    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book I)]
    [February 24, 1997]
    [Pages 189-194]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the American Council on Education
    February 24, 1997

        Thank you very much. Mr. Secretary, that was a good speech--
    [laughter]--and fully illustrated Clinton's third law of politics, which
    is, whenever possible, be introduced by someone you have appointed to
    high position. [Laughter] Their objectivity is stunning. [Laughter]
        I thank Secretary Riley and all the people at the Department of
    Education for the work that they do. Stan Ikenberry, I'm glad to be here
    today with all of you. President Knapp, thank you for your moving
    remarks about the HOPE scholarship. You all laughed when Barry said he
    was making a great sacrifice by going to the Aspen Institute, but in
    Georgia, that's what they think. [Laughter]
        President-elect Myers, and to my friend Barry Munitz--you know,
    we're all in a lather up here in Washington these days about campaign
    contributions. Everybody hates them, but nobody wants to go to public
    funding. So we seem destined to some period of handwringing. And since
    we're in a spirit of full disclosure, I have to tell you that in
    addition to my coming here today, I received a gratuity, which I intend
    to

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    disclose before the whole world. I complimented Barry on his watch, and
    he gave it to me. [Laughter] And cravenly, as we politicians are, I took
    it without blinking. [Laughter] He swears it cost $18. [Laughter]
        But I'll tell you why I bragged on it--and all of you more or less
    of my age group can identify with this--look how big the numbers are. I
    can--[laughter]--it's the first watch I've ever seen that I don't need
    glasses for. The more expensive they are, the smaller the numbers get.
    [Laughter] So, thank you, Barry.
        I would like to begin today, if I might, with a very personal and
    serious word. This is the first opportunity I have had, really, to say
    something publicly about the death of Al Shanker yesterday, one of the
    greatest educators of the 20th century in this country. He was my friend
    for many years. I considered him my colleague. He believed that all
    children could learn with high expectations and high standards, high-
    quality teaching, and high accountability. He literally lived a life
    that was nothing less than a crusade, with intense passion and power.
    And I know that all of you will join me in wishing his wife and his
    family and the members of the American Federation of Teachers the best,
    and giving them our sadness and our thanks for a remarkable American who
    did his job very, very well.
        I also want to come here to thank you. Secretary Riley said, in his
    inimitable way, that this is a big day for us--and this is a big day for
    us--starting with the community colleges and their trustees and then
    going to this organization which represents, I thought at last count,
    almost 1,700 2- and 4-year colleges and universities. Your views matter,
    your voice is heard, and your endorsement of our college opportunity
    agenda, including the HOPE scholarships, the tax deduction for tuition,
    and the large increase in Pell grants, will help to bring that
    opportunity into reality and to fulfill my dream of opening the doors of
    college to every single American who wants to go. Thank you very, very
    much. I'm grateful to you.
        This is a remarkable time in the history of our democracy. At the
    end of the cold war we find ourselves as the world's remaining
    superpower, with a special responsibility to try to shape the future in
    a way that will advance the cause of peace and prosperity. We find our
    own economy strong and growing, producing more jobs in the last 4 years
    than in any comparable term in our history, with record numbers of new
    businesses being formed each and every year.
        We know that this is a time of enormous change, but the impulse to
    satisfaction, I'm sure, is great. Normally, when democracies have times
    this good, one of two things happens, sometimes both at the same time:
    People get very self-satisfied and begin to relax and therefore miss the
    underlying currents of what is really going on for the future, or they
    become too easily preoccupied with small matters and begin to divide
    among themselves over things that bring them down instead of lift them
    up. We must give in to neither impulse.
        Because the growth of the global economy and the absolute explosion
    in scientific and technical information associated with the information
    age give us an opportunity but not a guarantee, an opportunity for
    undreamed of new jobs and careers, for greater knowledge and
    understanding, not just for greater material wealth but for enhancements
    in the quality of lives for families and communities, it is literally
    true that in the era toward which we are moving more people than ever
    before in all of human history will have a chance to live out their
    dreams. But it is also true that the chance cannot be realized unless we
    give them the power to make the most of their own lives. So this is no
    time to rest.
        Four years ago we knew we couldn't rest, and we set about laying the
    foundation for progress by changing the economic policy of the country
    to focus on investing in our people, getting our fiscal house in order,
    emphasizing science and technology, and opening the doors of trade with
    the rest of the world. We changed our social policy, centering it
    clearly on family and community and focusing on action instead of
    rhetoric. The result is that we've had marked drops in crime, the
    biggest drop in welfare rolls in the history of the country, the family
    and medical leave law, action to stop teenagers from being exposed
    illegally to the sales and marketing of cigarettes, and a number of
    other initiatives.
        Our foreign policy has begun to articulate the world that we want to
    make, working in an interdependent way with allies and friends of like
    mind throughout the world not only to advance the cause of peace and
    freedom and prosperity but to stand up against the new threats to our
    security.

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        Along the way, we have fought--and I hope largely resolved--the
    battle that has dominated America for nearly 20 years now over what the
    proper role of our Nation's Government should be. You hardly hear anyone
    saying anymore that Government is the enemy.
        It was interesting--in the last couple of days Hillary and I went to
    see--or brought in the movie--we have a theater at the White House; it's
    the best perk of the job, I think--[laughter]--but we had about all the
    seriousness we could stand, and we watched that movie ``Dante's Peak,''
    about the volcano exploding. And I couldn't help thinking, you know, the
    hero works for the U.S. Geological Service, and his life is saved in the
    end by a contraption developed not here at home for uses on the ground
    but by NASA for use in space. And I thought, the Government is not the
    enemy. The role of the Government is to create the conditions and to
    give people the tools to build strong lives and families and communities
    and a strong nation, and to give people the chance to live out their
    dreams.
        Now that that foundation has been laid, and now that I believe we
    have also moved away from the very dangerous rhetoric of the last
    several years that seeks to divide us against one another based on our
    racial or ethnic or religious or other differences, toward an
    understanding that it is actually a great godsend for us to be the
    world's most multiethnic, multiracial, multireligious democracy, we now
    can actually seize the opportunities that are before us. But the first
    and most important thing we have to do is to recognize that, beginning
    at the beginning, our education system will not provide us the
    opportunity to do that unless we change it.
        For the beginning years, we have to raise standards. For our
    colleges and universities, which are plainly the finest in the world, we
    simply have to make sure that the access is there for everyone who
    should go to have a chance to go.
        The main point I want to make is that we actually are in a position
    now to mold our future untroubled by war abroad or disruption at home in
    a way that is very, very rare in human history. We have no idea how long
    this moment of tranquility will last. We have no idea how long we will
    be fully free to wake up and say, ``what am I going to do today,''
    without being impinged upon by some external force that will shape us.
        I was interested when the Secretary talked about Abraham Lincoln and
    the land grant. I used to teach at a land grant school, so I like that.
    But it's interesting that President Lincoln signed that land grant bill
    during the Civil War. And Lincoln once said during the Civil War--he
    gave a statement today that I would be ridiculed nationwide if I said--
    he said, ``My policy is to have no policy. I am controlled by events.''
    Well, of course, he did have a policy. He had the most important one of
    all: ``I'm going to hold this Union together if we all have to die to do
    it, including me.'' That was his policy. But he also told an important
    truth. When the wheel runs off and things fall apart, you are to some
    extent controlled by events.
        Today, in a rare moment, America is not especially controlled by
    events, but we cannot be unmindful of the larger historical trends which
    will shape our future. And it is the moral obligation of every person in
    a position of responsibility in the United States to take this
    opportunity not to lay down on the job and not to fall into mindless
    debates but to lift our sights and our visions to take advantage of this
    rare moment and make the most of it. And we could do no better than to
    give our people the finest set of educational opportunities in the world
    and to make sure very single one of them has those opportunities.
        I was encouraged by the report I got out back, very brief, about the
    words that Senator Lott said earlier here today. During the cold war we
    had a bipartisan foreign policy, because--literally because the future
    of the country was at stake. Everybody agreed: We'd like to fight with
    you, and we'd like to kick you out if you're not in our party, but
    politics should stop at the water's edge.
        Today, in the information age, politics should stop at the
    schoolhouse door, because our security depends upon our ability to give
    all our people the finest education in the world. My shorthand
    expression for what we're trying to do, and you will all recognize there
    are many other things at stake, is that we have to create an America in
    which every 8-year-old can read, every 12-year-old can log on to the
    Internet, every 18-year-old can go on to college, and every adult can
    keep on learning for a lifetime. My balanced budget makes an
    unprecedented

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    commitment to these goals: $51 billion next year. But far more than
    money is required.
        Three weeks ago at the State of the Union, I issued a call to action
    for American education based on 10 principles necessary to prepare our
    people for the 21st century:
        First, we have to set world-class standards for our schools and
    develop a system of accountability, beginning for the first time with
    national standards-based reading tests in the fourth grade and math
    tests in the eighth grade.
        Second, we have to make sure we have the best teachers in the world.
        Third, we must make sure that every child can read on his or her own
    by the third grade. I see my friend the president of the Miami-Dade
    Community College out here, the largest community college in our country
    and one of the most diverse student bodies. Forty percent of the 8-year-
    olds in this country cannot read a book on their own, 40 percent. And we
    have to do better than that if we want all of our children to be in 2-
    and 4-year colleges when their time comes.
        Fourth, we have to make sure parents are more deeply involved in a
    constructive way in their child's learning from birth. The First Lady
    and I are going to host a conference on early childhood learning and
    brain development in the spring here.
        Fifth, we have to give parents more power to choose the right public
    schools for their children and encourage school reforms like charter
    schools that set and meet high standards.
        Sixth, we should encourage the teaching of character education in
    our schools--and Secretary Riley has done a marvelous job of that--and
    promote order and discipline at the same time by supporting local school
    initiatives like school uniforms or truancy enforcements or curfews and
    demanding zero tolerance for guns and drugs. I have seen in the most
    difficult neighborhoods in this country that children do not have to put
    up with violent, disruptive, and destructive school environments. There
    are schools that are succeeding against all the odds. And if some can,
    all can. And until they all do, none of us should be satisfied.
        Seventh, we should support school construction at the national
    level. I believe, for the very first time--because we have record
    numbers of school populations now--for the first time we've got a group
    bigger than the baby boomers coming through, and the schools are growing
    at record rates while their facilities are deteriorating at record
    rates.
        Eighth, we should make sure that learning is available for a
    lifetime by transforming what can only be described as a tangle of
    Federal training programs into a simple skill grant that goes directly
    to workers. People who need and are eligible for Federal training help,
    nearly all of them, live within driving distance of a community-based
    educational institution that can give them what they need. And we do not
    need a lot of Federal programs to get between them and those
    institutions. I have been trying for 4 years to pass this program. I
    hope you will help me get this done in this session of Congress, to
    create a new ``GI bill'' for America's workers that simply gives people
    a skills grant and lets them take it to the institution of education
    nearest them most able to meet their needs.
        Ninth, we are determined to connect every classroom and library in
    this country to the Internet by the year 2000, and we're making good
    progress on that.
        But finally, and the thing that you have endorsed today, is our
    effort to meet the last goal, to throw open the doors of college to all
    people who are willing to work for the opportunity.
        As the Secretary said, we have always expanded education. He began
    with Abraham Lincoln, and we might have begun with Thomas Jefferson, who
    advocated, even as he advocated buying Louisiana--for which I'm very
    grateful; otherwise I wouldn't be President--[laughter]--and America
    becoming a continental nation, that we should educate all of our
    children. Thomas Jefferson even advocated the education of every single
    child, boy or girl, of slave families in America. And we know from the
    beginning that it was the education of our leaders that gave them the
    vision to chart the course which has brought us to this day.
        I do believe, based on the sheer economic realities and the need for
    greater understanding of our interdependence in the world in which we're
    living, that we have to make the first 2 years of college as universal
    as a high school education is today. Fifteen years ago, the typical
    worker with a college degree earned 38 percent more than a high school
    graduate; today, it is 69 percent. Two years of college alone means a 20
    percent increase in learning and a quarter of a million dollars more in
    earnings over a lifetime.

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        Now, over the past 4 years we have put in place an unprecedented
    college opportunity strategy: student loans provided directly to people
    who need them and that enable people to repay those loans as a
    percentage of their income; AmeriCorps, which has already helped 70,000
    young people earn their way through college by serving their communities
    and their country; 200,000 more students in work-study as a result of
    last year's budget; and a very large increase in Pell grants last year,
    taking the maximum grant to $2,700 and expanding the number of people
    eligible.
        The plan I have put before the Congress in my balanced budget would
    expand work-study again so that one million students will be able to
    work their way through college by the year 2000. We want 100,000 of
    these new work-study students to join our America Reads efforts to help
    make sure all our 8-year-olds can read independently by the year 2000.
        I know that more than 80 college presidents have already committed
    thousands of their work-study students to work as reading tutors. I
    thank those of you who are here leading this effort, many of you on the
    front row here, and I'd like to ask all the rest of you to join us. Go
    back home, look at how many people you've got in work-study, see how
    many you could allocate to this effort.
        We're going to have about 35,000 AmeriCorps students trained
    especially to train tutors. We're going to challenge the parents and the
    schools to open up to make sure we can get these volunteers in there to
    teach these kids to read. We cannot expect the schools to operate
    efficiently if children have to leave the third grade not even being
    able to read. They will never learn what they need to know. And college
    students will relate well to these young kids and have a chance to
    literally revolutionize future learning in America.
        A lot of these children are not just poor kids, they simply--many of
    them come out of cultures where their first language is not English, and
    they did not learn to read properly. We should not let them go past the
    third grade without knowing we have all done everything we humanly can
    to make sure that they can read independently. So I thank those of you
    from the bottom of my heart who have volunteered already, and I ask the
    rest of you to join in that crusade. We need you, and it will make all
    the difference.
        Finally, let me say we have got to do more in other areas. For 3
    years in a row now we've expanded Pell grants for deserving students.
    But our budget this year--our balanced budget contains the largest
    increase in Pell grant scholarships in 20 years. We are adding $1.7
    billion in grants, a 25 percent increase, which will make 348,000 more
    students eligible, many of them older students, and will increase the
    maximum grant to $3,000. And for 4 million low and middle income
    students, the budget will cut student loan fees in half.
        But if we're truly going to set a new standard, a 14-year standard,
    we've got to do more. That's why I have proposed America's HOPE
    scholarship based on the Georgia pioneering program: 2 years of a tax
    credit of $1,500 for college tuition, enough to pay for the typical
    community college. We know it will work because of the testimonial you
    have already heard from President Knapp.
        Second, I propose a tax deduction of up to $10,000 a year for all
    tuition after high school to help families send children or parents to
    college or to graduate or medical school or any other education after
    high school.
        Third, I propose an expanded IRA, expanded in terms of eligibility,
    in terms of who can save, and in terms of purpose, so that families can
    save tax-free to pay for education. Together these proposals mean that a
    family could save money for college tuition and never pay a penny of
    taxes on it. For example, families could put up to $2,000 of income into
    the IRA each year without paying taxes, then withdraw up to $10,000 a
    year for tuition and deduct that from income so that there will not be
    any taxes when they're paid out.
        Cutting taxes to help people pay directly for college has never been
    done before on a national level. But we have cut taxes for years to help
    people buy a home or invest in a business because that's the way we
    thought we could encourage people to invest in their future and build
    the American dream. And it has worked. In the last 4 years we have seen
    homeownership rise to a 15-year high, and if the rate of increase
    continues, by the year 2000 more than two-thirds of Americans will live
    in their own home, an all-time record. In the last 4 years we have seen
    in each successive year a record number of new businesses formed in
    America. Today

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    we ought to have that same kind of encouragement to invest in education,
    an even more important investment for the future. And I think that it is
    highly appropriate to adopt this device to achieve that goal.
        Let me assure you, the Treasury Department is committed to working
    with the Department of Education and all of you to make this tax plan
    work. The IRS will not interfere with the affairs of educational
    institutions. We are committed to making this simple and straightforward
    for the academic community and especially for the students of every age.
    The plan will give families the power to choose the right education for
    themselves and the flexibility to decide the best way in which to pay
    for that education.
        Now, just think about what this could mean. A young person who can't
    afford tuition or whose family can't afford it can now go down to a
    local community college right away and sign up if they meet the
    standards, because the HOPE scholarship will pay for it. Someone with a
    new family who is worried about college costs down the road can multiply
    his or her savings power by putting tuition money in an IRA tax-free
    every year while the children are growing up. Then, when they're 40 and
    worried they might need more education to move ahead but can't spare
    time off from work, not only can they withdraw from the IRA for the kids
    but the parents can go part time or at night. But all can go to college
    without tax consequences.
        My plan is simple: $1,500-a-year tax cut for individuals to pay for
    college for 2 years; a $10,000-a-year tax deduction for families for any
    year of tuition after high school; an expanded IRA to help families save
    tax-free for education; plus the more and larger Pell grant scholarships
    for deserving students, 300,000 more work-study positions, AmeriCorps,
    the direct loan program.
        This plan will throw open the doors of college and give every
    American the great chance to make the most of the world that we are
    moving into. College is opportunity for tomorrow. And creating that
    opportunity is our responsibility today.
        I thank you again for your support of this plan. As we work in the
    weeks and months ahead to craft a bipartisan balanced budget, your
    endorsement today will be an historic element in making sure that this
    will be part of the ultimate budget plan. We need a balanced budget, but
    it has to reflect our values, and it has to pave the way to a better
    future.
        Today we have committed to expanding educational opportunities by
    enacting the HOPE scholarship tax cut, the college tax deduction, the
    Pell grant increases, the work-study increases. I thank you for standing
    with us. You are standing for opportunity for generations to come in a
    way that will change America forever for the better.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 2:14 p.m. at the Grand Hyatt Hotel. In his
    remarks, he referred to Stanley O. Ikenberry, president, Michelle Tolela
    Myers, incoming chair, and Barry Munitz, outgoing chair, American
    Council on Education; Charles Knapp, incoming president, Aspen
    Institute, Washington, DC; and Eduardo Padron, president, Miami-Dade
    Community College.