[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.