    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book I)]
    [April 9, 1997]
    [Pages 414-417]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Memorial Service for Albert Shanker
    April 9, 1997

        Thank you very much to all of you, but especially to Eadie and the
    members of Al's family, to the members of the family of the AFT, the
    other labor leaders who are here, and other friends and admirers and
    those who are indebted to Al Shanker.
        I'd like to begin simply by thanking everyone who has already spoken
    and all the people at the AFT who put together that wonderful film at
    the beginning. I think if Al were here and were whispering in my ear, he
    would say, ``This has been very nice, Mr. President, but keep it short,
    we're getting hungry.'' [Laughter]
        I have to say also that Hillary very much wanted to be here with me
    today. She worked with Al on a number of things over the last 15 years,
    and a long-standing commitment in New York kept her away. But I want to
    speak for both of us today in honoring a person we considered a model, a
    mentor, and a friend, a union leader, a national leader, a world leader.
    But first, last, and always, as the film began today, Al Shanker was our
    teacher and clearly one of the most important teachers of the 20th
    century.
        In 1983, in April, when the ``Nation At Risk'' report broke like a
    storm over America and resonated deeply in the consciousness of the
    country, that our country was at risk because we weren't doing right by
    our children and our schools--one month before, I had signed a law
    passed by my legislature establishing a commission to study our schools
    and to improve them, and I had appointed my wife to chair the
    commission. And we were eagerly reading this report and the reactions to
    it, and we noticed that there was Al Shanker, the first leader of a
    union to come out and say, ``This is a good thing. We need to do this.
    We've got to raise these standards. We've got to hold ourselves to
    higher standards. We've got to be accountable. We owe our children
    more.''
        That began what was for me one of the most remarkable associations
    of my entire working life. Hillary and I had occasion to be with Al on
    so many different occasions, and one of the previous speakers said,
    ``You know, if you go to enough of these education meetings, the usual
    suspects are rounded up, and after a while we could all give each
    other's speech, except for Al.'' [Laughter] And it really did make a

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    huge difference. After a while you get tired--you get off the plane;
    you're spending the night in another strange hotel room; you're showing
    up at another meeting--but if he was there, I always kind of got my
    energy flowing, my juices were running, and I knew it was going to be an
    interesting time. He was always saying that the students he taught
    wanted to know, ``Well, does it count?'' I can tell you, whenever he
    talked, it counted. It counted.
        Over all the years, it counted for me. In 1989, when President Bush
    called the Governors together in this education summit in the University
    of Virginia and I was the designated Democrat to stay up half the night
    and try to write those education goals, I was always consulting Al, who
    was there, trying to draw out of him exactly how we ought to write this
    so that in the end we could actually wind up with not just goals but
    standards that would apply to our schools and students across the
    country. And we thought we had done a pretty good job.
        It didn't work out exactly as we wanted. So, in 1993, when I became
    President, we were working together again, and we drafted this Goals
    2000 legislation. And we thought, well, this will get it done because
    the States will be developing their standards, but we'll have a national
    measure of testing whether we're meeting those standards, which is what
    we agreed to do way back in 1989 because Al Shanker wanted us to do
    that. He knew it was the right thing to do. But it never quite worked
    out because people always could find some excuse for it not to count.
        So, in my State of the Union Address this February, I announced the
    plan that is what Al Shanker wanted us to do all along, that we would
    develop national standards and that we would begin to make sure they
    counted, and we would begin with a fourth grade reading test and an
    eighth grade math test but that we ought to go on and do more after
    that. And after the speech, I called Al, as I had been calling him since
    he'd gotten sick periodically, and I said, ``You know, I hope you feel
    good now, because you've been telling us to do this for years and years
    and years, and finally your crusade will be America's crusade.'' Well,
    he only lived a couple of weeks after that, but he had to know that what
    he did counted.
        You know, I have to tell you that one of the things that I valued
    most about him and one of the reasons that he had such a big impact on
    me is that I always felt that I could say whatever was on my mind to him
    without thinking about how I would say it. You know how we all relate to
    each other? You know, when teachers talk to administrators--it's not
    that you're not honest with them, but you have to think about how you
    have to be honest with them, right? [Laughter] Or school board members
    talk to teachers or politicians talk to union leaders or union leaders
    talk to politicians--it's not that we don't say what's on our mind, but
    we think, well, we have all these sort of preconceptions that we've
    learned over a lifetime about how people who are in some other group
    view the world. So it's not that you're not honest with them, but you
    know you've got to talk to them a certain way or you won't even be
    heard.
        I never gave a second thought to that with Al Shanker. I never
    thought, here's this guy who grew up in New York City and I'm some rube
    from the country, and I'm a politician and he's a labor leader, and he's
    got all this stuff, I've got to think about--after about the second time
    I was with him, I never thought about it anymore. It's like a huge
    burden lifted off your shoulders to realize you can say any outrageous
    thing that comes to your mind if you believe it, and here's a person you
    can trust to absorb it with a level of self-confidence and integrity
    that will permit an honest conversation to ensue. And I see a lot of you
    nodding your heads. You know I'm telling the truth, don't you? You felt
    the same thing. [Laughter]
        And if we could all achieve that with each other, if somehow we
    could give each other the confidence to think and be who we are, the way
    he did to all of us, what a better world we could build. And he did it
    not to let us off the hook but to put us on the spot. That was the
    interesting thing that I thought was so important. He thought that this
    whole standards movement was essential for democracy to work, that it
    was the only way we could ever give every child, without regard to their
    background, a chance to live up to his or her God-given capacity. It was
    the only way we could ever avoid the kind of false elitism that always
    creeps into every society, was to give everybody a chance to reach high
    and achieve high and find dignity and meaning in life.
        He did not believe that how you learn depended upon accident of
    birth. And he thought all the arguments used to deny the need for

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    some sort of national standards for measuring ourselves were ridiculous.
    I'm very sensitive to that now because one of the things I heard him say
    over and over again was he would compare standards. When people would
    say, ``Well, standards will tie the hands of teachers,'' or ``They won't
    be fair to poor kids''--and I heard all these arguments a thousand
    times--he would equate it to surgery. Now, I'm sensitive to that now.
    [Laughter] And I thought to myself, how would I feel if Al Shanker--I
    never realized it--how would I feel if I had heard my surgeon just
    before my recent surgery making all those arguments about ``There really
    is no uniform standards here.'' [Laughter] ``Well, there is, but I'm not
    going to observe it because I have my own way to do it.'' I'd say,
    ``Please, I'd like to have another doctor.'' [Laughter]
        We're laughing about this now, but this was a profoundly wise man
    who lived with us. And because he was also a good man and a self-
    confident man and he wanted us to be fearless and thinking, he made us
    feel that we could say what was on our minds but that we had to keep
    being honest and reaching higher and going further.
        Al Shanker once said something about Bayard Rustin that he should
    have said about himself. He said the great thing about Rustin was that
    he didn't put up his finger to see which way the wind was blowing. He
    had the guts to say what he felt was right, no matter how unpopular it
    was.
        Al Shanker would say something on one day that would delight
    liberals and infuriate conservatives. The next day, he would make the
    conservatives ecstatic and the liberals would be infuriated. He really--
    even though he came out of the, if you will, the left wing of our
    society in the sense that he was a passionate union leader, when he
    thought about the future, he never thought about what wing he was
    seeking; he thought about how he could seek the truth and synthesize the
    facts and move us all forward. And that, too, is a great gift that we
    will sorely miss.
        And again, I say, he let no one off the hook--no one--not
    politicians, not administrators, not the public, not the students, and
    certainly not the teachers.
        In the last years of his life, he worked hard to bring people all
    over the world together around democracy and freedom and dignity. And he
    wanted teachers to lead the way. As the son of Russian immigrants, he
    had a deep interest in the work of the United States Information Agency,
    which has been sending American teachers abroad and bringing foreign
    teachers to America to support the development of democracy, especially
    in Central and Eastern Europe and the Newly Independent States of the
    former Soviet Union.
        I want to announce that today, from now on, teachers who participate
    in these international programs in civic education will be designated
    Shanker Fellows. Some of them are here with us today, and we thank them
    for their presence.
        In 1999, when the first fourth graders take the reading exam and the
    first eighth graders take the math exam, they, too, will be part of Al
    Shanker's legacy. And if, God willing, our budget passes, instead of 500
    of those board-certified teachers, like the wonderful woman we heard
    just before the Vice President and I came up here, that Al Shanker
    worked so hard for, we'll have 100,000--100,000.
        He really believed if we could get one in every school, they would
    be magnets; they would change the whole culture of American education.
    If this national certification movement, the standards movement for
    teachers, could just get one of those board-certified teachers in every
    schoolhouse in America, it would change the culture of education forever
    and change the whole way we thought about teaching. And we are
    determined to do that, and that, too, will be part of his legacy, along
    with his love of life and music and art and bread, along with all the
    energy that he put into his family and his friends.
        Al Shanker's life fully reflected the wisdom of the words of Herman
    Melville--I bring out this quote from time to time, and I don't think I
    know anyone it applies to better. Herman Melville said, ``We cannot live
    only for ourselves. A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.
    And among those fibers, as sympathetic threads, our actions run as
    causes, and they come back to us as effects.''
        Al Shanker's cause was education. And through his lifelong devotion
    to it, he lifted up our children, our schools, our teachers, and others
    who work in our schools, our Nation, and our world. He was truly our
    master teacher.
        Today, education is the number one priority of the American people.
    Al Shanker helped to make it so. His life was full of tumult and
    controversy, of growth and triumph. But what I

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    think he would want to know is, does it count? You bet it does. It
    counts, Al, and we thank you. We love you, and we bid you Godspeed.
        Thank you.

    Note: The President spoke at 12:12 p.m. at the Lisner Auditorium. In his
    remarks, he referred to Albert Shanker's widow, Eadie.