    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book I)]
    [June 25, 1997]
    [Pages 816-820]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the Family Re-Union VI Conference in Nashville
    June 25, 1997

        Thank you very much, Mr. Vice President. We built in a little time
    on the other end of the schedule because I knew that we'd all want to
    stay here longer. I'm reluctant to say anything; those 12 people were so
    good.
        I'm reminded of the very first time I made a speech as an elected
    public official, more than 20 years ago now. It was at a Rotary Club in
    southeast Arkansas, and it was one of these officers banquets, you know,
    it was one of those things where we start at 6:30, and I was introduced
    to speak at a quarter to 10. [Laughter] There were 500 people there; all
    but 3 were introduced. They went home mad. [Laughter] And the only guy
    in the audience--in the whole crowd more nervous than me was the fellow
    that was supposed to introduce me. He didn't know what to say. He was
    nervous, too. And so I get ready to be introduced, and the guy comes up,
    and his opening line is--after all the officers had been inducted, all
    the awards had been given, everybody had been recognized, his opening
    line is--in my first speech as an elected public official--is, ``You
    know, we could have stopped here and had a very nice evening.''
    [Laughter] Now, I know he didn't mean it that way. [Laughter] And I
    could have said that about myself now. We could stop right here and have
    had a very nice session.
        What I would like to do just very briefly is to try to put this
    whole--what we've been talking about today in the larger context of what
    America is trying to do and what our responsibility is at the national
    level, because when

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    I say over and over and over again, the era of big Government is over,
    but the era of big challenges is not, I don't mean for people to say, as
    they sometimes do, that that means the Federal Government can take a
    powder. I don't agree with that.
        What I mean is that we're going to have to do more of what we do
    together as partners, and we cannot succeed in a lot of these problems,
    which as you just heard are fundamentally human challenges that have to
    be dealt with child by child, family by family, street by street, school
    by school--that simply cannot be done successfully if the whole focus is
    on what is the Federal Government going to do. On the other hand, I
    would argue it cannot be done comprehensively and fairly to every child
    if there is no focus on what is the Federal Government going to do.
        Now, for the last 4\1/2\ years, Vice President Gore and I and our
    team have worked on a simple vision for America. We've been trying to
    prepare our country for the 21st century with some simple goals: We want
    every child to have the chance to live out his or her dreams. We want
    every citizen to be responsible for self, for family, for community, for
    country. And we want a community that is coming together as one America,
    not being driven apart by its differences. And we think if we do all
    those things, we'll have--what, finally, we want is for our country to
    continue to be the world's leading force for peace and freedom and
    prosperity in the world.
        And when you ask yourselves a tough question in the moment, I think
    it often helps to get the right answer. You say, ``Well, where do I want
    to go?'' Well, that's where we want to go. And our strategy has been to
    develop a National Government set of policies that would, in effect,
    empower citizens and families and communities and schools and workplaces
    to create the kind of destiny that we know we're capable of creating.
        That's why I love these Family Re-Union conferences, because every
    one of them, fundamentally, when you get right down to it, is about
    empowerment. You take the two the Vice President mentioned, the
    television rating system and the V-chip. The Government can advocate for
    and even mandate, in the case of the V-chip, a law, but all it does is
    to empower families to be able to raise their children with a little
    more direction--or what we did on the family and medical leave and what
    we hope to do on advancing, expanding family and medical leave, and
    having the right sort of flextime proposal.
        Nothing is really more important to a society than raising children.
    But if we have a good economy, it helps people raise children. So the
    real--what's in the vortex there in the middle is how do you enable
    people to succeed at home and at work? How many times did you hear these
    people talking about child care, before-school care, after-school care,
    bringing in the parents at different times--a parent played in an
    orchestra concert the night before and taught orchestra the next
    morning. What does that mean? It means that we have to find new and
    creative ways to reconcile work and family and in some places to get
    work for families so that they can succeed as parents of students.
        So that's what I like about this, because this family conference
    basically emphasizes what I think our central strategy ought to be,
    which is how are we going to give our citizens the power they need,
    first and foremost, to raise successful children and, secondly, to make
    America successful?
        And let me just very briefly mention two or three things. We have
    tried to focus on--in addition to the economy, which was our first
    obsession because we knew if we couldn't get it going, a lot of these
    other things wouldn't occur, we tried to say, ``Well, what else do
    families need?'' One is safe streets. So we've worked hard on a
    grassroots crime package to empower people to keep the crime rate coming
    down, and last year we had the biggest drop in 36 years. And if we do it
    for about 3 more years, people might actually believe it's come down, as
    it has. And that's good. That is, it might be more than numbers and
    lives saved; people might actually feel safe. And that's important
    because if people don't feel safe, they're not fully free.
        Then we focused on culture, the V-chip, the TV ratings, the work,
    the terrific work Secretary Riley did with Attorney General Reno to draw
    the lines and also amplify the possibilities for dealing with different
    religious convictions in our schools which are multiplying enormously.
    We tried to deal with cultural issues in the sensitive way that
    respected the differences of conviction and opinion of people on
    religion, on race, on other issues but still bound us together
    consistent with our Constitution.

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        The third thing we focused on, as I said, was home and work. And I
    mentioned that family leave, flextime, the minimum wage, a tax cut for
    working families with modest incomes--that's a big part of the new
    balanced budget plan, too. That has a children's tax cut.
        The fourth thing we focused on was public health and the
    environment. If you think about it, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the new
    food safety standards, cleaning up toxic waste dumps, these things are
    very important. If they make children healthier, it makes us stronger.
    We've made a lot of strides in that in the last 4\1/2\ years, indeed, in
    the last 25 years. And one of the things that I was doing this morning
    before I came down here to be with you was to deal with the obligation
    of the Environmental Protection Agency to issue new regulations, as
    they're bound to do on a 5-year cycle, to control pollution from soot
    and smog. That's very important. And I approved some very strong new
    regulations today that will be somewhat controversial, but I think kids
    ought to be healthy.
        Our approach on the environment, interestingly enough, has been a
    lot like the approach that you've heard here on the schools. We think if
    we have high standards for protecting the environment, but we're
    flexible in how those standards are implemented and we give adequate
    time and adequate support for technology and creativity, that we can
    protect the environment and grow the economy. And we know we can never
    be put in the position of choosing one or the other because in the end,
    a declining economy has always, always led to an environment that is
    less clean--always. So we've got to find a way to do both.
        And I want to thank the Vice President for his leadership on this
    issue. And I know that those who have opposed the higher standards, I
    want to just tell you: Read the implementation schedule; work with us.
    We will find a way to do this in a way that grows the American economy.
    But we have to keep having a clean environment if we want healthy
    children.
        Children with asthma don't do very well in school. Children with
    gripping allergies that they could have avoided if they hadn't had to
    breathe dirty air don't do as well in school. So the public health and
    the environment are important parts of this.
        We're trying extraordinary new measures to give cities the means
    they need to clean up their environment so they can attract the right
    kind of investment. And we're determined to clean up 500 more toxic
    waste dumps; that will bear directly on education. And if we do it
    right, it will cause our economy to grow faster, not slower. So I hope
    all of you will support that.
        And finally, let me say, in education we have focused on
    empowerment, on things like charter schools, public school choice, more
    funds for Head Start to get more kids well-prepared, better terms for
    college loan programs so more young people can borrow money and go to
    college and never worry about going broke because they couldn't pay
    their loans back, so they could pay them back as a percentage of their
    income, a huge expansion in work-study, a big expansion in Pell grants.
    And then, on top of what we've already done, if a balanced budget plan
    passes, it will be the biggest increase in funds for education in over a
    generation. And including funds to support the schools that are trying
    to set high standards, that are trying to be innovative with things like
    charter schools, more funds to support putting the right kind of
    technology with the right kind of training and software in all of our
    schools, more funds to support a massive volunteer effort to make sure
    all of our 8-year-olds have a chance to read well.
        We still have some serious challenges in our schools. One of the
    most interesting things that we finally saw manifested in test scores
    this year was that the Third International Math and Science Test scores
    came out this year on last year's scores, and they showed that for the
    first time, American fourth graders scored way above the international
    average on math and science. And that even though this was just a few
    thousand of our kids who took this, it's a representative sample by
    race, by income, and by region, proving that our children can learn even
    though they are very diverse in incomes and in ethnic backgrounds and in
    living circumstances--way above the national average. That's the good
    news.
        The bad news is, we were the only nation in the world to score way
    above the national average on the fourth grade tests and well below the
    international average on the eighth grade tests. It happened in no other
    country in the world.
        Why is that? Let's be real here. The reason you stood up and clapped
    for Yvonne is you know that a lot of these kids are living in
    hellaciously difficult circumstances, right? That's why you did that.
    And you did it because you

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    want to believe that those kids can make it if we do right by them. And
    she made you believe they could, and it was thrilling to you. But when a
    lot of these kids reach adolescence, every single problem that affects
    every adolescent hits them multiplied by a hundred. And we've got to
    find a way to keep their parents or other concerned adults involved with
    them when they reach adolescence.
        The fourth grade tests should make you ecstatic. It punctures all
    the myths that we can't compete globally in educational performance,
    uniformly, because we have so many poor people, because we have so many
    immigrants, because we're so diverse. That is our meal ticket to the
    future if we do it right. That punctures the myth.
        The eighth grade tests should sober us up. These kids have a tough
    time out there. That's one of the reasons that in our budget we're
    determined to give half of them health insurance for the first time and
    deal with some of these health problems we're talking about. We
    shouldn't stop until they all have health care. It's unconscionable.
        Let me say, in the moment, the most important thing is that you know
    we can do it. That's what the fourth grade tests mean. The second most
    important thing is you know that we can't stop until every child has the
    kind of parental involvement that 30 years of academic studies have
    shown is pivotal in the success of children.
        And so one of the things, to go back to Representative Purcell's
    formulation, plus my little add-on about either leading the way, getting
    out of the way, or trying to support the way--one of the things that I
    think is important is that today the Department of Education is
    publishing a handbook to help parents everywhere understand and live up
    to their responsibilities and work with the schools. And Dick gave me
    the first copy here. It's called ``A Compact For Learning.''
        And I would like to explain something to you. We are required under
    Federal law to have a written compact for the title I schools, and so we
    thought we ought to have an outline here that would at least increase
    the chances that we might be as successful in these other schools as the
    ones that you've seen featured today. But what we want to do with this
    is to challenge every principal, every teacher, every parent to have a
    written compact that outlines their expectations and their
    responsibilities for helping every child to learn high standards, with
    serious, sustained, effective parental involvement. That's how we'll try
    to support the way. It is very, very important.
        I have to tell you, I feel more hopeful today--I've been working on
    these educational issues for nearly two decades now, and I have never
    been more hopeful than I am today that what I consider to be the central
    problem with the system of education in America might be overcome.
        The central problem is the following, as you have just heard: Every
    challenge in America has been met by somebody, somewhere. How can that
    be a problem? Because if that is true, we should be able to replicate it
    everywhere.
        You heard the Vice President say 98 percent of us have televisions.
    Well, once, just a few of us did. We all figured out how everybody could
    get a television. You heard John Doerr say that 50 percent of the
    parents--more than 50 percent of the parents with children in school now
    have personal computers in their homes. Any pretty soon it will be a lot
    higher than that and go way down in lower income levels.
        Why is it--and I mean this as a compliment to our first speakers,
    our first three speakers who talked about their schools, and the
    principal of the San Antonio school district--why is it that we want to
    scream with joy when we hear them talk, when we heard our friend from
    Chattanooga talking about how they served the parents--and they had no
    excuses? Why did we want to scream with joy when we heard that? Because
    they are the exception, not the rule.
        So, no offense, but I'd like it if 5 years from now they could come
    back to this stage and give all these talks and receive polite applause
    and the gratitude of the Nation for getting everybody else to follow
    their lead so they would no longer be the exception and not the rule.
        We'll do our part. I hope you'll help us get this handbook out and
    get it made alive in the work of the school districts in the country, in
    all the schools. You'll do yours. But remember, our kids can do it. The
    only question is whether we're going to do our part to make sure they
    get their chance to do it. And that is, in many ways, the central
    obligation of adult Americans at this moment in our history.
        And I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to the Vice President
    and Mrs. Gore for every year reminding us about what's most important in
    all our lives and in our country's life.

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        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 12:40 p.m. in Langford Auditorium at
    Vanderbilt University. In his remarks, he referred to Yvonne Chan,
    principal, Vaughn New Century Learning Center, San Fernando, CA; former
    Tennessee State Representative Bill Purcell, director, Child and Family
    Policy Center, Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies; and John
    Doerr, partner, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, Menlo Park, CA.