[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.