[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
[November 13, 1997]
[Pages 1553-1555]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]


[[Page 1553]]


Remarks on Signing the Departments of Labor, Health and Human Services, 
and Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, 1998
November 13, 1997

    You may have to consider a move from math to public service. 
[Laughter]
    Well, thank you, Philip and Tina Israel. Thank you, Kikuyu Shaw. Mr. 
Vice President, Secretary Riley, Secretary Herman, Deputy Secretary 
Thurm, all the Members of Congress who are here, and Mrs. Udall, thank 
you for coming.
    Ladies and gentlemen, before I make my remarks about this 
legislation that we have all worked on, I'd like to say a few words 
about yesterday's United Nations Security Council resolution on Iraq.
    Plainly, it sent the right message: Comply now with the U.N. 
resolutions and let the UNSCOM inspection team go back to work. Iraq's 
announcement this morning to expel the Americans from the inspection 
team is clearly unacceptable and a challenge to the international 
community.
    Let me remind you all again--I will say this every time I discuss 
this issue--these inspectors, in the last 6 years, have uncovered more 
weapons of mass destruction potential and destroyed it than was 
destroyed in the entire Gulf war. It is important to the safety of the 
world that they continue their work. I intend to pursue this matter in a 
very determined way.
    I think it's fair to say that this is one of those days in public 
service that these Members of Congress in both parties work for and live 
for and put up with a lot of the hassles of public life for. We have 
been on a journey for the last 5 years to a new century that is now just 
around the corner, driven by a vision to provide opportunity to 
everybody who is responsible enough to work for it, to continue to lead 
the world for peace and freedom and prosperity, and to bring our people 
together, across all the lines that divide us, into one America. And 
we're clearly making progress. Our economy is the strongest in a 
generation; crime, welfare, and unemployment are falling.
    I think all of us believe that the best way to sustain and build on 
that progress is to make sure that all of our people have a world-class 
education. In my State of the Union Address, I challenged our people to 
join me in a nonpartisan effort to make sure that 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, every adult can continue to learn for a lifetime. 
For the very first time, I feel that we are determined to finish that 
part of our journey.
    Congress and the United States of America have answered the call. 
When I sign this bill into law, I will have the privilege of signing 
into the record books what is plainly the best year for American 
education in more than a generation.
    First, we are taking historic steps to make sure that every child in 
America can meet the high national standards of academic achievement 
that the Israels spoke about so that every children can master the 
basics. This bill represents a genuine breakthrough in what is now quite 
a long effort by many people to achieve national academic standards in 
the United States. For the first time, we will have workable and 
generally agreed-upon standards in math and reading. And for the very 
first time, Congress has voted to support the development of voluntary 
national tests to measure performance in fourth grade reading and eighth 
grade math. The tests will be created by an independent, bipartisan 
organization and will be piloted in schools next October.
    The importance of this cannot be overstated. Our children rise with 
the expectations we set for them. We know that every child can meet high 
standards if we set them and measure our progress against them. I want 
to especially thank Senator Bingaman and Representative Miller and 
everyone else who worked on this particular part of the legislation.
    This legislation also takes concrete steps to help our children meet 
the standards and, indeed, to achieve all our national education goals. 
It will help every 8-year-old in America read on his or her own by 
funding the America Reads challenge and expanding national service so 
that our AmeriCorps members can recruit trained literacy tutors for our 
schools. Already, over 800 colleges and universities and numerous other 
organizations are providing tens of thousands of volunteer tutors that 
are going into our schools

[[Page 1554]]

every week to help make sure our children can read. We can give our 
children the extra attention and practice they need so that we can 
assure that they'll be able to read independently by the end of the 
third grade if we continue to pursue this.
    Second, the bill takes significant steps to ensure that every 12-
year-old can log on to the Internet. I must say, I had ambivalent 
feelings when I realized that Mr. Israel was logging on to the Internet 
and reading what was on the website about the exam. Some day somebody 
may figure out how to find the actual exam on the website. [Laughter] 
But I was glad to know you were. This measure nearly doubles--nearly 
doubles--our national investment in education technology. It puts us 
well on the way to connecting every classroom and library to the 
information superhighway by the year 2000, something the Vice President 
has made a particular commitment to.
    And I want to emphasize something else, because I met with a group 
of young people yesterday in their twenties who were hammering me on 
this. They said, ``What difference will it make if you connect every 
classroom in the country to the information superhighway if the teachers 
aren't trained to use the technology, and the kids know more than they 
do?'' So I want to emphasize that a big part of this legislation 
provides investments to make sure that our teachers have the training 
they need to maximize the use of this new technology.
    Third, the bill, along with the college tuition tax credits I signed 
into law this summer and the improvements in the college loan program we 
have been implementing since 1993, will make it possible for every 18-
year-old who's willing to work for it to go on to college. And it gives 
us the chance to make the 13th and 14th years of education as universal 
as a high school diploma is today. This measure includes the largest 
increase in Pell grant scholarships in two decades, raising the maximum 
grant, and serving an additional 220,000 students.
    I might add that the Congress--and I thank the members of this 
committee who are here--has added in the last two budgets another 
300,000 work-study positions as well.
    The bill also promotes innovation and expands public school choice, 
helping parents, teachers, and community leaders to open some 500 new 
charter schools and clearing the way for 3,000 such schools by early in 
the next century. It recognizes that learning begins in the earliest 
years of life and significantly expands investment in Head Start. It 
challenges teachers to reach higher standards along with students and 
honors those who do by helping 100,000 more teachers seek certification 
for the National Board of Teacher Standards as master teachers.
    Let me emphasize the significance of the 100,000 figure. The year 
before last, there were only 500 teachers in the entire country who had 
been certified as master teachers. Because of the unique training and 
performance required to gain this certification, it is our firm belief--
and I know Secretary Riley believes this--if we can get one master 
teacher certified in every school building in America, it will change 
the entire culture of teaching across the country and elevate the 
quality of education dramatically. So this is very important.
    The bill brings more to our efforts to build the discipline and 
order and safety and positive activity into the lives of our children, 
with $40 million to help schools stay open late, on the weekends, and in 
the summer, to help keep young people off the streets and out of 
trouble, along with job training for out-of-school youth. Now, let me 
emphasize the importance of this. Most juvenile crime is committed 
between the hours of 3 in the afternoon and 7 at night. While the crime 
rate has dropped in America dramatically, it's only in the last 2 years 
that it's begun to level off among young people.
    But we ought to look at this in a positive way. This is an 
opportunity to take kids who otherwise don't have the institutional 
support they need, who are capable of getting a good education and being 
good, productive citizens, and giving them the institutional framework 
within which to do that. It also helps a lot of them whose parents have 
to work until later in the evening and cannot be at home.
    So it may sound like a little money, but a little money given to a 
school on a tight budget for this purpose can make all the difference in 
the world in the lives of a lot of our young people. So I'm very pleased 
by that. And again, I want to thank all the Members who are here for 
what they have done.
    I hope now we will use this momentum in education to take some new 
steps, to pass finally a ``GI bill'' for America's workers that would 
enable us to give a certificate to any American who needs it to take to 
the nearest educational institution to learn new skills to reenter the

[[Page 1555]]

workplace, and to meet the quiet crisis of crumbling and crowded school 
buildings across America. We have more children in our schools than at 
any time in our history, with serious overcrowding problems and serious 
building deterioration problems, which I believe we should help to 
address.
    Let me say, finally, that this bill continues our efforts to 
strengthen families on many other fronts. It expands educational 
opportunity for recent immigrants, children with disabilities, children 
growing up in our poorest neighborhoods. It significantly increases 
funding for biomedical research, from cancer to Parkinson's disease--and 
we're particularly glad to have Mrs. Udall with us today--to the 
astonishing human genome project. And I would like to thank Congressman 
Porter and Congressman Obey and Congressman Spratt for the work that 
they have done on this particular thing. And I would like to especially 
thank Congressman Upton for the work that he's done on the Parkinson's 
issue. This is a remarkable, remarkable bill with an astonishing 
bipartisan commitment to keep our country on the front ranks of medical 
research.
    Finally, it will help to make new, very powerful AIDS therapies more 
available to needy patients. Along with the FDA reform legislation this 
Congress has passed that we will be signing in the next several days, 
moving promising medical therapies to market more quickly in a more 
efficient way and then making them more available to the people that 
need them can change the lives and improve the quality as well as the 
length of lives for many, many tens of thousands of our fellow 
Americans.
    And believe it or not, with all these issues on the education 
checklist and all the things I just mentioned in health care, these are 
just some of the important provisions in this bill that honor our duty 
to prepare our people for the future. As much as any bill I have signed, 
as much as any bill the Congress has passed in recent years, this bill 
genuinely does fulfill our strategy of opportunity for all, 
responsibility from all, a community of all Americans. I am very proud 
to sign it into law.
    And again, let me thank every single person in this room who had 
anything to do with its enactment, but especially, let me thank the 
Members of Congress who are here for working together in good spirit and 
honest and principled compromise to hammer out this truly remarkable 
bill.
    Thank you very much.
    Now I'd like to ask the Members of Congress and the people from the 
executive departments and our speakers to join me up here while we sign 
the legislation.

Note: The President spoke at 10:29 a.m. in the East Room at the White 
House. In his remarks, he referred to fifth grade student Philip Israel, 
who introduced the President, and his mother, Tina; Kikuyu Shaw, a 
junior at Howard University; and Norma Udall, wife of former 
Representative Morris K. Udall. H.R. 2264, approved November 13, was 
assigned Public Law No. 105-78.