[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
[July 25, 1997]
[Pages 997-1001]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the National Association of Elementary School Principals in 
Arlington, Virginia
July 25, 1997

    The President. Thank you very much, Superintendent Paz, President 
Allen, my longtime friend Sam Sava. Thank you, Secretary Riley. I 
believe the record will reflect, when your tenure is over, that you have 
done more for the children of America than any Secretary of Education 
who ever served, and I thank you.
    I want to say, we are joined today by a number of other 
distinguished education leaders, other superintendents from cities 
around our country, along with Bob Chase, the president of the NEA; 
Sandra Feldman, the president of the AFT; Michael Casserley, the 
executive director of the Council of Great City Schools; and Anne 
Bryant, the executive director of the National School Board Association; 
and my good friend Mayor Beverly O'Neill from Long Beach, California. 
And a lot of superintendents are here. I thank you for joining the 
elementary school principals and for your support for better education 
for our children.
    I want to begin by thanking the elementary principals for what they 
do for America's children. Like every parent, I remember very well

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the first time I sent my child off to school, putting her in the hands 
of a principal I did not know but whom I came to know and like very 
well. [Laughter] Every year hundreds of thousands of children arrive on 
your doorstep, entrusted to you by their parents. And every year you 
prove their trust is well-placed.
    When I was the Governor of Arkansas, I had the opportunity to 
cochair a national task force on school leadership for the education 
commission of the States. And we found about a decade ago what you have 
always known, that when it comes to the quality of education in the 
school, it is the principal who makes all the difference.
    As school enrollments reach record levels, up to 54 million by the 
year 2006, and as we move into the 21st century's knowledge economy 
where learning for a lifetime will be essential to success, your 
leadership will be more important than ever. And your ability to inspire 
people and to make them believe that we can achieve educational 
excellence will be more important than ever. Beginning with our Nation's 
elementary schools, we have to demand excellence from every school, 
every teacher, every student. We have to repair and rebuild our schools. 
We have to make sure they take advantage of the newest technologies. We 
have to make sure that they are safe and drug-free. We have to make sure 
that we are supporting promising reforms like charter schools and other 
initiatives underway in many of your districts. But I believe the single 
most important thing we can do to give our children world-class 
education is to insist on high national standards, so that we make sure 
that we've done everything we can to see that every single child learns 
what he or she knows to succeed in the exciting world of the 21st 
century. For too long we've been unwilling to insist on that as a 
nation, perhaps for fear that some of our children could not reach those 
standards, perhaps out of a misguided notion that such standards would 
lead to too much Federal Government involvement or too much loss of 
local control.
    I believe a lot of Americans have always feared that children from 
disadvantaged backgrounds and struggling communities just might not be 
able to hold their own. I believe that too many Americans have thought 
that with so much diversity and poverty and family difficulties among 
our young students, American children would simply always lag behind 
other countries that had more homogenous, less disruptive cultures, and 
perhaps longer school years. Still, for more than a decade now, at least 
since the issuance of ``A Nation At Risk'' report in 1983 and, indeed, 
going back some years before, Americans have been working hard, led by 
their educators and reform-minded public servants, to improve our 
schools, and it is making a difference.
    As Secretary Riley said, last month we learned that our fears were 
wrong when America's fourth graders finished second only to Korea in 
science in the international math and science tests. They scored well 
above the average on the annual math tests. Six years earlier, our 
fourth graders had scored well below the international average. These 
tests, of course, are not of all of our fourth graders, but they are of 
a rather large and representative sample of them. And they tested enough 
of them to prove that we don't have to settle for second-class 
expectations or second-class goals for any of our children.
    They also show, frankly, that by the time our students reach the 
eighth grade, the high test scores drop back below the international 
average. I think we all know that the problems our children face are 
aggravated in those middle school years, when they move into 
adolescence, and that in many of our communities the structure and 
organization of the middle school was more adequate to a previous time 
when a lot of those problems did not exist.
    Nonetheless, the fourth grade test proved, number one, that you're 
doing a good job and, number two, that our kids can do it. And that is, 
after all, the most important thing. Therefore, I believe it is 
imperative now to take action and to begin the movement to high national 
standards for all of our children. When we don't expect or encourage our 
children to learn, we indirectly encourage them to fail. When we set 
high standards and when we insist on them, there's no end to what our 
kids can do. You see that every day; you know that better than anyone.
    In my State of the Union Address I challenged every State and every 
school to adopt high national standards and by 1999 to actually test all 
our fourth graders in reading and all our eighth graders in math to make 
sure the standards are being met, not Federal standards but national 
ones, standards that every child can meet in every city and State in 
America and

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standards that every child must meet if we want every child to be able 
to live out his or her dreams. After all, national standards are 
defensible because reading is reading and math is math in Appalachia and 
in Alaska and all points in between.
    Since I issued that call, education leaders or Governors or both in 
seven States--California, North Carolina, Maryland, Massachusetts, 
Michigan, Kentucky, and West Virginia--along with our Department of 
Defense schools all over the world have announced their support for 
national standards and their desire to participate in the testing 
program as soon as it becomes available in 1999.
    Today I am pleased to make an announcement that would have been 
literally unthinkable just a couple of years ago. Fifteen of our largest 
school districts, including schools in six of the seven largest cities 
in the United States, have committed to meet these standards and to 
participate in the tests to measure the progress of their students 
against them.
    Now, I don't know how much news this will be tonight on the news or 
tomorrow in the papers, but every one of us who has been involved in 
education--if I had told you 5 years ago that the leaders of the school 
districts in New York; Philadelphia; Atlanta; Broward County, Florida; 
Cincinnati; Detroit; Chicago; Houston; San Antonio; El Paso; Omaha; Los 
Angeles; Long Beach; Fresno; and Seattle--that the leaders of these 
school districts have asked that their students be held to and measured 
against the same standards in reading and math that we expect our 
children to meet to have a world-class education, no one would have 
believed that. Educators know this is an historic, astonishing, 
wonderful moment in American education. And I thank them for doing that.
    This commitment means that 3\1/2\ million more children, one out of 
every 14 public school children in America, will be held to these world-
class education standards in the basics. And it means after the test is 
given, all of them will get better education because we'll all learn 
from the test results and keep working until we get the results we want 
in every one of those districts.
    I would like to ask the representatives of those 15 school districts 
who are here to stand up and be recognized, the superintendents, the 
teachers, the principals. Thank you very much. [Applause]
    And let me say, the Secretary of Education and I are about to leave 
to go out to Las Vegas to meet with the Governors. Now, if this event 
had gone on in 1979 or 1980 or 1983 or 1984, the Governors would have 
been the first group out there. And they've been dragging their feet, 
and don't you believe for a moment that Dick Riley and I aren't going to 
tell them what we saw at the elementary school principals convention.
    When we get these results, they ought to be incorporated into school 
and school district report cards, so that parents and taxpayers can see 
how our kids are doing but can also measure their progress. Keep in 
mind--you all know this, and we have to explain this to the citizens and 
the parents--these tests are not graded on the curve. If you make the 
highest grade in the class and it's not high enough, you don't know 
enough. If you make the lowest grade in the class and you're over the 
bar, you're at least qualified to do well in the world you will live in. 
It is very important that we get that message across to our people. We 
are measuring what is required to succeed in the world our children will 
live in.
    We in the National Government will continue to do our part. The 
balanced budget agreement we reached with Congress, that was voted for 
overwhelmingly in both Houses by Members of both parties, takes Head 
Start the next step toward our goal of a million children. It will fund 
the Technology Literacy Challenge to help us participate with the 
private sector in hooking up every classroom and library to the Internet 
by the year 2000. It will help to fund America Reads, our program to get 
a million trained reading tutors available to give extra help to 
children who need it most, to make sure that all of our 8-year-olds can 
read independently. I urge Congress to act to implement this program. 
All told, you should know that if this balanced budget agreement passes, 
the increase in education funding, Federal support for education, will 
be the largest since 1965.
    I also want to emphasize that we know that one of the challenges 
especially that a lot of our big-city schools will face is a looming 
teacher shortage, that we're going to have more students coming in and 
more teachers retiring. Just last week I offered a new initiative to 
provide extra scholarship money modeled on the Federal Health Service 
Corps, where we pay for medical

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school costs for doctors who will go out to underserved areas, to pay 
for the education costs of young people who will agree to teach for 3 
years in areas that are especially challenging. And I hope Congress will 
pass that as well.
    Finally, let me mention in regard to the budget that in addition to 
the support for education from Head Start through high school 
graduation, this budget takes another huge step toward opening the doors 
of college education to all Americans. The agreement provided for a tax 
credit for the first 2 years of college that would be sufficient to 
virtually guarantee universal access at least to community college for 
every high school graduate in the United States and for every adult who 
needs to go back to school. In addition, it provides tax relief for the 
3d and 4th years of college and for graduate school. And that's what 
we're working on now in these budget negotiations. The agreement 
provided for that. The tax plan that the Republicans released a couple 
of days ago falls far short of the commitment in the agreement.
    Now, let me say again, I believe we should have a tax cut. We can 
afford it and still balance the budget, because the budget is now going 
to finish this year over 80 percent below what it was when I took 
office. We've already done over 80 percent of the work in balancing the 
budget. But the tax cut has to, first of all, put middle class families 
who need the relief most at the heart of its objectives. It should help 
families to pay for all 4 years of college and for graduate education. 
It should help working people get training throughout a lifetime. It 
should help middle class parents to raise their children. And equally 
important, it should keep us within the limits of balancing this budget 
and keeping it balanced and not having it explode in the out-years.
    We have been handicapped severely for years and years and years 
because we went on a binge of deficit spending in the early eighties 
that we couldn't break. Now we have done it. You see the results in our 
economy: When we have fiscal discipline you have lower interest rates; 
you have more investment; you have a growing economy. And it's required 
us to show some restraint here over the last few years, but it's also 
helped to swell the coffers of State and local government, which fund 
our schools, primarily because we have a healthy economy. So all of this 
has to be observed.
    I have to tell you that even though there are differences which are 
clearly and publicly stated between the White House and the Republican 
leaders and, to some extent, also clearly stated between the Democrats 
in Congress and others, I think we're going to get this agreement. The 
negotiators are working even as we speak. And I think we all know that 
this is a remarkable moment in American history, and we have an 
obligation to balance the budget for the first time since 1969, to keep 
this economic growth going, and to do it in a way that gives us the 
biggest investment in education in over 30 years, and I might add also, 
the biggest investment in expanding health coverage to our children 
since 1965. And this is important. That will also help you do your jobs 
better. And I want to emphasize that if we pass college benefit 
provisions as contemplated by the budget agreement, it will be the 
biggest increase in access to college, federally supported access to 
college, since the GI bill passed in 1945. This is a very good 
agreement.
    So this is a day that we celebrate these 15 school districts 
stepping forward, representing so many of our children, putting the lie 
to the notion that our children can't meet the high standards because 
they're from immigrant families or because they're from poor families or 
because they live in difficult circumstances. We can all make excuses 
until the cows come home, but in the end, these kids have to get up and 
live their lives. And we've got to give them a chance to live their 
lives in the best way possible. And we have done that. We celebrate 
that. We live in the expectation of a successful conclusion of these 
budget negotiations.
    But the thing I want to close with is that when you go back to your 
school, I want you to know that I know that you are leading the fight 
for the future of our children. More than anybody else, you have to have 
the conviction that every child can learn to high standards. You have to 
have the conviction that your teachers can do what they have to do. You 
have to have the convictions that you can establish the alliances with 
your parents and your communities that you have to establish. You have 
to believe that if you demand high standards and have high expectations 
that our kids can meet them. You have to believe that we actually can 
succeed in giving our children the tools they need to make the most of 
their own lives and to keep our country the great beacon of hope

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and freedom and opportunity in the 21st century.
    Pearl Buck once said that if our American way of life fails the 
child, it fails us all. It follows that if our American way of life 
supports, ennobles, lifts up our children, it does that for all of us. 
That is what you do, and I am very grateful.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

[At this point, Samuel G. Sava, executive director, National Association 
of Elementary School Principals, presented the President with a bell.]

    The President. Well, I may use this in unconventional ways. Thank 
you very much, Sam. This means more to me than you know. The young man 
you mentioned, Michael Morrison, is a wheelchair-bound young man, raised 
by a single mother, who became my friend. On that cold November Tuesday 
in 1992, when it was really cold in New Hampshire, Michael Morrison got 
up to go to the polls to work for me, and his car was broken down, his 
family car. His mother couldn't take him. And so he wheeled his 
wheelchair alongside an icy highway for more than 2 miles to reach the 
polling place. He is now a college honor student. Don't ever forget what 
you do makes a difference.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 11:19 a.m. at the Crystal Gateway Marriott 
Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Stanley Paz, superintendent, El 
Paso Independent School District; and Yvonne Allen, president, National 
Association of Elementary School Principals.