[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.