    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1998, Book I)]
    [February 24, 1998]
    [Pages 276-282]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 276]]

    Remarks to the National Council of Jewish Women
    February 24, 1998

        The President. Thank you very much. Nan did
    such a good job, I could resort to that old parliamentary device; I can
    say I associate myself with the previous speaker's remarks and sit down.
    [Laughter]
        I thank all of you for making me feel welcome. I'm delighted to be
    here with a number of members of our administration today, including my
    Director of Communications, Ann Lewis; my Director
    of Public Liaison, Maria Echaveste, and her
    aide, Debbie Mohile, and Lynn Cutler, who is known to many of you I know; and our HHS
    Assistant Secretary for Children and Families, Olivia Golden. I thank all of them for coming with me.
        This has been a very busy week in Washington, and I think that there
    are a couple of issues I ought to make a remark or two about before I
    begin what I came here to visit with you about. First, let me say a few
    words about Iraq. As you know, yesterday the Government of Iraq agreed
    to give the United Nations inspectors immediate, unrestricted, and
    unconditional access to any site they suspect may be hiding weapons of
    mass destruction or the means to make or deliver them. If fully
    implemented, this means that, finally, and for the first time in 7
    years, all of Iraq will be open to U.N. inspections, including many
    sites previously declared off limits. This would be an important step
    forward.
        I'm proud of all of our men and women in uniform in the Gulf. Once
    again we have seen that diplomacy backed by resolve and strength can
    have positive results for humanity. We have to be watching very closely
    now to see not just what Iraq says, but what it does; not just the
    stated commitments, but the actual compliance. Let there be no doubt, we
    must remain committed to see that Saddam Hussein does not menace the world with weapons of mass
    destruction.
        I think that there has been a lot of talk, pro and con, about this
    issue in the last several days. I would just tell you that I think that
    many of you are in a position to launch an effort to educate all the
    people of our country about the potential future dangers of chemical and
    biological warfare: how such weapons can be made, how they can be
    delivered, how easy it is to disseminate them to irresponsible groups in
    small quantities that do large amounts of damage. And because you are in
    a position to know that, and because all of you have friends, many
    family members in Israel that feel vulnerable to such things, and
    because you understand that every civilized community in the world could
    be exposed to them in the 21st century, I ask you as citizens just to
    share what you know with your friends and neighbors back home so that we
    can continue, as a nation, to remain vigilant on this issue wherever we
    have to stand against it.
        I'd also like to say a word about campaign finance reform, an issue
    of concern to many of you. We've been working on this for years now, and
    finally we may have a chance to actually have a vote in the Senate.
    During my first term, every single year, a vote on campaign finance
    reform was put off in the House to see what would happen in the Senate.
    And then the leaders of the other party always killed it with a
    filibuster in the Senate. Now, this year, the McCain-Feingold bill,
    which has--obviously, it's supported by Senator McCain, the Republican, Senator Feingold, the Democrat--every Member of the Democratic caucus has
    endorsed the McCain-Feingold bill which ends soft money and imposes
    other limits on the present system of campaign finance.
        There was a difficulty with the bill which was keeping us from
    generating any more Republican support. Senator Snowe of Maine and Senator Jeffords of Vermont have brokered a compromise. Just before I left to
    come over here, I was told that all the Democrats are going to vote for
    that. So we're doing our best to do our part to get campaign finance
    reform. If a majority will back the Snowe-Jeffords compromise, then once
    again you will see that it is a minority keeping the country from
    getting it. So when you go up to the Hill today, if you can put in a
    plug for a meaningful campaign finance reform bill, I would appreciate
    it. And we need it.
        I have a lot to be grateful to the National Council of Jewish Women
    for. Many of you have participated in White House conferences

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    on hate crimes, on early childhood learning and the brain, on child
    care. You've been involved in our national initiative on race. And I'm
    grateful for all of that. I was talking to Hillary late last night about my impending visit here, and she
    reminded me that the thing that I should be most grateful for is that in
    1986--I can hardly remember it, it was so long ago--[laughter]--Nan
    Rich came to Arkansas to talk to Hillary and me
    about the HIPPY program. And we embraced it. We were the first State in
    the country--there were a lot of communities that had embraced it, but
    we were the first State that ever tried to go statewide with the
    program. It was a resounding success there, and now I believe there are
    28 States which have statewide efforts for the home instruction program
    for preschool youngsters. It has been a wonderful thing.
        And I might say I don't think I ever did anything as Governor that
    was more moving to me than to go to those HIPPY graduation programs and
    talk to the mothers and see the kids. And so I want to say on behalf of
    the First Lady and myself again, thank you, Nan,
    and thanks to all of you for supporting that. If every child could be in
    that kind of program, it would do as much to strengthen families and
    later success of children who are otherwise at risk as anything we could
    do. And I want to urge you to stick with it and keep going.
        These are good times for America. We have almost 15 million new jobs
    in the last 5 years, the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years, the
    lowest inflation in 30 years, the lowest crime rate in 24 years, the
    lowest welfare rolls in 27 years, the highest homeownership in history.
    Today we learned some more good news. First, that in spite of the growth
    of the last year, the inflation rate and Consumer Price Index remained
    absolutely stable and very low.
        So we are doing something that I was told after I got elected
    President we could not do. They said we could not grow consistently at 3
    percent or more a year without inflation, and that is not so. We are
    doing that. And I'm very grateful for everybody who is involved in that.
        We also learned just today that the American people are upbeat about
    their prospects not only in the moment but in the future. There are two
    major measurements of consumer confidence in America: one put out by
    something called--a group called the Conference Board; the other put out
    by the University of Michigan. In the figures that will be released
    today, the Conference Board Index is the highest it's been in 30 years,
    and the University of Michigan measurement the highest ever recorded in
    the confidence of the consumers in the United States of America in our
    prospects. And that's good, too.
        But I'd like to reiterate something I said in the State of the
    Union. Good times are a blessing, and they should be enjoyed. But we all
    know, in the nature of humankind and the rhythm of human affairs, no
    condition endures forever without interruption. And therefore, the good
    times impose upon us an opportunity and an obligation to prepare for the
    future, to create a framework within which long-term prosperity and
    health and well-being will be supported. That's why I said in the State
    of the Union that before we spend a penny--a penny--of the surplus that
    we estimate will materialize over the next 5 years, we should make sure
    we have secured Social Security in the 21st century so that the baby
    boom generation does not bankrupt the system.
        And that is why we have to tend to the health care of our people. We
    have to continue the work and actually finish the job of insuring 5
    million more children. I hope that Congress will pass my proposal to
    allow people over 55 who, for one reason or other, have lost all their
    health insurance to buy into the Medicare system. We can do that without
    imposing any financial burdens on Medicare, and even though the premiums
    are fairly high, a lot of these folks have children who will help them
    pay the premiums and they're much, much cheaper than just one trip to
    the hospital. So I hope we can do that.
        I hope that we will pass the Patients' Bill of Rights this year,
    because we have 160 million people now in managed care programs, and
    even others in nonmanaged care situations, who don't have the elemental
    rights and protections that I think everyone in the health care system
    should have. I hope that we will continue to move forward with
    environmental protection with the new clean water initiative and with
    the anti-global warming initiatives that I have recommended to help us
    deal with the problem of climate change, which a lot of you, depending
    on where you live, may have been experiencing over the last decade and
    even in this winter, if we can call it a winter.

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        I hope that we will continue to make this a safer world. I have
    asked the Congress to vote for the expansion of NATO, to ratify the
    Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, to strengthen the Biological
    Weapons Convention to give us some teeth to deal with the kind of
    problems we've been discussing in Iraq throughout the world. And I hope
    that the idea that was inspired by the First Lady of a gift to the millennium that honors our past and
    imagines the future will find favor in Congress where we save our
    precious historical documents and the Star-Spangled Banner, and also
    devote the largest amount of money in history to medical and other
    research, scientific research to the future.
        But if you think about what the leading indicator--you know,
    economists--if you ever listen to any of these talk shows where these
    economists are talking and they always are talking about what the
    leading indicators are, which means they're always trying to figure out
    what happened. And they're kind of like me, half the time they're
    guessing, and they don't want you to know it. [Laughter] So they talk
    gravely about leading indicators as if that will pave the way. But there
    are some leading indicators I think that will tell us something about
    our future. For me, perhaps the most important leading indicator of
    where we'll be 10, 20, or 30 years from now is where our children are
    right now in terms of educational attainment. Now, that I think is
    clearly a leading indicator.
        And I believe, if we are being honest, we would have to say the
    leading indicators are mixed. That's what an honest assessment would be.
    Now, we can do one of two things when we look at the bad news as well as
    the good news. We can say, ``Well, what do you expect? America is a big,
    diverse country; we're the most ethnically, religiously, racially
    diverse democracy in the world, and besides that, there's so much
    difference in the incomes in America and so much difference in the
    neighborhoods, and what do you expect?''
        We can do that, or we can do what we ought to do and just say,
    ``Most of this is not rocket science.'' Way over 90 percent of the
    people are capable of learning 100 percent of what they need to know to
    function well in a modern society. And if our children don't do it, it's
    our fault, and we're going to do something about it. This is not rocket
    science, and we can do better.
        Let's just look at where we are. For the last 5 years--and I'll
    speak more about the specifics later--but for the last 5 years, I have
    tried to bring to bear what I learned in 12 years as a Governor to the
    work of having the United States Government do what we could to help
    improve the educational enterprise in America, to raise standards, to
    promote reforms, to increase accountability, to improve teaching, to
    improve quality of education.
        Now, let's start with a certain premise here. I think everybody in
    America believes, and rightly, that we are blessed with the finest
    system of higher education in the world. I don't think anyone in America
    believes that, for all of our children, we have the best system of
    education, kindergarten through 12th grade, in the world.
        Therefore, it has been easier, in my judgment, to do the best things
    in higher education because you don't have to do so many hard things.
    All I tried to do in college when it came to college education was to
    open the doors of college to all, because college costs were the only
    thing that went up more than health care costs in the 1980's, in
    percentage terms. So what have we done? We passed the HOPE scholarship,
    a $1,500 tax credit for the first 2 years of college, a lifetime
    learning tax credit for the junior and senior years and graduate schools
    and for adults going back for job training; education IRA's; interest on
    students loans as tax-deductible; direct college loans that cost less
    money and are easier to repay; 300,000 more work-study positions; a lot
    more Pell grant scholarships; the biggest increase in aid to college
    since the GI bill. We can actually say we have opened the doors of
    college to any American who is willing to work for a college education.
    That is a very important achievement of which we can be proud.

    [At this point, a child in the audience cried.]

        The President. That child obviously doesn't understand that yet.
    [Laughter] But in time.
        Now, when you back up from there, the going gets harder. And let me
    just give you one example. And I want you to ask yourselves as I go
    through this list what do you think caused this. Today our
    administration is announcing the results of the Third International Math
    and Science Study. And I talked about it last year and the year before.
    This is--the TIMSS test, it's called--the Third International Math and

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    Science Study, are tests given in math and science to 4th, 8th, and 12th
    graders to a relatively large and representative sample--we believe
    representative sample--of students not only in our country, but
    throughout the world.
        Now, the past TIMSS tests showed that the fourth graders in America
    do very well; that in the eighth grade we begin to fall back to the
    middle. And we believe it's in no small measure because as kids go
    through school, children in other parts of the world begin to take
    harder courses than our kids do and undergo a more rigorous learning
    pattern. And a lot of the problems associated with the socioeconomic
    difficulties begin to manifest themselves.
        Today we learned that by the 12th grade, our children trail far
    behind in math and science. Of the 21 countries measured, our 12th
    graders outperformed only 2. So we start near the top, we fall to the
    middle, and we come out at the end.
        Now, let me say, first of all, there's some good news in this. The
    4th graders represent the same socioeconomic diversity and indeed they
    are more diverse because of the changing patterns than the 12th graders.
    Therefore, there is something wrong with the system that we are using to
    teach them. I do not believe these kids cannot learn. I am tired of
    seeing children patronized because they happen to be poor or from
    different cultural backgrounds than the majority. That is not true. That
    is not true.
        And let me tell you, just a couple of days ago--I can't remember
    exactly what day, the days fly by up here--but a couple of days ago I
    went to Baltimore, and I visited something called Living Classroom. And
    I walked along the waterway there in downtown, and I watched some kids
    rebuilding wetlands. And literally on the inland harbor, they've got
    egrets now coming back to a wetland site. And I watched inner-city kids,
    many of whom had never focused on a harbor before, seen a waterway,
    measuring water quality, having very sophisticated conversations with me
    about the acidic content of the water and what caused it, and what the
    various sources of pollution in seawater are and what could be--what
    that might do to various kinds of fish and other life in the water.
        I watched inner-city kids working a fairly sophisticated computer
    program, monitoring a sailboat race, the Whitbread Race, and monitoring
    the American boat they were watching as it went around Cape Horn. So I
    don't believe all this business about how some kids are just so burdened
    down with their background they just can't learn all this modern stuff;
    that's just not true. But it is true that too many people are not
    learning. And so, I recommend that we take another look at this. Now, in
    '97 in the State of the Union Address, I outlined a 10-point plan to
    help education and ask that politics stop at the schoolhouse door, and
    then in 1998, just a few weeks ago, I talked again about what I thought
    we ought to do about education. And I would like to briefly review the
    list of things that I think are important.
        First of all, I still believe we have to start with the basics. We
    need smaller classes, better teaching, harder courses, higher standards.
    We have smaller classes, better teaching, harder courses, higher
    standards, greater accountability, and more reform. That's basically
    what I think we should be focused on. Even though we do pretty well in
    the fourth grade international tests, I think you know as well as I do
    there are still too many kids that don't get off to the start they need.
    And I appreciate what Nan said about the child care initiative. I ask
    for your support.
        We have substantially increased the number of kids in Head Start.
    We've increased our investment in Federal child care supports by 70
    percent in the last 5 years. We have doubled the earned-income tax
    credit, and that's lifted more and more children out of poverty. But we
    have to do more.
        The budget that I have presented on child care would double the
    number of low-income children receiving Federal assistance subsidies to
    2 million; it would give 3 million more working families an expanded
    child care credit. It would actually mean that a family of four with an
    income of $35,000 a year or less that had high child care costs would
    actually not pay any Federal income tax.
        It would improve the safety and quality of child care. It would also
    provide scholarships for good providers to help to train them. And it
    recognizes that we need to do more on the educational component of child
    care. As we learned at the White House conference on early learning and
    the brain, which the First Lady put
    together, an enormous amount of the development of the infrastructure of
    learning is done in the first 3 years. So I'm proposing an early
    learning fund that would help to reduce child-to-staff ratios and also
    help to educate parents

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    more so that we could increase the learning component of the preschool
    years.
        I guess what I'd like to say is that I want to believe that if this
    plan passes, the lessons that are taught through the HIPPY program could
    be taught in homes all across America and all kinds of programs. That's
    what I want.
        One more thing I'd like to say about this, sort of about the out-of-
    school hours; another big part of our budget contains funds, through
    both the Educational Department and the Justice Department, to help
    schools stay open after hours. An enormous percentage of the kids who
    get in trouble, juveniles who commit serious offenses, do so after the
    school day is over, but before their parents get home. Literally, if
    there were no juvenile offenses between like 2 to 3 in the afternoon and
    6 to 7 in the evening, the juvenile crime rate would be cut by way over
    50 percent. So I think it's important to give these children something
    to say yes to. And these after-school programs that we propose would
    help about a half a million children to say yes to soccer and computers,
    and no to drugs and crime. And I think that's a very important thing.
        Now, let's talk about what I hope the Congress will do this year to
    help to deal with the K through 12 years and what we have to continue to
    build on that has been started already. First of all, we need a national
    commitment to reduce class size in the early grades. Our budget would
    enable local school districts to hire 100,000 more teachers and lower
    the class size to an average of 18 in the first, second, and third
    grades and also to modernize or rebuild 5,000 schools so there would be
    classrooms for that to occur in. I think that's important.
        Second, we would continue the America Reads program, which now has
    literally tens of thousands of college students and other volunteers now
    going into elementary schools every week to make sure that no child gets
    out of the third grade without being able to read independently. That is
    very important.
        Next, we would continue our movement toward national academic
    standards and voluntary national exams to measure how our children are
    doing according to high national standards. Last year we took the first
    steps toward a fourth grade reading and an eighth grade math test, and I
    hope that eventually we will have every State testing their children in
    these basics and measuring them by a common national standard, so that
    we can continue on up the ladder academically to deal with the courses
    and the measurement.
        Next, I think it is very important that we support better teacher
    development. One of the problems is in a lot of these later years--and
    you have to pay the teachers well, too--in a lot of these later years in
    these senior-level courses is you have a lot of schools who have to
    offer courses that are taught by people who did not have sufficient
    academic background in the math or science course at issue. And I think
    that is very, very important.
        One of the most important developments potentially over the long run
    in American education in the last few years and gets almost no
    publicity--it's called the National Board for Professional Teacher
    Certification. And it basically is a national board set up to certify
    master teachers in a way that specialists in medicine and other
    professionals get certified. But the teachers are basically picked not
    only because of their substantive knowledge but because of their
    teaching ability, and they are trained. And the idea is that we will try
    to have a core--and there's just a few hundred of them now--a core of
    these teachers all across America. In my budget there's enough money to
    identify, train, and certify 100,000 master teachers. If you put one of
    these people in every school building in America, I believe it can
    revolutionize the culture of learning, and the quality of teaching has
    got to be a big part of what we're trying to do.
        The next thing I'd like to do--I want to talk about two other things
    that I think would really help performance in the later grades. I think
    it's important that we encourage the school districts to end the process
    of social promotion, but to do it in a way that lifts kids up, not puts
    them down. That is, if you look at what Chicago is doing now--an example
    which is truly astonishing--I mean Chicago used to be known by the
    annual teachers' strike. We all saw a picture in the paper of the
    Chicago teachers' strike every year. They have adopted a policy that
    basically says--and it's school by school, supported by grassroots
    parents groups--if the children do not perform at grade level, they
    cannot go on. But they have mandatory summer school, which also, by the
    way, has done wonderful--wonders for juvenile problems.

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        They have mandatory summer school. So nobody just gets held back for
    spite or because of carelessness or callousness. There's a serious,
    disciplined comprehensive effort to give all the kids a chance to learn
    at grade level. I think that's very important. The Secretary of
    Education got a directive from me this week to come up with, basically,
    a plan and a program to help every school district in the country adopt
    a similar approach, particularly those that have a significant problem.
        Now, in addition to that, we are trying to pass in Congress this
    year some funds that will help universities comprehensively adopt
    schools where there are large numbers of disadvantaged children,
    starting in the sixth grade. So we can go to sixth and seventh graders,
    and not only give them college students as models and mentors but say to
    them in the sixth or seventh grade, look, here's the deal: If you make
    your grades and you take these courses and you learn these things, we'll
    be able to tell them now, here is the amount of college aid you can get.
    You will be able to go to college; this is the aid you will get; and
    this is what the college that is working with you is prepared to do.
        Now, this has the chance, I think, to dramatically lift learning
    levels in inner-city schools and other isolated schools with large
    numbers of poor children. And it's based on a number of different
    programs that have been bandied around in America over the last 20
    years, and especially the work of a Congressman from Philadelphia named
    Chaka Fattah. So I'm very excited about it. I
    hope you will support it.
        You just think, if every troubled school in America or every school
    with a lot of kids who are poor in America had a college adopting it,
    with kids in that school from the sixth grade on from the college, and
    at the same time actually contracting with the children and their
    parents, saying, this is the amount of college aid you're going to get
    if you do what you're supposed to do for the next 6 years, I believe you
    would see these scores begin to go up dramatically. And I hope that we
    can get a lot of support for that.
        Finally, let me say, we have to continue to support the reforms that
    are already underway, more school choice, more charter schools, and we
    have to finish the job of connecting every classroom and library to the
    Internet by the year 2000. That will enable more stories like the one I
    told you about Baltimore, because once you get everybody on the
    Internet, we can use technology to dramatically increase the quality and
    quantity and sophistication of material pouring into every school in
    America without regard to its resources and wealth. The Federal
    Communications Commission is helping us with an E-rate which will save
    the schools a couple of billion dollars a year in hookup costs and
    payment for time used. So that's very, very important.
        I say all these things to you again to point out that it is not
    inevitable that we have low scores on comparative exams, but it is a
    leading indicator. There's a coalition of schools in northern Illinois
    called the First in the World Coalition, and they take these 10 steps;
    they prepare for them; they work on them, and they do well with them.
    Now, most of the schools are in upper income neighborhoods. That's not
    why the kids do well. They do well because they prepare. They take hard
    courses, they work hard at it, and they believe they're going to do
    well. And if we do that for every school in America, if we can give them
    the hard courses taught by well-qualified teachers in an environment
    that's supportive, and convince them that they can do well, they will do
    very well.
        Our present levels of performance are unacceptable. They are not a
    good leading indicator. But we have lots of indicators that we can do
    what we need to do.
        So I want--I ask you again; you have to really think. You clapped
    when I said this before; you have to think about whether you believe
    this. Do you believe all children can learn? The HIPPY program shows
    that's right. The Israeli experience of the HIPPY program shows that's
    right. If you believe that, and if it's not happening, then there is
    something wrong with the systems. And it is our generation's
    responsibility to fix it. You cannot blame the schoolchildren. And if
    their parents don't have a lot of education and don't know what to do,
    you sure can't blame them. We have to--this is--this cannot be rocket
    science. There is no excuse for this. So again, I say, I am hoping and
    praying that we can continue to put aside partisan politics when it
    comes to education and continue to move forward on these things, because
    it's so important for our future.
        If you think about it, a lot of the challenges we're facing today
    are not so different than they were back in 1893 when this organization
    was founded. Think about it, right? [Laughter]

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    We've got a new economy. And there was a new economy in 1893. And we've
    got to figure out how to make it work for everybody instead of just a
    few people.
        We are overwhelmed by a big influx of immigrants from different
    kinds of countries, and so were we in 1893, and we have to bring
    everybody into the American mainstream. We are about to enter a new
    century with a lot of confidence but a lot of challenges. We have to do
    what we've always had to do at such times as Americans. We have to make
    sure we deepen the meaning of our freedom, we widen the circle of
    opportunity, we strengthen the Union of our people.
        The Talmud says every blade of grass has its angel that bends over
    it and whispers, ``Grow, grow.'' Our children are blades of grass. You
    must be the angels.
        Thank you.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:28 a.m. in the Regency Ballroom at the
    Hyatt Regency Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Nan Rich, national
    president, National Council of Jewish Women; the Home Instruction
    Program for Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY); and the First in the World
    Consortium. The President also referred to his memorandum of February 23
    on helping schools end social promotions.