[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book I)]
[June 25, 1997]
[Pages 816-820]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the Family Re-Union VI Conference in Nashville
June 25, 1997

    Thank you very much, Mr. Vice President. We built in a little time 
on the other end of the schedule because I knew that we'd all want to 
stay here longer. I'm reluctant to say anything; those 12 people were so 
good.
    I'm reminded of the very first time I made a speech as an elected 
public official, more than 20 years ago now. It was at a Rotary Club in 
southeast Arkansas, and it was one of these officers banquets, you know, 
it was one of those things where we start at 6:30, and I was introduced 
to speak at a quarter to 10. [Laughter] There were 500 people there; all 
but 3 were introduced. They went home mad. [Laughter] And the only guy 
in the audience--in the whole crowd more nervous than me was the fellow 
that was supposed to introduce me. He didn't know what to say. He was 
nervous, too. And so I get ready to be introduced, and the guy comes up, 
and his opening line is--after all the officers had been inducted, all 
the awards had been given, everybody had been recognized, his opening 
line is--in my first speech as an elected public official--is, ``You 
know, we could have stopped here and had a very nice evening.'' 
[Laughter] Now, I know he didn't mean it that way. [Laughter] And I 
could have said that about myself now. We could stop right here and have 
had a very nice session.
    What I would like to do just very briefly is to try to put this 
whole--what we've been talking about today in the larger context of what 
America is trying to do and what our responsibility is at the national 
level, because when

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I say over and over and over again, the era of big Government is over, 
but the era of big challenges is not, I don't mean for people to say, as 
they sometimes do, that that means the Federal Government can take a 
powder. I don't agree with that.
    What I mean is that we're going to have to do more of what we do 
together as partners, and we cannot succeed in a lot of these problems, 
which as you just heard are fundamentally human challenges that have to 
be dealt with child by child, family by family, street by street, school 
by school--that simply cannot be done successfully if the whole focus is 
on what is the Federal Government going to do. On the other hand, I 
would argue it cannot be done comprehensively and fairly to every child 
if there is no focus on what is the Federal Government going to do.
    Now, for the last 4\1/2\ years, Vice President Gore and I and our 
team have worked on a simple vision for America. We've been trying to 
prepare our country for the 21st century with some simple goals: We want 
every child to have the chance to live out his or her dreams. We want 
every citizen to be responsible for self, for family, for community, for 
country. And we want a community that is coming together as one America, 
not being driven apart by its differences. And we think if we do all 
those things, we'll have--what, finally, we want is for our country to 
continue to be the world's leading force for peace and freedom and 
prosperity in the world.
    And when you ask yourselves a tough question in the moment, I think 
it often helps to get the right answer. You say, ``Well, where do I want 
to go?'' Well, that's where we want to go. And our strategy has been to 
develop a National Government set of policies that would, in effect, 
empower citizens and families and communities and schools and workplaces 
to create the kind of destiny that we know we're capable of creating.
    That's why I love these Family Re-Union conferences, because every 
one of them, fundamentally, when you get right down to it, is about 
empowerment. You take the two the Vice President mentioned, the 
television rating system and the V-chip. The Government can advocate for 
and even mandate, in the case of the V-chip, a law, but all it does is 
to empower families to be able to raise their children with a little 
more direction--or what we did on the family and medical leave and what 
we hope to do on advancing, expanding family and medical leave, and 
having the right sort of flextime proposal.
    Nothing is really more important to a society than raising children. 
But if we have a good economy, it helps people raise children. So the 
real--what's in the vortex there in the middle is how do you enable 
people to succeed at home and at work? How many times did you hear these 
people talking about child care, before-school care, after-school care, 
bringing in the parents at different times--a parent played in an 
orchestra concert the night before and taught orchestra the next 
morning. What does that mean? It means that we have to find new and 
creative ways to reconcile work and family and in some places to get 
work for families so that they can succeed as parents of students.
    So that's what I like about this, because this family conference 
basically emphasizes what I think our central strategy ought to be, 
which is how are we going to give our citizens the power they need, 
first and foremost, to raise successful children and, secondly, to make 
America successful?
    And let me just very briefly mention two or three things. We have 
tried to focus on--in addition to the economy, which was our first 
obsession because we knew if we couldn't get it going, a lot of these 
other things wouldn't occur, we tried to say, ``Well, what else do 
families need?'' One is safe streets. So we've worked hard on a 
grassroots crime package to empower people to keep the crime rate coming 
down, and last year we had the biggest drop in 36 years. And if we do it 
for about 3 more years, people might actually believe it's come down, as 
it has. And that's good. That is, it might be more than numbers and 
lives saved; people might actually feel safe. And that's important 
because if people don't feel safe, they're not fully free.
    Then we focused on culture, the V-chip, the TV ratings, the work, 
the terrific work Secretary Riley did with Attorney General Reno to draw 
the lines and also amplify the possibilities for dealing with different 
religious convictions in our schools which are multiplying enormously. 
We tried to deal with cultural issues in the sensitive way that 
respected the differences of conviction and opinion of people on 
religion, on race, on other issues but still bound us together 
consistent with our Constitution.

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    The third thing we focused on, as I said, was home and work. And I 
mentioned that family leave, flextime, the minimum wage, a tax cut for 
working families with modest incomes--that's a big part of the new 
balanced budget plan, too. That has a children's tax cut.
    The fourth thing we focused on was public health and the 
environment. If you think about it, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the new 
food safety standards, cleaning up toxic waste dumps, these things are 
very important. If they make children healthier, it makes us stronger. 
We've made a lot of strides in that in the last 4\1/2\ years, indeed, in 
the last 25 years. And one of the things that I was doing this morning 
before I came down here to be with you was to deal with the obligation 
of the Environmental Protection Agency to issue new regulations, as 
they're bound to do on a 5-year cycle, to control pollution from soot 
and smog. That's very important. And I approved some very strong new 
regulations today that will be somewhat controversial, but I think kids 
ought to be healthy.
    Our approach on the environment, interestingly enough, has been a 
lot like the approach that you've heard here on the schools. We think if 
we have high standards for protecting the environment, but we're 
flexible in how those standards are implemented and we give adequate 
time and adequate support for technology and creativity, that we can 
protect the environment and grow the economy. And we know we can never 
be put in the position of choosing one or the other because in the end, 
a declining economy has always, always led to an environment that is 
less clean--always. So we've got to find a way to do both.
    And I want to thank the Vice President for his leadership on this 
issue. And I know that those who have opposed the higher standards, I 
want to just tell you: Read the implementation schedule; work with us. 
We will find a way to do this in a way that grows the American economy. 
But we have to keep having a clean environment if we want healthy 
children.
    Children with asthma don't do very well in school. Children with 
gripping allergies that they could have avoided if they hadn't had to 
breathe dirty air don't do as well in school. So the public health and 
the environment are important parts of this.
    We're trying extraordinary new measures to give cities the means 
they need to clean up their environment so they can attract the right 
kind of investment. And we're determined to clean up 500 more toxic 
waste dumps; that will bear directly on education. And if we do it 
right, it will cause our economy to grow faster, not slower. So I hope 
all of you will support that.
    And finally, let me say, in education we have focused on 
empowerment, on things like charter schools, public school choice, more 
funds for Head Start to get more kids well-prepared, better terms for 
college loan programs so more young people can borrow money and go to 
college and never worry about going broke because they couldn't pay 
their loans back, so they could pay them back as a percentage of their 
income, a huge expansion in work-study, a big expansion in Pell grants. 
And then, on top of what we've already done, if a balanced budget plan 
passes, it will be the biggest increase in funds for education in over a 
generation. And including funds to support the schools that are trying 
to set high standards, that are trying to be innovative with things like 
charter schools, more funds to support putting the right kind of 
technology with the right kind of training and software in all of our 
schools, more funds to support a massive volunteer effort to make sure 
all of our 8-year-olds have a chance to read well.
    We still have some serious challenges in our schools. One of the 
most interesting things that we finally saw manifested in test scores 
this year was that the Third International Math and Science Test scores 
came out this year on last year's scores, and they showed that for the 
first time, American fourth graders scored way above the international 
average on math and science. And that even though this was just a few 
thousand of our kids who took this, it's a representative sample by 
race, by income, and by region, proving that our children can learn even 
though they are very diverse in incomes and in ethnic backgrounds and in 
living circumstances--way above the national average. That's the good 
news.
    The bad news is, we were the only nation in the world to score way 
above the national average on the fourth grade tests and well below the 
international average on the eighth grade tests. It happened in no other 
country in the world.
    Why is that? Let's be real here. The reason you stood up and clapped 
for Yvonne is you know that a lot of these kids are living in 
hellaciously difficult circumstances, right? That's why you did that. 
And you did it because you

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want to believe that those kids can make it if we do right by them. And 
she made you believe they could, and it was thrilling to you. But when a 
lot of these kids reach adolescence, every single problem that affects 
every adolescent hits them multiplied by a hundred. And we've got to 
find a way to keep their parents or other concerned adults involved with 
them when they reach adolescence.
    The fourth grade tests should make you ecstatic. It punctures all 
the myths that we can't compete globally in educational performance, 
uniformly, because we have so many poor people, because we have so many 
immigrants, because we're so diverse. That is our meal ticket to the 
future if we do it right. That punctures the myth.
    The eighth grade tests should sober us up. These kids have a tough 
time out there. That's one of the reasons that in our budget we're 
determined to give half of them health insurance for the first time and 
deal with some of these health problems we're talking about. We 
shouldn't stop until they all have health care. It's unconscionable.
    Let me say, in the moment, the most important thing is that you know 
we can do it. That's what the fourth grade tests mean. The second most 
important thing is you know that we can't stop until every child has the 
kind of parental involvement that 30 years of academic studies have 
shown is pivotal in the success of children.
    And so one of the things, to go back to Representative Purcell's 
formulation, plus my little add-on about either leading the way, getting 
out of the way, or trying to support the way--one of the things that I 
think is important is that today the Department of Education is 
publishing a handbook to help parents everywhere understand and live up 
to their responsibilities and work with the schools. And Dick gave me 
the first copy here. It's called ``A Compact For Learning.''
    And I would like to explain something to you. We are required under 
Federal law to have a written compact for the title I schools, and so we 
thought we ought to have an outline here that would at least increase 
the chances that we might be as successful in these other schools as the 
ones that you've seen featured today. But what we want to do with this 
is to challenge every principal, every teacher, every parent to have a 
written compact that outlines their expectations and their 
responsibilities for helping every child to learn high standards, with 
serious, sustained, effective parental involvement. That's how we'll try 
to support the way. It is very, very important.
    I have to tell you, I feel more hopeful today--I've been working on 
these educational issues for nearly two decades now, and I have never 
been more hopeful than I am today that what I consider to be the central 
problem with the system of education in America might be overcome.
    The central problem is the following, as you have just heard: Every 
challenge in America has been met by somebody, somewhere. How can that 
be a problem? Because if that is true, we should be able to replicate it 
everywhere.
    You heard the Vice President say 98 percent of us have televisions. 
Well, once, just a few of us did. We all figured out how everybody could 
get a television. You heard John Doerr say that 50 percent of the 
parents--more than 50 percent of the parents with children in school now 
have personal computers in their homes. Any pretty soon it will be a lot 
higher than that and go way down in lower income levels.
    Why is it--and I mean this as a compliment to our first speakers, 
our first three speakers who talked about their schools, and the 
principal of the San Antonio school district--why is it that we want to 
scream with joy when we hear them talk, when we heard our friend from 
Chattanooga talking about how they served the parents--and they had no 
excuses? Why did we want to scream with joy when we heard that? Because 
they are the exception, not the rule.
    So, no offense, but I'd like it if 5 years from now they could come 
back to this stage and give all these talks and receive polite applause 
and the gratitude of the Nation for getting everybody else to follow 
their lead so they would no longer be the exception and not the rule.
    We'll do our part. I hope you'll help us get this handbook out and 
get it made alive in the work of the school districts in the country, in 
all the schools. You'll do yours. But remember, our kids can do it. The 
only question is whether we're going to do our part to make sure they 
get their chance to do it. And that is, in many ways, the central 
obligation of adult Americans at this moment in our history.
    And I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to the Vice President 
and Mrs. Gore for every year reminding us about what's most important in 
all our lives and in our country's life.

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    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 12:40 p.m. in Langford Auditorium at 
Vanderbilt University. In his remarks, he referred to Yvonne Chan, 
principal, Vaughn New Century Learning Center, San Fernando, CA; former 
Tennessee State Representative Bill Purcell, director, Child and Family 
Policy Center, Vanderbilt Institute for Public Policy Studies; and John 
Doerr, partner, Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers, Menlo Park, CA.