee for them along with the national money, to
    pregnant women, and to poor children. And if something happens and we
    can't do that, I think it would be problem. As a person who was Governor
    of a State with economic challenges not unlike yours, I can tell you
    that it would give me a headache if I had had to go through the awful
    economic years of the 1980's with Medicaid as a block grant. I just
    don't think it's a good idea.
        But I do think it is a good idea for us not to micromanage the
    program to death. And whatever comes out of this, you will see there

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    is an enormous willingness to let the States have much more control over
    how the program is run but to maintain, from my point of view, a Federal
    guarantee that the populations should be covered and a guarantee that
    when times are getting tough you will get the money from Washington you
    need. Because if we block grant it and a big recession comes along and
    there's not enough money in the so-called reserve fund, then it will
    amount to an unfunded mandate, or you will be in a position of having to
    walk away from some of your folks that need it worse or having a
    mandated tax increase. And I just don't think it's right, and I don't
    think we ought to do it.
        In the area of welfare reform I do think we can, and I hope we will,
    get a Federal bill through that will give States much more flexibility
    in the area of how to move people from welfare to work. We all know what
    we believe in: We think there ought to be strict time limits, stiffer
    child support enforcement, requirements to work, and help to give
    parents the child care and health care they need so they can leave
    welfare behind without worrying that they're leaving their kids in a
    tight spot.
        You want people on welfare to do what you want the rest of society
    to do, to succeed as parents and as workers. And if you talk to any
    group of working people today, you find that that's what they're often
    worried about. If they're working hard and doing well but they're
    working longer hours at work, are they spending enough time with their
    kids, are their kids going to be okay?
        And that's what we want in America, I think, is for everybody to be
    able to succeed at home and at work, because if we have to choose one
    over the other we're in a terrible fix. If we don't succeed at work, we
    won't be competing and winning and keeping the American dream alive. But
    if we blow it at home, it's all for nothing anyway.
        I often say, you know, if we're lucky enough to know when we lay our
    head on the pillow for the last time before we leave this Earth, most of
    us won't say, ``Gee, I wish I had spent more time at the office.'' But
    we might say, ``I wish I had spent more time with my children; I wish
    there had been just a little more time to try to do this, that, or the
    other thing right. I could have been a better father. I could have been
    a better mother. I could have done this better.''
        So when you think about this welfare reform issue, I ask you only to
    think about this: What we want for every American family is success at
    work and success at home, and our policies ought to be designed to
    promote responsibility, work, and good parenting. If we do that, we're
    going to do the right things, and we'll get a better country out of it.
        I want to compliment Senator Breaux for the plan that he and the
    Republican Senator from Rhode Island, John Chafee, have introduced. If
    Congress would send me a bill like that, that is tough on work and fair
    to our children, then I'd be happy to sign it. And if we get a welfare
    reform bill, it will probably be because John Breaux has stayed after it
    and has been determined to get the Republicans and Democrats together
    when it seems so often that there's a determination to fight. And I
    thank him for that and you should be grateful for that, as well.
        Meanwhile, we'll just keep on telling States that they can have
    permission to get around cumbersome Federal rules to fashion their own
    welfare reform. Since I've been President we've given 38 States a total
    of 62 separate waivers from the Federal rules. Louisiana got permission
    to impose a 2-year time limit and to require minor welfare mothers to
    stay in school and to have their children immunized, two good
    requirements that I hope every State in the country will follow, because
    that means success at home and success at work. That's good for America.
        These 62 waivers--let me just give you an idea of what that means--
    that compares with a total of 24 in the previous two administrations,
    and there's more on the way. We have--75 percent of the families in
    America today are living under welfare reform experiments. And that's
    one reason, along with the improving economy, that there are 1.3 million
    fewer people on welfare today than there were in 1993 and one million
    people fewer on food stamps today. The poverty rolls are down. And that
    is because of welfare reform and the improving economy. So I urge you to
    continue to work on welfare reform and to continue to do it in a
    bipartisan fashion.
        Now, let me again say that we don't always do things in a partisan
    fashion in Washington. We passed the bipartisan budget for this year
    that brings down the deficit, continues to invest in education, in the
    environment, in Medicare

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    and Medicaid. We passed a tough antiterrorism bill. We passed that
    unfunded mandates bill. We passed the line item veto, thank goodness,
    after talking about it for 15 years.
        So we are doing some things up there in a bipartisan fashion, and I
    will continue to try that, and I hope welfare reform is one of them. But
    meanwhile, you keep after it, because it is the symbol in America of
    what is wrong with Government but also what could be right about
    Government. And I think you can make a real difference at the State
    level. We'll do all we can to help you.
        Let me just say a couple of words about education. The magic of
    education obviously is what occurs in the classroom between the teacher
    and the child, supported by the family. You need, for it to work, a good
    principal; you need, for it to work, a good school district; you need,
    for it to work, a strong State system that has not only adequate funding
    but high standards, high expectations.
        And then I believe that the National Government has a responsibility
    to help States deal with the populations that are especially
    troublesome, which we do through programs like the Chapter 1 program to
    help you if you have a disproportionate number of poor children, for
    example; through the Head Start program to get more of our kids in
    preschool programs; through the college loan programs, the college
    scholarship programs which we've expanded to make college more readily
    available; and through the Department of Education's efforts to promote
    reform.
        I appointed a Governor to head the Department of Education, Dick
    Riley, the former Governor of South Carolina. And he has designed an
    approach that I think is the proper one, where we try to encourage and
    facilitate school reforms, but we don't mandate them. The Goals 2000
    program, for example, only requires that States have a plan to meet high
    national standards, and that they decide how they're going to do it and
    how they're going to implement it. And in return for that, they get some
    help and freedom from a lot of hassle that used to be in Federal rules
    and regulations.
        The school-to-work program, about which I want to say just a little
    more in a moment, is in some ways the most important thing you can be
    focused on in the short run of your economy, because it recognizes that
    we are one of the few advanced countries in the world that has no system
    in every State in America to move people who don't go to 4-year colleges
    into the work force with enough skills to get jobs where the incomes
    will grow instead of going down. And every State has got to figure out
    how to do that.
        The school-to-work program is just a device in which you can get
    people together who represent the technical schools, the community
    colleges, the private sector, people who are interested in this, to find
    a way to deal with it. But let me say, as I told the Speaker of the
    House and the President of the Senate earlier this afternoon, if you
    just look at the 1990 census you will see this issue screaming at you
    from the 1990 census, because it shows you that in the 10 years between
    1980 and 1990 the people with a high school degree or less who were
    younger workers got jobs where their incomes went down. The people with
    4 years of college or more get jobs where their incomes went up.
        But you didn't have to have a 4-year degree. What you had to have
    was the equivalent of 2 years further training after high school. So
    people who went to a vo-tech school, a community college, into the
    United States military, or got training on the job that amounted to
    adding to the skill levels by 2 years got jobs that were more solid,
    more predictable, where they had a better path to the future and rising
    incomes.
        So our school-to-work program doesn't tell you to do anything, it
    just provides a framework in which you can bring all the people in
    Louisiana to the table and a little bit of money so that you can
    increase the number of young people who don't just get out of high
    school and drop through the cracks.
        One of the things we have got to do is to show these young people
    who are dropping out of the system, who aren't voting, who feel cynical
    about it, that they can have a positive future if they won't give up on
    themselves after high school and they'll put themselves in a position
    where they can get skills and they can continue to learn for a lifetime.
        The last thing I'd like to say about that is that I believe that we
    at the national level should do more to increase access to education
    after high school, not to shrink it. That's why I think the most
    important tax cut we could give the American people is a tax deduction
    for the cost of all education after high school, whether it's by the
    parent or the child, whether

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    it's in a 2-year program or a 1-year program or a 4-year program,
    because we need to set up a system where people can keep learning for a
    lifetime. That is a way that we don't make any decisions; the people
    make all the decisions.
        The second thing I propose is, we take all these Federal training
    programs, 70 or 80 of them, and collapse them all and put them in a big
    pot of money, and when somebody loses their job, just send them a
    voucher and let them do what they want to with it--go to the local
    technical college; go to the local community college; get in whatever
    program is certified and approved--and then send some money to the
    States for the people that aren't in driving distance of a high-class
    program where you can make a decision on how to deal with those people
    if they're isolated in rural areas or whatever.
        But these are the kind of things, it seems to me, that we can do
    together. Meanwhile, I just want to commend you for what you're trying
    to do on teacher salaries; I want to commend you for what you're trying
    to do on the whole issue of higher education. I know some people say--I
    was proud to hear the Governor say what he said about the regional
    average--some people say, you know, this education is not a money
    problem, and to some extent it's not. But one of Clinton's laws of
    politics is, I'll bet you anything when somebody tells you it's not a
    money problem, they're talking about somebody else's problem, not
    theirs. Money is not a sufficient condition to improve education, but it
    is necessary. It is nowhere near enough, but it's important, and I
    applaud you for what you're trying to do.
        I also will say again, I think this whole issue of high expectations
    is important. And if I might just return for one moment to my Governor's
    days, I spent I don't know how many hours in hundreds of schools as a
    Governor, most of them in my own State but some of them in States all
    over the country. I got to where I could get the feel of a school within
    10 minutes after walking in. I've talked and listened to principals and
    teachers and students and parents, and we did something yesterday that I
    just wanted to mention, because Louisiana ought to be really proud. We
    honored the Blue Ribbon Schools of 1996 yesterday, and there were eight
    Louisiana schools on that list--which is higher than your population--
    eight. They were from Gretna, Metairie, Shreveport, Abbeville, New
    Orleans, St. Joseph's Academy right here in Baton Rouge. What I was
    going to say about these schools is, they all have some things in
    common. They all have high standards, and they all have high
    expectations. They have systems of accountability and they reward
    people, and they deserve credit for that.
        But the thing that I have been most frustrated about when I was
    Governor and still as President is that we don't seem to have a system
    in education that you see in other forms of human endeavor, where people
    are dying to learn from the folks that are doing it in a way that works.
    And anything you can do, whether it's setting up charter schools or
    permitting parents to have more judgment about their schools--we've
    passed a broad public school choice plan in Arkansas, we're trying to
    help 3,000 of these charter schools to be set up within public school
    districts, but groups of teachers can establish it on their own--
    anything you can do that will help these schools that work get copied by
    others, I think that's one of the most important things that any State
    government could do in America, because every problem in public
    education has been solved by somebody somewhere.
        We could all sit here and tell each other stories until 3 a.m.
    tomorrow morning about it, and some of these stories will bring tears to
    your eyes. I was in a junior high school in--I'll never forget as long
    as I live--in Chicago in the highest crime rate area in the city before
    they started bringing the crime rate down. The principal of the junior
    high school was from my home State, from the Mississippi Delta. They had
    a school dress code. They had a mandatory attendance policy. They had an
    absolute zero tolerance for weapons. They had 150 mothers and 75 fathers
    volunteering in that school every week. They had attendance rates,
    graduation rates, and test scores above the State average, and they had
    no violence in the toughest neighborhood in the whole city.
        We could all tell stories about that. Why can't--if that can be done
    in one place or 2 places or 100 places or in these 8 schools in
    Louisiana or in all the Blue Ribbon Schools, why can't we do that
    everywhere? That cannot be done by the Federal Government. But if you
    wanted to do something that would revolutionize Louisiana forever, if
    you can figure out how to take what those eight schools we awarded
    yesterday those blue ribbons are doing, and get it done everywhere, you
    will do something

    [[Page 845]]

    that no State has figured out how to do that I think would make a
    difference that is profound in the future of the children of this State.
        Finally, let me say I think that there is one other thing that we
    ought to help do, and that is to add to the basics for the 21st century
    computer literacy and access to the information superhighway. I have
    asked the Congress to give me a small amount of money, $2 billion, to
    help us work with the private sector in school districts all across
    America to make sure that by the year 2000, every classroom and every
    library in every school in America is connected to the information
    superhighway, and I think that is very, very important.
        If you just think about what that would mean, and if we do it in a
    way that guarantees the good software and properly trained teachers--the
    State of West Virginia has been hooking up a grade a year, for 6 years
    now. They're going into junior high school; they just got out of grade
    school. But one-third of all the money they've spent on computers and
    wiring and connections, one-third of all the money they spent on teacher
    training. So it's important that whatever we do to help put the rest of
    this together, the teachers are properly trained.
        That could also do more for our poor States and our poor school
    districts than anything else. Think about it. If you've got good
    equipment, good software, trained teachers in the remotest, most rural
    school district in the mountains of the Arkansas Ozarks or in the
    backwaters of Louisiana, you could have children doing research papers
    out of libraries in Australia on volcanoes anywhere in the world. You
    could have the quality of instruction coming to people that they could
    never get any other way, that today may be available only to people who
    go to the fanciest, most rigorous private and public schools in America.
        So I think that--I want you to all think about that. We ought not to
    start this new century without every classroom and every library hooked
    up to the Internet, without adequate software for these kids, without
    adequate computers for these kids, and without enough teachers being
    trained to make sure they can do it. We can leapfrog a whole generation
    of economic advancements in our public schools if we do this right. And
    there's no excuse for us in the South--we have waited too long for
    this--there is no excuse for us to walk away from this, especially in
    the Southern States.
        So I ask you to think about those things. And again, I say in
    closing, I saw my job when I became President to create a structure of
    opportunity for the 21st century, so that every American would be able
    to make the most of their own lives, and to find a way for us to work
    together with responsibility and a united community, instead of being
    divided.
        The results, I think, have not always satisfied me in Washington.
    But we are in better shape than we were 3\1/2\ years ago. And even in
    Washington--you look at it--every time we work together, we produce
    something that's good for America. When we work together, we do
    something that is good for America. When you work together, you will do
    something that is good for Louisiana.
        And I will say again, I believe that having a world-class education
    system that is available to all of our children is now the single most
    important thing we can do, not just for the South to catch up to America
    but for America to remain the strongest, most prosperous country in the
    world in the next century. And we owe that to our children.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 6:15 p.m. at the State Capitol. In his
    remarks, he referred to Gov. Mike Foster and his wife, Alice; H.B.
    Downer, Jr., speaker, Louisiana House of Delegates; and Randy Ewing,
    president, Louisiana State Senate.