    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book I)]
    [April 18, 1997]
    [Pages 451-454]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at the Award Ceremony for the National Teacher of the Year
    April 18, 1997

        Thank you very much to our Teacher of the Year and all the teachers
    of the year and their friends and supporters and family members who are
    here. Senator Glenn, Congressman Chabot, Secretary Riley, and Vice
    President Gore, thank you for being such wonderful partners to me.
        Next year, Dick Riley and I will have been working together for 20
    years in one way or another, and we're about to get the hang of it.
    [Laughter] And I really think he's done a wonderful job as our Secretary
    of Education.
        I want to tell you, this NetDay idea that the Vice President
    developed--we were just sitting around talking one day, and I was
    bemoaning the fact that he was doing some elaborate thing on his
    computer screen in his office and I still can hardly figure out how to
    turn mine on. [Laughter] And we were all laughing about how our children
    were leapfrogging us in their capacity to deal with computers and one
    thing led to another and before you know it, we have a goal that we'll
    hook up every library and classroom in the country by the year 2000, and
    then there's going to be a NetDay and, all of a sudden, one day we hook
    up 20 percent of the classrooms in California. And I never met anybody
    that was any better at taking an idea and turning it into reality than
    Al Gore. And this NetDay thing, it's going to revolutionize education in
    this country, because we're not going to stop until we bring the
    benefits of technology to every single child in this country, and I
    think it's a wonderful thing.
        I could have done without Secretary Riley telling that story that
    my--[laughter]--my second grade teacher did. But I was sitting here--I
    have no notes on this, so if I mess it up you'll have to forgive me, but
    the truth is that Sister Mary Amata McGee, whom I found after over 30
    years of having no contact with her--she was my second and third grade
    teacher. I found her in Springfield, Missouri, one night when I came
    there near the end of the 1992 campaign. I had no idea what had become
    of her. I didn't know what had happened. So I reestablished my
    relationship with her. But she was a little too generous. The truth is,
    I think she gave me a D in conduct--[laughter]--and I think she gave me
    a D not because I raised my hand but because I spoke whether I was
    called on or not. [Laughter]
        But if ever you wonder whether what you do matters, after Sister
    Mary Amata McGee in the second and third grade, there was Louise Vaughn,
    Mary Christianus, Kathleen Scher, my sixth grade teacher, who was my
    steady pen pal until she died just a few days before she became 90 years
    old, when I was Governor. And then in the seventh grade, my homeroom
    teacher was Ruth Atkins. And then there was Miss Teague, my civics
    teacher in the eighth grade. And Mary Broussard, my ninth grade English
    teacher, who was the only person in our class besides me that supported
    John Kennedy over Richard Nixon. [Laughter] In the ninth grade!

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        And I could go through my whole high school list of teachers,
    through my college list of teachers. All the people around here have to
    put up with stories that I forget that I've already told once about
    specific verbatim things I remember that my teachers in college said in
    lectures over 30 years ago.
        Now, don't ever think what you do does not matter. I remember them
    all as if I were sitting with them yesterday. And there are things that
    each of them gave to me that I am not even aware of today, after all
    these years of having had a chance to think about it.
        Every one of you made a decision that you would never be wealthy.
    [Laughter] You made a decision that you would give yourselves to the
    next generation. You made a decision that you would do at work what
    we're all supposed to do in our families--that you would always be
    thinking about tomorrow.
        On New Year's Eve, someone asked me, in this meeting I was at, if I
    had to write a legacy on my tombstone, what would it be? And I would
    say--I said something like--I don't remember exactly what I said, but
    something like that I had the privilege of leading America into a new
    century and keeping the American dream alive for everyone, having our
    very diverse country live together as one America, and maintaining our
    leadership as the world's greatest force for peace and freedom and
    prosperity. If you think about that, every single one of those tasks
    requires that we do a better job of educating more of our people, every
    single one.
        You look around America today, we have 5.2 percent unemployment.
    It's a great thing. And it's also entirely misleading. Unemployment is
    virtually zero for people who have the skills necessary to meet the
    demands of the emerging economy if they live in a place where investment
    is coming in. What we have to do is to close the gaps and the skill
    levels. How do you do that? Give people better education and then
    provide incentives to invest in the places that have been left behind.
        The Vice President was in Detroit a few days ago, promoting our
    empowerment zone concept of trying to build communities and give
    incentives for people to invest where people are there willing to work
    and there is no investment. But the unemployment rate is absolutely
    meaningless if you're unemployed. If you're unemployed, the unemployment
    rate is 100 percent. [Laughter] It's not one or zero or five or--you
    know, that's what it is. So we can't create opportunity for all
    Americans unless everybody first has the educational skills.
        We certainly can't learn to live together as one America, with all
    this rich diversity we have, without being educated to it, because for
    thousands of years, people have lived in tribal patterns that taught
    them to be suspicious of those that were different from themselves.
    Among the Teachers of the Year here today, we have an immigrant from
    Taiwan making a great contribution to the United States. Among the
    Teachers of the Year today we have a Japanese-American whose parents
    were interned during World War II. My State had one of those internment
    camps. I've been down there to see it, and I still can't believe my
    country ever did that. We have African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans.
    We have people from different religious backgrounds.
        You know that what unites us is more important than what divides us,
    and, once having recognized that, you know that what divides us makes us
    more interesting and far better positioned to do well in the world of
    tomorrow than countries that are less diverse than we are. But we can't
    learn to do this right unless we can not only feel our way out of this
    but think our way out of this. We have to know more than we now know.
        And we certainly--we certainly--cannot take advantage of the
    opportunities that are there for us at the end of the cold war to create
    a whole new order of peace and freedom and prosperity without much
    higher levels of understanding.
        Or let me put it in another way. The American Society of Newspaper
    Editors were here the other day, and one of the editors from out in the
    country stood up, and I thought, you know, I'm going to get a question
    on whatever is going on in Washington. He said, ``I got a 10-year-old
    son in the fifth grade, and he wants to know what your advice is for him
    for the future.'' And it was the hardest question I got asked all day.
        And I said, he should study hard. He should stay out of trouble and
    not defile his body with drugs or anything else. He should seek out
    people who were of different racial and religious backgrounds and get to
    know them and understand them. He should try to learn more about the
    rest of the world as early as possible, as soon as possible. And he
    should begin right now

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    taking some time to serve in his community to help people who needed
    help. Those are the five things I said. Why? Because I think that will
    give him a good education and give him opportunity, help us to come
    together as one America and appreciate our differences, and help us to
    maintain our leadership in the world. And you're doing that every day.
    The kindergarten teachers here are doing that.
        Now, that's why I look so forward to this every year. Because most
    of the time, frankly, we just sort of take you for granted, unless we
    get mad because we don't like the way the test scores come out or the
    comparative test scores or whatever else. And I think it is very
    important that we not lose the enormous significance of your collective
    impact. And I thought I'd stand up here today and try--and I didn't know
    if I could do it, but I thought I could--just remember all my teachers,
    just to show you the personal impact you have. See, I'll bet you a lot
    of you could do the same thing I just did, and that's probably why
    you're doing what you're doing today.
        We do have some changes to make, and we do have to recognize that we
    have to keep moving to lift the standards and we have to realize that
    there are some senses in which we do what we do very well and some
    senses in which we have challenges because we have so much diversity
    among our children that others don't have. But we can't use that as an
    excuse. We have to just deal with the facts and believe every child can
    learn.
        At this brain conference yesterday that the Vice President mentioned
    that the First Lady and I hosted, I was stunned when we had these
    scientists there talking about one trillion networks being developed in
    the brain.
        We've known for a long time--I was taught in school that we only use
    a small part of our brain's capacity, but I never understood the extent
    to which the brain keeps developing all during childhood and how we
    interrelate to it. But what it convinced me of was what I already
    believed by conviction, which is that nearly everybody is fully capable
    of learning whatever they need to learn to get where they need to go.
        And that's to me what this whole standards business is about and
    what the encouragement of all the States to develop standards that are
    nationally and internationally sound, challenging all the States to join
    in the fourth grade reading and the eighth grade math tests in 1999 is
    all about. It's not about another test. It's about saying, we believe
    all our children can learn, and we believe children learn according to
    the expectations placed on them, and our expectations are going to be
    high. That's what this is about. And I hope every one of you will
    support that, because I think it is terribly important.
        So far, in only a couple of months, the educational leadership of
    California has joined Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina, and the
    schools of the Defense Department system in endorsing--in saying they
    will participate in this standards movement. And I hope every State in
    the country will say yes before the time comes.
        Because we have a record number of students in our schools and
    they're growing rapidly, and now we've got for the first time--it's
    rather humbling for me and the Vice President--we finally have more kids
    in school than we had during the baby boom. [Laughter] We're going to
    have to find in the next 10 years 2 million new teachers, and that's
    going to be quite a challenge. And we have to train them for the
    challenges that they'll face today and the world their children will
    face tomorrow.
        So I want to thank you for your willingness to think about that and
    for helping to encourage teachers to achieve new levels of excellence. I
    know many of you are participating in Secretary Riley's national forum,
    which gives you a chance to share ideas with educators all across the
    country about the best way to train teachers. This is an issue that is
    very hard. It will never make the front page on any day. There will
    always be something more immediate. But there are very few things that
    are more important than how we train our teachers and how we continue to
    learn as teachers in the classroom and in the schools and how we can all
    learn from each other. That's one of the reasons I encourage teachers
    all over the country to seek board certification from the National Board
    for Professional Teaching Standards.
        And we now have 500 of these teachers, nationwide. Governor Hunt
    from North Carolina, who is well-known to many of you, has been working
    on this as an obsession for years. But in our balanced budget plan we've
    got $105 million that would put 100,000 master teachers in our Nation's
    classrooms. And the idea is not really--it's just like you. You're the
    Teacher of

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    the Year, but you know, you're really standing in the shoes of every
    other good teacher in your State. But if you can put this training in
    the hands of one teacher in every school building in America, which we
    ought to be able to do with this, it will upgrade the performance of all
    the teachers in the schools and it will change the culture of the
    schools. So I hope you will support that as well.
        There are a lot of other things in our education program, but I
    wanted to focus on those two things, plus our efforts to wire the
    schools, to focus just on the public schools today. We're also trying to
    help the schools that are terribly overcrowded get some financial help
    to reduce the cost of new construction or repair work when the local
    districts are willing to do their part, and I hope that initiative will
    pass.
        But the main thing I want to tell you is, what you do really
    matters. It matters to the country as a whole, it matters to individual
    kids, and if any--if at all possible, it matters even more now to our
    society at large than it did when I had all those teachers whose names
    and faces and voices and manners and stern rebukes I still remember.
    [Laughter]
        Today we honor, especially, Sharon Draper. She happens to be one of
    our Nation's first master teachers and a member of the National Board
    for Professional Teaching Standards, and I'm especially pleased about
    that.
        For 27 years, she has inspired students with her passion for
    literature and life. The standards to which she holds her students at
    the Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati are legendary, so much so
    that seniors wear T-shirts that proclaim, ``I survived the Draper
    Paper''--[laughter]--when they finish their senior thesis. I was
    intrigued when I read that, and I asked her for one of those T-shirts.
    And I was denied because I haven't yet survived it. [Laughter]
        Her gifted teaching has not gone unrecognized. She received both the
    National Council of Negro Women Excellence in Teaching Award and the
    Ohio Governors Educational Leadership Award. She is an accomplished
    author in her own right. She was honored with the American Library
    Association's Coretta Scott King's Genesis Award and its annual Best
    Books for Young People Award. She has devoted her career not only to
    teaching and to writing but to helping other teachers improve their
    skills as well.
        Sharon Draper is more than a credit to her profession; she is a true
    blessing to the children she has taught. And it gives me great pleasure
    now to present her with the National Teacher of the Year Award and ask
    her to come forward and say whatever she'd like to say. Congratulations.

    Note: The President spoke at 2:10 p.m. in the East Room at the White
    House. In his remarks, he referred to Gov. James B. Hunt, Jr., of North
    Carolina.