    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
    [February 15, 1996]
    [Pages 261-264]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 261]]

    Remarks on the Education Technology Initiative in Union City
    February 15, 1996

        Thank you very much. Mr. Vice President, thank you for that
    introduction and for your leadership to advance the technological
    revolution in America and especially to bring its benefits to all of our
    children. Thank you, Mr. Mayor; Superintendent Highton; Senator
    Lautenberg; Congressman Menendez; Secretary of Education Klagholz; Bob
    Fazio, the principal of this fine high school; I'm glad he's not running
    for President this year. [Laughter]
        Jim Cullen, the vice chairman of Bell Atlantic, thank you so much
    for everything you have done to make this school district a success, and
    the work you have done throughout this State and throughout your area of
    service. To the folks at Bergen Academy and Secretary Riley and to
    others joining us on the information superhighway, including students
    from 65 schools in 3 counties--and I believe Congressman Torricelli is
    out there in cyberspace somewhere--it's nice to have all of you with us.
    And let me say a special word of thanks to the parents, the teachers,
    and the students of this school and the Bergen Academy who joined us
    today to talk about what all this means to our children and our future.
    And let me ask us all to give a special word of recognition to the two
    students who just spoke, who must have been somewhat nervous but did not
    betray it, Marlon Grenados and Tonya Nagahwatte; they did a great job.
        I'm very glad to be back in New Jersey and in Union City. All of you
    know that the Vice President and I came here today because this school
    system is undergoing a remarkable transformation. I want the rest of the
    country to know about it, and I want everybody in the country to be able
    to emulate it. Let me begin by acknowledging the contributions of
    Congressman Bob Menendez, who was formerly mayor here, a true native son
    of Union City, a sponsor of the New Jersey Telecommunications Act in
    1991 that set the stage for the remarkable events we are celebrating
    today.
        The rebirth of Union City and your schools reminds us that we do
    live in an age of great possibility if people are willing to work
    together to make the most of it. More Americans from all walks of life
    will have more chances to live up to their dreams than at any time in
    our Nation's history. New technologies are opening prospects for vast
    new areas of human activity that will bring prosperity. A growing global
    marketplace is putting a premium on the kind of ingenuity and skills
    Americans can contribute to the present and the future.
        But let's face it, we also know that this new era is a time of great
    new challenges, putting new pressures on families that are not
    particularly well equipped to deal with it. More and more of our
    citizens are living better, but more and more of our families are
    working harder and harder just to keep up. They justifiably wonder if
    they and their children will be winners in this new age, or if they will
    be left behind in some downsizing or in some job in which they never get
    a raise.
        After what I have seen today, I believe more strongly than ever
    before the answer to the problems of those who are not yet benefiting
    from the information age is not to try to put walls up or turn around
    and go back, it is to keep going forward until every child and every
    family in every home, in every workplace can see what we are seeing here
    today.
        You know, in the State of the Union Address I talked about the
    importance of the budget discussions we have been having in Washington
    for the last year, the need to finish the work of balancing the budget
    but to do it in a way that recognizes our obligations to our future
    through investments in education and environmental protection, and that
    recognizes our obligations to our families and to our larger American
    family, including those who through no fault of their own need help from
    all of us, and that's why we ought to preserve the Medicare and Medicaid
    programs. But I also said there, and I would like to reiterate here, I
    believe there is a broad bipartisan consensus in this country to
    continue the work until we have eliminated this permanent deficit, until
    we are living within our means, until we are committed, all of us, in
    living on a balanced budget.
        So what we have to do now is look to the future. In that address, I
    outlined what I believe are the seven great challenges facing America if
    we want all Americans to have a chance at

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    the American dream and if we want to grow together, not be driven apart.
    We must build stronger families and better childhoods. We must have
    better education; we must make sure all of our children--every single
    one of them--has access to the educational opportunities of the present
    and the future. We must build economic security for every single working
    family genuinely willing to work for it to hook into that future so that
    they will not be left behind. We must continue the fight to make our
    streets safer until crime in America is once again the exception, not
    the rule. We must work to clean up our environment while we grow our
    economy and forever dispose of the myth that you cannot have a strong
    economy unless you are destroying your environment; we cannot afford any
    more of the luxury of pretending that that is true. We must continue to
    work to lead the world toward a direction that is more peaceful and
    free. And finally, our Government must be one that serves and works and
    earns your trust, instead of your distrust.
        I think it is fair to say that none of those goals can be achieved
    unless we are successful in improving the quality of education for all
    Americans. We will do this through a partnership, not through big
    Government. The high-tech information age means that all large
    bureaucracies will be restructured, that more decisions will be pushed
    down to the grassroots, that people will be able to make more decisions
    for themselves.
        But we dare not go back to an era when all of our people were left
    to fend for themselves. We have to go forward together with teamwork,
    just the way Union City has gone forward together with teamwork to have
    this remarkable educational achievement we celebrate today. I thank
    Congressman Menendez for what he said in echoing the title of the First
    Lady's book, which I'm pretty proud of. He is right, it does take a
    whole village to raise and educate our children. And it takes all of us
    to meet all these common challenges.
        That's what Union City is an example of. That's why we wanted to
    come here today. I loved looking into the eyes of young people in the
    meeting which we just came from and hearing one of them say, you know,
    the thing about this technology is we can all achieve. It doesn't matter
    whether we're the richest family in the State or not. It doesn't matter
    what our background is. It doesn't matter if our parents came here just
    a few years ago. This is the great equalizer. We can have high standards
    and high expectations and we can all make it if we work together. That
    is the message America needs to heed today.
        For 3 years, working with our distinguished Education Secretary,
    Dick Riley--who may not be a cheerleader in his next life--[laughter]--
    but has been a terrific cheerleader for America's children for the last
    3 years and, indeed, even before--we have worked on a simple strategy
    for education. We believe in high standards. We believe in high
    expectations. We believe in high levels of opportunity. We believe in
    high technology. And we believe the doors of college should be open to
    every single American citizen.
        We have worked hard to expand Head Start; to implement the Goals
    2000 program, which gives to States and school districts the ability to
    advance toward high national standards through grassroots reforms, like
    public school choice or even letting teachers start their own public
    schools or doing things like you have done here that can't be done
    everywhere in the beginning. We have worked to create a network of
    school-to-work programs to help young people who don't go on to college
    immediately to at least find good jobs and to continue their education
    when they leave high school. We have set challenges to schools to
    recognize that they must impart the basic values that keep our society
    together, through character education and teaching good values and good
    citizenship.
        All these things we have done. We have expanded Pell grants and
    created a new direct lending program that makes it easier for young
    people to borrow money for college and easier for them to repay it. Our
    AmeriCorps program is now giving 25,000 young Americans a chance to work
    in their communities to solve problems at the grassroots and earn money
    for college.
        But we have to do more. In the State of the Union I proposed giving
    a $1,000 merit scholarship to the top 5 percent of every high school
    graduating class, to expand work-study to include a million students so
    more people can work their way through college. And if we are going to
    cut taxes, what better way to do it than to give a tax deduction of up
    to $10,000 to every American family for the cost of college tuition?
    That would be a good way to cut taxes.
        But we know that none of these things will work until we bring the
    information and technology revolution into every school, and through

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    the schools, into the homes of every school student in the United States
    of America. You heard the Vice President say he was in Philadelphia
    yesterday to celebrate the birthday of ENIAC, the first computer. He was
    too delicate to say it's 50 years old this year, and it was born in the
    same year I was. [Laughter] The computer and I this year will become
    eligible to join the American Association of Retired Persons. I don't
    know about the computer, but I hope I don't quite qualify this year.
    [Laughter]
        Let me just say, when I was the age of the students here--let me
    just give you some examples of what has happened in this 50 years. When
    I was the age of the students that we met with today, the big
    technological breakthroughs were Technicolor movies and stereo music. I
    can remember when 3-D movies came out and you got to wear little glasses
    to look at the movies. And we really thought that was hot stuff, that we
    had to put glasses on to see movies that looked like real people. I
    remember when color televisions and cellular telephones and computers
    that could fit on somebody's desk were science fiction; nobody could
    even imagine it.
        For our young people today, that all seems like ancient history, not
    science fiction. They interact with computers at the supermarket, at the
    checkout counter, in video arcades, in their homes. You know, to them
    it's all second nature. I'd venture to say that at least half the adults
    in this room have learned more about computers from their kids than from
    any other source.
        But it's a real misfortune that not every schoolroom in America has
    the computers we celebrate today here and at the Bergen Academy. That is
    wrong. And that's why I have issued this challenge to our Nation to form
    a national partnership to make sure every young American has access to
    the future through the information superhighway.
        When I was young, I thought the future was there for every American
    who would work for it. It turned out to be true for my generation. It
    will be true for this generation, too, and it will be a bigger,
    brighter, broader future, but only if we bring the benefits of the
    information revolution to every single one of them.
        Bob Menendez talked about the achievements of this school district.
    But think about it: Not so long ago this school system was on the brink
    of a State takeover under New Jersey's law, that actually has a lot to
    recommend it, saying that if students aren't learning, the State should
    have a right to move in. But you rescued it. And you did it the way we
    have to meet our challenges, everybody working together, everyone doing
    their part: the board of education voting to modernize, Bell Atlantic
    making all the contributions it made linking up the schools, the State
    of New Jersey helping with its resources, teachers and experts writing a
    new curriculum, parents actually coming here for weekend training taught
    by a teacher and her students, parents who now can work with their
    children at home on the computer.
        And the students have taken this opportunity and this
    responsibility. They feel empowered, and they know it makes learning
    more fun. You know that with the computers in the classroom and at home,
    linked together, homework is being done in a new way; classrooms,
    lessons take on a new life; parents and teachers can keep in touch by E-
    mail. Test scores have gone up, and truancy and dropout rates have gone
    down. In the words of the Vice President that he coined 4 years ago,
    everything that should be up is up and everything that should be down is
    down. And that's the way it ought to be all over America.
        We're not just talking about an option that it would be nice for
    schools to have. Over 130 recent academic studies have shown clearly
    that the use of technology in support of instruction has led to higher
    achievement in language, in art, in math, in social studies, and of
    course, in science. We have dramatic proof of the power of technology to
    expand opportunity for our young people. We have to harness that power
    and spread it throughout this country.
        In the State of the Union, I called on Americans to join in this
    national mission to make every child technologically literate, to
    connect every classroom and library in our country by the dawn of the
    21st century, which is just a few years away, to connect them with
    quality computers, trained teachers, creative software. We must do
    everywhere what you have done here.
        We are making real progress. We are bringing companies and
    volunteers together in California to wire 20 percent of those schools
    this year alone. And the Vice President and I are going out there in a
    few days to celebrate that. And in the telecommunications bill which I
    signed last week, there is a requirement for companies to provide a
    discount for connecting all of our

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    classrooms and libraries to the information superhighway. And I thank
    the people in Congress who unanimously--almost unanimously--passed that
    bill, and the industries that supported it. We must all continue to do
    our part.
        But our National Government must do its part, too. Consistent with
    the recommendations of the National Information Infrastructure Advisory
    Committee, which I appointed and which recently issued its last
    reports--full of communications executives and others expert in
    communication around our country--I am today announcing a major
    initiative to energize our people to work to fulfill that mission even
    more quickly. I am proposing in my present budget, paid for in the
    balanced budget, a $2 billion technology literacy challenge that will
    put the future at the fingertips of every child in every classroom in
    America.
        The two Members of Congress here present are in a unique position to
    support this endeavor: Senator Lautenberg, because before he became a
    Senator he was in the information business, and he saw the possibilities
    of computers, and he knows it should be used to do more than make
    successful businesses, it should make successful students; and
    Congressman Menendez, because of what he has done with you here.
        Together, working with like-minded Democrats and Republicans, we can
    make this America's cause. We can do this. We can have computers in
    every classroom. We can have all students eager to learn. We can have
    the face of every single child light up, and we can know that down deep
    inside every child can believe again that he or she--no matter what
    their background, no matter what their economic challenges--can fulfill
    the mission that they have the capacity to fulfill. We can do this. We
    can do it together, and I believe we will.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:30 a.m. in the gymnasium at St.
    Michael's Academy. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor Bruce D. Walter
    of Union City; Tom Highton, superintendent, Union City School District;
    and Leo Klagholz, New Jersey secretary of education.