    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book I)]
    [March 13, 1997]
    [Pages 295-305]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to a Joint Session of the North Carolina State Legislature in
    Raleigh
    March 13, 1997

        Thank you very much. Lieutenant Governor Wicker, Speaker Brubaker,
    Senator Basnight, the other State elected officials who are here, my
    good friend Governor Hunt, Mayor Fetzer. I'd like to thank those who
    came down here with me today. I brought some of the Members of your
    congressional delegation home. They don't need to hear this speech,
    they've heard

    [[Page 296]]

    it before, but I was glad to have them here in moral support:
    Congressman David Price; Congressman Bob Etheridge, your former
    superintendent of education; Congressman Mike McIntyre; and
    Congresswoman Eva Clayton. I thank them for coming.
        I also want to say I'm glad to be joined today by your neighbor, the
    Secretary of Education, Richard Riley, former Governor of South
    Carolina, and by our new Secretary of Defense, Bill Cohen of Maine.
    We're glad to have him with us today, too. Thank you, Secretary Cohen,
    for coming.
        I was glad that you mentioned my Chief of Staff, Erskine Bowles. He
    wouldn't come here with me today because he was afraid all of you would
    think that he was shirking his duties and not at work. But let me tell
    you, he is doing a magnificent job. I'm very proud of him. I couldn't
    believe it when he agreed to come back to Washington and take this job,
    especially because I knew it would cost him a small fortune. And he
    reminded me that his father used to tell him, ``Once you have the tools,
    you've got to spend some time to add to the woodpile.'' So he's up in
    Washington adding back to the woodpile. And you should all be very proud
    of him. He is a remarkable man. He's doing a good job.
        I'd also like to thank the other North Carolinians on my staff. Two
    of the three of them are here today. Doug Sosnik, my former political
    director and senior counselor, is not here, but my Director of
    Communications, Don Baer, is here, and Charles Duncan, the Associate
    Director of Presidential Personnel. They both came home with me, and
    they were glad to have the excuse to come home. And I appreciate their
    being here and their service.
        I was told that this was the first time a sitting President has
    addressed the North Carolina State Legislature. If it's not true, don't
    disabuse me now, because I'm about to say something good. [Laughter] And
    I am very honored to be here. Even more important, I've spent a little
    time here over the years, and I am honored and mildly surprised that you
    are here, because it's tournament time and you've got four teams, as
    usual, in the tournament.
        You may know that I am something of a basketball fanatic. And you
    may know that one of my most memorable basketball experiences--I once
    saw North Carolina and Kentucky play in the Dean Dome, and the car that
    I came in was towed. [Laughter] But I had so much fun at the ballgame, I
    would have walked all the way back to Arkansas after it was over.
    [Laughter] I make it a point never to take sides in basketball games
    unless my home team in Arkansas or my alma mater, Georgetown, are
    playing. But I am looking forward to the day when the great Dean Smith
    breaks Adolph Rupp's record.
        There is much for the rest of the Nation, and especially the rest of
    the South, to admire in North Carolina, the determined and visionary
    leadership that has characterized this State for many decades in
    education and economic development, in bringing harmony among peoples of
    different backgrounds.
        When I was a young man, I followed the work here of then-Governor
    Terry Sanford, who later became my friend and colleague. Eighteen years
    ago, when I first started my career as Governor of Arkansas, my best
    mentor and friend was Jim Hunt. And he is still my mentor and friend.
    Dick Riley and I were laughing with Jim Hunt--we were together 18 years
    ago as the Governors of Arkansas, South Carolina, and North Carolina,
    and we were laughing that Jim was probably the only one of us who could
    still get elected Governor in our home States after 18 years. [Laughter]
    And I applaud him on that.
        It was in Chapel Hill that the cornerstone was laid at our Nation's
    first publicly funded university, in Kitty Hawk where man first took to
    the skies. And today, North Carolina is an aeronautics and an air travel
    hub center for millions of people. Your State universities receive the
    highest level of funding for research and development in the Nation. You
    have connected more of your communities than any other State in the
    country to the information superhighway, something I'm trying to do for
    every classroom and library in America by the year 2000. The Research
    Triangle has one of the highest per capita concentrations of Ph.D.'s in
    the world, and you are clearly one of America's most dynamic centers of
    economic activity.
        The most important thing about all this is not for me to brag on
    you, you know that already, but to emphasize the main point: These
    things do not happen by accident. They are the product of vision and
    disciplined, long-term effort.
        Now our country faces the challenges of a new century, a whole new
    economy, a whole

    [[Page 297]]

    new way in which people will work and live and relate to each other here
    at home and around the world. It is driven by information and by
    technology. Its best hopes may be undermined by its darkest fears, by
    the old demons of racial and religious and ethnic hatreds, by terrorism
    and narcotrafficking and organized crime.
        This new time that we're moving into, that coincidentally will be
    part of a new century and a new millennium, will give more people in
    this State and this Nation the chance to live out their dreams than at
    any period in human history, if we take advantage of it to seize our
    opportunities and deal with our challenges.
        There is unprecedented peace and prosperity now, and it has been
    very rare in our country's history. You can go back and find maybe a
    couple of other examples when we've had real security, a feeling of
    prosperity, and yet, a whole lot of challenges before us. Usually when
    people feel secure and relatively prosperous, one of two things
    happens--neither of them very laudable, but it's part of human nature--
    we either get sort of happy and self-satisfied and don't do anything, or
    because we are not gripped by big differences, we fall out with each
    other over small things, and petty things make us less than we ought to
    be.
        The point I want to make today is that we cannot afford either to be
    complacent or to be divided among ourselves about small things. For we
    have been given an opportunity almost unique in American history to
    fashion a future that will embrace everybody. And we cannot and dare not
    blow that opportunity.
        If you look at where we are now, you can see the vistas of the
    future. Our economy produced 12 million jobs in 4 years--never happened
    before in a 4-year period. We've had constant decline in crimes. We've
    had the biggest drop in the welfare rolls in American history in the
    last 4 years. In North Carolina, you've seen the unemployment rate drop
    to 4.2 percent, 75,000 people off the welfare rolls, 350,000 new jobs.
    That's going on all over America. But you know that we have more to do.
        I have been going around the country, to the Michigan and the
    Maryland State legislatures--today the Vice President is in California
    speaking to the State legislature as I am here with you--because I know
    that to achieve the vision that we share for America, we all have to do
    our part. I've said many times that the era of big Government is over.
    Your Federal Government is now 285,000 people smaller than it was the
    day I took office. It's the smallest it's been since President Kennedy
    was in office, in real terms. As a percentage of the civilian work
    force, the Federal Government is now as small as it was when Franklin
    Roosevelt was sworn into office the first time, before the New Deal.
        But the challenges we face are still very big indeed. If they cannot
    be solved by government alone, and especially by the Federal Government,
    obviously, a new partnership is required. And new efforts, new activity,
    new responsibility is required of people at the State level, at the
    local level, and in their private lives. The biggest challenge we face
    today, I believe, is the challenge of creating a world-class education
    system that embraces every child that lives in this State and in this
    Nation. And this must not be a political football.
        In the cold war, because we knew that communism threatened our
    existence, it became commonplace that politics would stop at the water's
    edge, and the Democrats and the Republicans would fight like cats and
    dogs over whatever it was they were fighting about, but when it came to
    standing up to the threat of communism, we were together. If the
    President of one party went abroad on a mission of world peace, he was
    never criticized back home by members of the other party because
    politics stopped at the water's edge.
        I think we understand today, intuitively, that education holds the
    key to our future in the 21st century. And I believe politics must stop
    at the schoolhouse door.
        When I was Governor, a long time ago now, North Carolina already had
    the highest percentage of its adults in institutions of higher education
    of any State in the South. The economy was growing, and it was
    diversifying, and yet you still had more success in maintaining
    manufacturing jobs than any State in our region and, indeed, in the
    country. You know all this. Last year you had the biggest increase in
    eighth grade math scores, I noticed, in the country. I was in Michigan,
    and I said that they had the second biggest increase in math scores, and
    the minute I got in the car, Governor Hunt made sure I knew who was
    number one. [Laughter] So I knew that.

    [[Page 298]]

        The Governor chose to be sworn in at the Needham Laughton High
    School, his old school, to make clear that school standards and teaching
    excellence will be his top priorities. But with all the progress that we
    have made, you know we've got a lot more to do.
        Between 1992 and the year 2000, 89 percent of the new jobs created
    in this economy will require more than a high school level of literacy
    and math skills--89 percent. Today, even though over 80 percent of our
    children are graduating from high school, more than half--or about half
    the people entering the work force are not prepared with these skills.
    We all know that is true.
        For 20 years, inequality among working Americans grew. In the last
    few years it started to shrink--in the last couple of years--as we've
    gotten--more and more of our new jobs are becoming higher wage jobs and
    as growth and productivity are permitting wages to rise again.
        Many people just a couple of years ago were saying, ``Well, is the
    middle class vanishing in America? Will it always be squeezed? Are we
    going to create a country with a huge number of people that are very
    well off and an even much larger number of people that are poor, with a
    smaller middle class?'' We've seen in the last few years that that does
    not have to happen. We can begin to grow the middle class again with
    productivity and growth and the right kinds of new jobs, but we have to
    be able to provide the people with the skills to hold those jobs if
    we're going to maintain a high-wage, high-growth, high-opportunity
    society in America in the 21st century. And our schools are still
    turning out millions of young people who simply cannot do that.
        That is why our number one priority has to be to make America's
    education the best in the world. We have to have a nation in which every
    8-year-old can read independently, every 12-year-old can log on to the
    Internet, every 18-year-old can go on to college, and every adult
    American can keep on learning throughout an entire lifetime.
        In my State of the Union Address, I laid out a 10-point call to
    action for American education that describes the steps we have to meet.
    First, we have to make sure that all of our children come to school
    ready to learn. Our balanced budget will expand Head Start to a million
    children.
        But we all must do more, and a lot of that has to be done at the
    State level. And I hope every State in the country is looking closely at
    the Smart Start program in North Carolina. The idea of having all
    elements of a community in a community nonprofit environment working on
    not only education but health care and parenting skills and child care,
    trying to give our poorest children a coherent early childhood, is
    terribly important. Scientists have discovered that learning begins in
    the earliest days of life. And now we have to explore how parents and
    educators can best use these findings. On April 17th the First Lady and
    I will host the White House Conference on Early Childhood Development
    and Learning in Washington, and I want Smart Start to be an important
    part of what is considered there.
        Let me just give you one simple example of the scientific findings.
    Over half of the capacity of the brain to absorb and to learn and to
    grow--the capacity is developed in the first 4 years of life. In the
    first 4 years of life, if a child has parents who understand this and
    who constantly--whether they have a Ph.D. or they were high school
    dropouts, but who constantly work at nourishing the child's learning
    capacities, that child will get 700,000 positive contacts. But in the
    typical experience of a child with a single parent, let's say, with very
    little education and no self-confidence about parenting and no training
    and no understanding and a sense that no difference can be made, and the
    child is left in front of the television in the first 4 years, that
    child will get 150,000 positive contacts, a more than four-to-one
    difference.
        Now, you tell me what the future is going to be like for them. Smart
    Start can change that. And our cooperative efforts can change that. But
    we have to understand that we have totally underestimated the impact of
    this whole thing. And the new scientific findings impose upon all of us
    a heavier responsibility than we have ever had for developing the
    capacities of our children in their earliest years. So I look forward to
    that.
        I believe we have to do more to give constructive alternatives,
    creative alternatives for our young children in our public schools. I
    favor public school choice. I've been a pioneer supporter of the charter
    school movement. I think that it's important to open schools that stay
    opened as long as they do a good job, but only as long as they do a good
    job. And I know

    [[Page 299]]

    that this afternoon, your State board of education has the opportunity
    to open more charter schools than any State has ever opened at one time,
    to foster innovation and competition and renewal. I hope the board will
    take that step today, and one more time, North Carolina will be in the
    vanguard of a movement you can be proud of.
        We have got to have a commitment to rebuild our schools and give our
    children the facilities they need to learn in. We have the largest
    number of children in public schools in history. The Secretary of
    Education never gets tired of reminding me, since I am the oldest of the
    baby boomers, that our generation has finally been eclipsed in numbers
    by the people that are in the public schools today. We also have the
    physical facilities in many of our schools deteriorating at a rapid
    rate. So, for the first time in history, I have proposed a program that
    will enable us at the national level to support local efforts to
    increase their investment in the physical facilities of the schools by
    making sure that the interest rates are lower and the costs are lower in
    the places where the need is most critical.
        I'm going to Florida after I leave you, and tomorrow morning I will
    be at a school where there are 17, I understand, according to my
    briefing, 17 trailers for classroom space around the existing school
    facility in a modest-sized community in Florida. That is not an atypical
    experience in many of our States.
        We have to meet our national goal of connecting every classroom and
    library to the Internet by the year 2000. We have to open the doors of
    college to all. North Carolina pioneered, with your network of 4-year
    and 2-year higher educational institutions, pioneered the idea that
    education ought to be a lifetime experience and that the doors ought to
    be open to everyone.
        In the last 4 years, we have lowered the cost and improved the reach
    of the student loan program, added 200,000 slots to work-study, opened
    up almost 70,000 slots for college through the national service program,
    AmeriCorps. We have worked very, very hard, but I think we have to do
    more.
        It is clear to me, if you look at the job profile, where 89 percent
    of the new jobs will require more than a high school education, we have
    to make 2 years of education after high school, the 13th and 14th
    grades, just as universal in America by the year 2000 as a high school
    diploma is today, every bit as universal.
        To achieve that, our balanced budget plan proposes a $1,500 HOPE
    scholarship, a tax credit that reflects the cost of the typical
    community college tuition in America, modeled on Governor Zell Miller's
    HOPE scholarship program in Georgia. We propose to give people a tax
    deduction of up to $10,000 a year for the cost of any education after
    high school, an expanded IRA that you can withdraw from tax-free if the
    money is used to pay for higher education, and the largest increase in
    Pell grants in 20 years, along with another 100,000 work-study slots.
    That will help North Carolina, and it will help America.
        Finally, let me say on this subject, we know we have to make sure
    learning continues throughout a lifetime. We know that we have older and
    older students going back to community colleges, changing their careers
    and getting new careers and opening up new vistas. We have a Federal
    response which I think is totally antiquated. There are at least,
    conservatively speaking, at least 70 different Federal programs that
    were developed with the best of intentions, to try to help to pay for
    various training programs for people who lose their jobs or people who
    are grossly underemployed.
        I have proposed for 4 years, with a Democratic Congress and with the
    Republican Congress, getting rid of these programs and putting the money
    in a pot and sending a skills grant to an unemployed person or an
    underemployed person who has qualified for any of them and let them go
    to the nearest community college or 4-year college if it's the
    appropriate one, whatever is nearest and best to get their education. We
    do not need a lot of Government intermediaries here. People know--people
    know what they need. They're capable of making a judgment.
        In a State like North Carolina and most places in the country,
    nearly everybody's within driving distance of a community college that
    works. I call that my ``GI bill'' for America's workers. And if you
    could prevail upon your legislators to support it, I would appreciate
    it. I've been trying for 4 years to pass that thing. I would appreciate
    it.
        I think the most important thing we have to do is to make sure that
    our children have met certain national standards in basic courses.

    [[Page 300]]

    In 1989, when President Bush and the Governors met at the University of
    Virginia, I had the honor of being the Democratic Governor chosen to try
    to write the Nation's education goals. And at the time, we always
    assumed that out of those goals there would come national standards and
    a system, a nationally recognized system of testing our children to see
    if they met those standards.
        Well, that hasn't happened yet. And as a result, we still don't
    know. We don't really know whether every child in every classroom knows
    what he or she needs to know when he or she needs to know it in math and
    in basic language skills. I have challenged every State in this country
    to adopt high national academic standards, not just in math and language
    but in other areas as well, to participate nationally by 1999 in an
    examination of fourth graders in reading and eighth graders in math, so
    that we can see how every child is doing in meeting those basic
    standards.
        Now, this is, I know, somewhat controversial. There are people who
    have actually argued that you couldn't possibly have a national
    examination reflecting national standards in a country as diverse as
    America, as if it's some sort of plot, as if math is different in
    Raleigh than Little Rock or any board of education could rewrite the
    rules of algebra for Alaska as opposed to Florida. I think that is
    inherently implausible.
        When you compete here in North Carolina for a new high-tech plant,
    when the Research Triangle finds some new breakthrough, you do it based
    on an international competition; you have to win based on standards that
    are imposed. We have to be willing to hold our children to the same
    standards and to hold ourselves to the same standards.
        Governor Hunt told me today that he will endorse our call for
    national standards and a testing plan. North Carolina, therefore, would
    be the third State to do so. The Republican Governor of Michigan joined
    in, along with his legislative leaders, just a few days ago.
        But let me say what I think we need to do. A lot of you know a lot
    about this. We have some standardized tests in America, but we don't
    have any test to nationally accepted standards. The closest we have is
    the so-called NAEP test, the National Assessment of Education Progress.
    But as all of you know, it only is given to a sample of students in
    various districts. There is no examination in America which says, here
    are the standards that everyone should know in language or math, and
    here is a test which reflects those standards, and it doesn't matter
    whether you're first or last in your class, it matters whether you get
    over this bar. If you're first in your class and nobody is over this
    bar, nobody knows what they need to know. If you're last, but you're
    over the bar, you're still going to do okay in this old world. I think
    that is very important. We all need to know that. We all need to know
    that.
        And let me also say that I know it won't be easy, because some of
    our kids won't do all that well at first. If you saw the State of the
    Union Address, you know that I introduced two students from 20 school
    districts in northern Illinois who took the Third International Math and
    Science Survey, and the 20 school districts up there tied for first in
    science and second in math in the survey, with Singapore for first. But
    if they had finished dead last I would have been equally proud of them
    because they were willing to actually hold themselves to international
    standards of achievement and measure themselves.
        And this is where we need all of your help. I'm convinced that one
    of the reasons that we've never done this in America is that we were
    afraid if the news was bad, we wouldn't know what to do about it. And I
    think that in so doing, we have sold our children short. All the
    evidence is, all the scientific evidence is, all the anecdotal evidence
    is that almost all of our children, without regard to their race, their
    income, and where they live can learn what they need to know to compete
    and win in the global economy. And when we do not hold them to high
    standards because we are afraid that in the beginning they won't meet
    them, we are selling their futures down the drain and we are insulting
    them, because they can meet these standards.
        What we have to be willing to do is to say, ``Okay, we'll have these
    exams. We'll hold people to high standards. Some people won't make it at
    first. We don't want to punish people. We want to lift everybody up, but
    we can't know how to lift people up unless we know where we start.''
        When I go around the world, people find it unbelievable that we have
    no national standard in America to tell our parents and our school
    leaders whether our children know what they're supposed to know in the
    basic skills that

    [[Page 301]]

    are necessary to learn all the other more sophisticated things we want
    people to know.
        And I tell you, I believe in the kids of this country. I have been
    in schools in circumstances where it would be unthinkable that people
    could learn because of crime in the neighborhoods and because of poverty
    in the neighborhoods. And I have seen children performing at very high
    levels, meeting standards that would be acceptable in anyplace in the
    entire world. And I am tired of people telling me that there is some
    reason we shouldn't have that opportunity given to every American child.
    We are not protecting our children by denying them the chance to develop
    their God-given capacities to measure up to what they need to know and
    do, to do well in the future. And we ought to stop it and do better.
        Now, on a lighter note, you may wonder why the Secretary of Defense
    is here with me today. [Laughter] Before I came down here, Senator Helms
    asked me to tell you that he is not the guard that Jesse once said I
    would need to come to North Carolina. [Laughter] Ever since I got a
    Chief of Staff that does not speak with an accent, we've been getting
    along a lot better, Senator Helms and I. [Laughter]
        There is another reason that the Secretary of Defense is here today.
    We want to set an example. We think we ought to start the standards
    movements with the schools that we run at military bases. At 66 schools
    across our country and 167 more around the world, our Department of
    Defense educates 115,000 of our children every year. The Department of
    Defense runs a school system as big as that of the State of Delaware.
    And I met some of the children, some of the teachers, and some of the
    parents out at the airport when I came in today.
        Sixteen of those schools are at Camp Lejeune and Fort Bragg, right
    here in North Carolina, and nearly 8,000 students attend them. It's
    important that we give these children the best possible education, too,
    especially these children, because their families sacrifice. They live
    far from home. They often risk their lives for their country. It's
    important, too, because these students come from every racial and ethnic
    background. They move from place to place as their parents are
    transferred from base to base.
        Because of this mobility, no group of students better underscores
    the need for common national standards and a uniform way of measuring
    progress than this group. If standards can work in these schools, they
    can work anywhere.
        So I am pleased to announce today that, with the strong support of
    the Secretary of Defense, the Department of Defense schools have stepped
    forward to ask that their students be among the first to take the new
    tests when they become available. The Secretary of Defense and the
    Secretary of Education Riley have both committed their work.
        Starting in 1999, students and classrooms, from Wiesbaden Air Force
    Base in Germany to Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, to Camp Lejeune
    will learn the same rigorous material and take the same national tests
    as students throughout this State and, I hope, throughout our entire
    Nation. We can make our public schools, just like our military, the best
    on Earth if, like our military, we are willing to adhere to high,
    rigorous standards for all people, regardless of their background.
    That's what we ought to do. And I thank you, Mr. Secretary, for being
    here today.
        Let me also say that we know we have to do more work to prepare all
    of our students. And the Department of Defense is being directed today,
    through its school system, to use every resource to prepare the students
    for 1999 when the new math and science tests--or math and reading tests
    are ready.
        Let me mention one other thing that I think is very important, and
    it goes well with a lot of what you are doing here with your preschool
    years and your early years. It is appalling to me that 40 percent of
    America's 8-year-olds cannot read a book on their own, but it's true.
    And the rest of this stuff is just sort of whistling the breeze, if
    people can't read. So we have launched the America Reads initiative,
    through the Department of Education, to mobilize an army of a million
    reading tutors, properly trained, to help make sure that by the year
    2000 every 8-year-old can read independently.
        Thirteen North Carolina college presidents have pledged to commit a
    portion of their work-study students to serve as tutors, and I thank
    them for that. We're going to have 300,000 new work-study students over
    a 4-year period. If we can put at least a third of them into reading
    instruction for our young children, we'll be a long way toward those
    million volunteers.
        We ought to be clear about something else, too, and here's something
    that I really take my hat off to Governor Hunt for. We cannot expect

    [[Page 302]]

    our children to meet high standards unless we demand that our teachers
    meet high standards. We have to do whatever is necessary to make sure
    that they do.
        Last year the report of Governor Hunt's National Commission on
    Teaching and America's Future laid out a blueprint for the road ahead.
    And all of you have come together across party lines to develop a
    comprehensive legislative agenda that implements the report's
    recommendations. We have to start by recognizing and rewarding our best
    teachers. We all know what a difference a good teacher can make in the
    life of a child. I know what a difference my teachers made in mine.
        The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, led by
    Governor Hunt, has encouraged teachers all over the country to improve
    their skills and seek certification as master teachers. North Carolina
    already has more certified national teachers--master teachers--than any
    other State in the country. And the Governor was kind enough to bring
    five or six of them out to the airport to meet me, and they were not
    ashamed of the fact that they had been board-certified master teachers.
        Over 20 percent of all the teachers that have been certified are
    here in North Carolina. That's the good news. The bad news is that only
    about 500 teachers have been certified. In our balanced budget plan,
    there's enough money to help 100,000 teachers achieve this important
    credential. Now the States need to do things like North Carolina has and
    offer to pay. The Governor's plan would pay master teachers another 12
    percent more. You have to encourage people. But we need 100,000 at
    least, because what we really want is at least a board-certified master
    teacher in every single school building in America. If you get one in
    every single school building in America, we know from the research that
    they will change the education environment and help lift the standards
    that other teachers achieve and help to lift the quality of teaching in
    all the classrooms.
        So that is one of the things that we're trying to do in our budget.
    But again, I'd say that we are following your lead and especially the
    years and years and years that Governor Hunt has put into this. In April
    Secretary Riley will hold a national forum on attracting and preparing
    teachers with 50 of our Nation's best teachers and thousands of others.
    And we are going to have to do more to encourage our brightest young
    people to become teachers.
        Finally, we also have to make sure, as the Governor said, that while
    good teachers get a raise, the truly bad teachers who can't measure up
    should get a pink slip. We have to do that in an expeditious and fair
    way. Today, that is too time consuming and costly. In some States it can
    cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. That same money could be and
    should be used to reward good teachers and to train those who are trying
    to improve their skills. We can change this, as they have in Cincinnati
    where school boards and teachers unions have worked together in
    partnership to find more efficient and fair ways to remove teachers who
    should leave the classroom. Encouraging teachers is not easy or cheap,
    but again, I say, we know what a phenomenal difference it makes.
        Finally, to elevate teaching, I think we have to reform the way we
    spend money in our schools and give parents the tools to demand more
    accountability. Today the Vice President is discussing that at the State
    legislature in Sacramento, California. His reinventing Government
    initiative has helped us to shrink the National Government to the
    smallest it's been in three decades and to take that money and invest it
    in education, invest it in technology, invest it in transportation,
    invest it in growing the economy and building a better future. We have
    to have the same sort of national effort to analyze the way expenditures
    are made in public education throughout America, so that we can support
    those who are committed to reducing unnecessary bureaucratic
    expenditures and increasing expenditures on children and teachers and
    learning.
        Yesterday I did a townhall meeting with 35 children, on drugs. And I
    asked all these kids--and some of these kids had been on drugs and were
    off drugs, a couple of these kids were in treatment, some of them had
    been in families of gang members who had been involved in drugs, and
    then some of them had never used drugs. It was a whole panoply of kids.
    But I went through child after child after child, and I asked them to
    tell me about their circumstances. And they all said, ``We need mentors.
    We need programs we're interested in.'' And one after another they kept
    telling me about how their school had had to abandon its music program
    or its art program, its physical

    [[Page 303]]

    education programs, its intramural athletic programs, all the things
    that happen after school or on weekend that keep kids involved in
    positive things.
        We have to understand that however much money we have for our
    schools, we have to make sure we are spending it first and foremost on
    instruction and, secondly, on ways designed to give the children the
    best chance to live productive, wholesome, good, constructive lives, and
    that ought to be a national effort as well. We have found phenomenal
    amounts of money that we could redirect in the Federal Government to
    reducing the deficit or investing in our future simply by slowly but
    deliberately eliminating hundreds of unnecessary programs, thousands of
    unnecessary regulations, and reducing, without running people off, just
    slowly reducing the size of Government until we have got it to the point
    where I mentioned to you earlier.
        And we have to work on that in our schools because we cannot afford
    to waste a single dollar when it comes to these children's future. And
    it is folly to believe that we're not paying for it when we take these
    kids away from a chance to have a full, wholesome experience and to be
    in those schools after school hours or before school hours and doing
    things in addition to their academic learning. So I hope you will
    support that. [Applause] Thank you.
        Let me just say one final word in closing about another big job we
    have to do together. We have to finish the work of welfare reform. In
    the first 4 years of my Presidency, we gave waivers from Federal rules
    to 43 States to do all kinds of things to help move people from welfare
    to work. We now know that partly because of the growing economy, partly
    because of State welfare reform efforts, and partly because of a 50
    percent increase in child support collections nationwide, the welfare
    rolls went down by 2.6 million in 4 years, a record number.
        Then the Congress passed and I signed the welfare reform bill, which
    says there will still be a national guarantee for poor children for food
    and medicine, but there's a limit to how long an able-bodied person can
    be on welfare without going to work. And we're going to give it to the
    States and let the States decide how to design their plans to move
    people from welfare to work.
        Well, what I want to tell you folks is that this is like that old
    country singer Chet Atkins, who used to say, ``You've got to be awful
    careful what you ask for in this old life, because you might get it.''
    And now you've got it. And here is what you have. In order to meet the
    demands of the law that was supported by almost every Governor and every
    State official in the country, we must move about another million people
    from welfare to work. Now keep in mind when we reduced the welfare rolls
    by 2.6 million, some of those were children; only about a million of
    those were people moving from welfare into the work force. So we moved a
    million people in 4 years when the economy created almost 12 million
    jobs. We have to move another million in the next 4 years because of
    what the law says, whether the economy creates the jobs or not. And it
    is your responsibility to design a plan to get that done.
        Now, I want to help. And I have proposed Federal legislation to give
    a tax credit of 50 percent for up to $10,000 in salaries for people who
    hire people specifically off welfare. I have proposed to give extra cash
    to high-impact, high-unemployment areas so people can do public service
    work, community service work, if necessary.
        But there are more things you can do. Your Work First program here
    in North Carolina is encouraging private employers by subsidizing
    paychecks and holding job fairs. These are the kinds of things we have
    to do everywhere. But you really need to look at how your program works.
    And you need to look at whether you have a system for challenging
    private employers to look at the incentives that are available. And you
    need to figure out how many people every county is going to have to move
    from welfare to work in order for you not to have a train wreck at the
    end of the next 4 years.
        Every State has to do this. And it's going to have to be done county
    by county, community by community. Because I'm telling you, everybody
    that ever said people who are able-bodied on welfare ought to have to
    work now has a moral obligation to make sure that the people who have
    been told they have to work actually have jobs so they can work. We have
    to do that.
        Let me just say, I have been to a lot of States and looked at a lot
    of programs. In Missouri, they go to employers and say, ``We'll give you
    the welfare check for up to 4 years if you need it, but you have to pay
    people $1.75 over

    [[Page 304]]

    the minimum wage, and we'll give you the welfare check as an employment
    and training supplement. And you can have it for a slot, but not for a
    particular individual, for up to 10 years, if you'll just keep being
    part of our program.'' So they've got a lot of employers, small, medium,
    and large, who are part of that.
        You have to do something like that to do something for the employers
    who are not taxed. Community nonprofits and religious organizations can
    hire a lot of people from welfare into their ranks and have a lot to do
    with integrating their families into the mainstream of life in North
    Carolina. But they have to have some incentive to do so.
        The second thing I would urge you to do is to make sure that as you
    realize savings from people moving from welfare to work, I think you can
    meet your goals better if you turn around and invest at least the
    initial of those savings back into the transition. We did a good job of
    adding $4 billion to child care for people moving from welfare to work.
    But we still may not have enough child care to do the job. And we know
    that is a huge barrier. You cannot ask people to hurt their kids when
    they go to work. And a lot of folks entering these entry-level jobs
    don't make much money. Now we can carry them over with Medicaid health
    insurance for their kids for a while. They've got to have the child
    care.
        This bill gives you a lot of flexibility, and now you have to design
    this program. I would just implore you to really get down to brass
    tacks, get the facts: How many people does North Carolina have to move
    from welfare into jobs in 4 years? How many is that per county? How many
    is that per community? What are the tools we have? Who have we asked to
    do the job?
        I believe that the private sector is anxious to be asked to
    participate in this. I believe they want to end the permanent under
    class in America and help people move into the thriving, growing middle
    class. But we have to do it in an organized, disciplined way, State by
    State. We're going to do our part, but we need you to do yours.
        Finally, let me say that it is obvious from looking at education
    that we have to have a new partnership in America. Washington can lead
    the way, but the work has to be done by all Americans. North Carolina
    has led the way for a long time.
        I was smiling today when I got up and I thought about coming down
    here, and I thought about the first time I was ever in a meeting with
    Governor Hunt and Governor Riley--18 years ago; we were all much younger
    then. And we had this idea that all the Southern States would reach the
    national average in per capita income and have all these great
    opportunities for our people if only we could have an education system
    that was as good as anyplace in the country and it would reach
    everybody, without regard to race or income.
        And ironically, the mission that many of us who are southerners have
    carried for 20 or 30 years in our hearts is now the mission of America
    in a global society dominated by information and technology. And it is
    within our reach, literally, to give every single child in America the
    greatest future in human history, if we create the conditions in which
    we can flourish--that's partly our job, through national defense and
    meeting the security challenges and providing a good economy, but also
    having the tools.
        We cannot guarantee the future for any child, but we can give every
    child the tools to make the most of his or her own life. That is now
    America's mission. It is a mission this State has pursued for a long
    time. If you will lead the way, America's best days are still ahead.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:09 a.m. in the House of Representatives
    Chamber. In his remarks, he referred to Gov. James B. Hunt, Jr., and Lt.
    Gov. Dennis Wicker of North Carolina; Harold Brubaker, speaker, North
    Carolina House of Delegates; Marc Basnight, president pro tempore, North
    Carolina State Senate; Mayor Tom Fetzer of Raleigh; Dean Smith, men's
    basketball coach, University of North Carolina; and Gov. John Engler of
    Michigan.

    [[Page 305]]