[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1998, Book II)]
[October 13, 1998]
[Pages 1795-1798]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



[[Page 1795]]


Remarks at Forest Knolls Elementary School in Silver Spring
October 13, 1998

    Thank you very, very much. Well, first of all, I'd like to thank 
Carolyne Starek for that marvelous statement. Didn't she do a good job? 
[Applause] And she talked about teachers using visual aids, and then 
pointed the press, helpfully, to the visual aid back here. [Laughter] 
I'm glad you're here, but if you'd ever like a job in communications at 
the White House, I think we might be able to arrange that. [Laughter]
    Let me say to all of you how delighted I am to be here. I want to 
thank Nancy King for her devotion to education and her remarks, and Dr. 
Paul Vance, the other local officials who are here, Mr. Leggett and the 
delegates and the school board members. If I come out here to this 
school district one more time, I think you ought to devise a special 
assessment for me so I can contribute to the building fund of the 
schools--I have been here so much.
    My great partner in our efforts to improve education is the 
Secretary of Education, Dick Riley, I believe, the best Secretary of 
Education America ever had, and I'd like to thank him for being here.
    I want to thank Governor Parris Glendening and Lieutenant Governor 
Kathleen Kennedy Townsend for their extraordinary work and leadership. 
This is one of the most innovative State governments in America. 
Maryland is always at the forefront of whatever is happening in 
education and the environment and economic incentives. And as a person 
who served as Governor for 12 years, I believe I know a little something 
about that, and one of the things that I always love to do is to steal 
ideas from other Governors. You know, that's not a very delicate way of 
saying what the framers of our Constitution had in mind when they called 
the States the laboratories of democracy. That's what a laboratory is--
you find a discovery, then no one else has to discover it; they can just 
borrow it. If I were a Governor today, I would be paying a lot of 
attention to what goes on in Maryland. And I thank them for what they 
have done.
    I would also like to thank Senator Daschle and Congressman Gephardt. 
I think you could see the intensity, the passion they feel for our 
determination after nearly a year of trying to get education on the 
agenda of this Congress before it goes home. We cannot allow a budget to 
pass without a serious consideration of these issues. And their 
leadership and their passion and their commitment have made it possible.
    A President--if the Congress is in the hands of the other party, and 
they passionately and genuinely, I think, disagree with us on whether we 
should put 100,000 teachers out there, or help build or repair thousands 
of schools--none of this would be possible if it weren't for their 
leadership. And I want you to understand that. I can give speeches until 
the cows come home, but until the majority party wanted to go home for 
the election, and our guys said no, my ``no'' was not enough. And so I 
thank them and all of their colleagues who are here today.
    I want to introduce them just to show you the depth and the national 
sweep of our feeling about this. Senator Daschle is from South Dakota. 
He is joined by our leader in the Senate on education issues, Senator 
Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts, and Senator Byron Dorgan from North 
Dakota. You know Mr. Gephardt is from St. Louis; he said that. He's 
joined by David Bonior, from Michigan; Charles Rangel, from New York; 
Ted Strickland, from Ohio; Nita Lowey, from New York; Ruben Hinojosa, 
from South Texas; and two Congress Members from Maryland, Steny Hoyer 
and Albert Wynn.
    I'd also like to acknowledge a longtime friend of mine who is a 
candidate for Congress. And as Ted Kennedy reminded me before I came up 
here, back in the great days when America was fighting for equal rights 
for all of these children, without regard to their race, Ralph Neas was 
known as the ``101st United States Senator'' for civil rights. And we're 
glad to have him here. Thank you.
    When I ran for President 6 years ago, I had an absolute conviction--
and a lot of people thought I was dead wrong--but I had an absolute 
conviction that we could reduce the deficit and eventually balance the 
budget and still invest more in our children and in our future. And we 
have been working to do that. The strategy has worked. We've got the 
strongest economy in a generation, the first balanced budget and surplus 
in 29 years, the lowest crime

[[Page 1796]]

rate in 25 years, and the doors of college are more open than ever 
before.
    I think it is literally possible to say now that because of the Pell 
grants, and the deductibility of student loan interest, and the fact 
that young people can pay back their college loans as a percentage of 
their incomes, and because of the widespread tax credits for $1,500 a 
year for the 2 years of college, and then tax credits for other years of 
college--that you--literally possible to say now that any young person 
that works for it will find the doors of college open to them and not 
barred by money. And I am very proud of that. I think we have done the 
right thing.
    But we now have to decide as a people--not just because it's 3 weeks 
from an election, but because it's a very momentous time in our 
country's history--what we are going to do with this moment of 
prosperity, and whether we're going to fritter it away or build on it. 
Whether we're going to be divided and distracted, or focused on our 
children and our future.
    This country still has a lot of challenges. If you've been following 
the news, you know there's a lot of turmoil in the international 
economy. And the United States has to take the lead in settling that 
down, because a lot of our growth comes from selling what we make here 
overseas. And eventually, if everybody else is in trouble, we'll be in 
trouble, too.
    If you've been following the debates, you know that when the baby 
boomers retire, Social Security will be in trouble unless we move now to 
save it--which is why I don't want to spend this surplus until we save 
Social Security. If you've been following the national news, you know we 
still have big debates in Washington and in Congress over the 
environment. And I passionately believe that we can grow the economy and 
improve the environment. You know we've had big debates over whether the 
160 million Americans in HMO's should be protected by a Patients' Bill 
of Rights.
    But there is no bigger issue affecting our long-term security than 
education. And we cannot stop until this record number of children--
whether or not they live in Maryland, or Utah, or someplace in between; 
whether they're rich or poor; whether they're African-Americans, 
Hispanic, Asian-Americans, Irish-Americans, or you have it; whether they 
are physically challenged or completely able-bodied; whether they're 
rich or poor; whether they live in an inner city or a rural area or a 
nice suburban community like this one--until all of our children have 
access to a world-class elementary and secondary education. We owe that 
to them. And that is what this is all about.
    Eight months ago in my State of the Union Address, I asked Congress 
to use this moment of confidence and prosperity and the money--that the 
fact that--that you've paid into the Treasury, because more of you are 
working than ever before--to make a critical downpayment on American 
excellence in education. I asked them to do a number of things, but I 
want to emphasize two.
    First, I asked them to help local communities reduce class size in 
the early grades by hiring 100,000 new teachers. Study after study after 
study confirms what every parent and teachers know: smaller classes and 
better trained teachers make a huge, huge difference, especially in the 
early grades. They lead to permanent benefits from improved test scores 
to improved discipline.
    Let me just tell you one story, just one. A few years ago when I was 
Governor, I used to spend a lot of time in classrooms--unfortunately, 
more time than I can now spend. And I enjoyed going into the classroom 
and meeting your students who were over there a few moments ago, but I 
can't do what Governor Glendening still does, go in and tutor and 
actually spend a lot of time and talk and listen. But there was a very 
poor rural school district in my State that had a visionary leader. And 
they came to me and said, ``You know, Governor, we don't have much 
money, but if you could get the Federal Government to let us take our 
Title I money and some other money we're getting, some special education 
money, and put it all together, we'd like to try for a year or two to 
put all of our first graders in the same class.'' And the per capita 
income of this school district was way, way, way below even our State 
average, not to mention the national average.
    Well anyway, to make a long story short, we were able to give 
permission to do that. We pooled all the money. We created four 
elementary school first grade classes of 15 kids each. Here's what 
happened. The overall performance of the children on the measured test 
increased by 60 percent. The performance in one year--the performance of 
the Title I kids doubled. Four children had been held back because they

[[Page 1797]]

hadn't learned anything the first year. Their performance quadrupled.
    And when Hillary and I were promoting education reform in Arkansas, 
one of the things we worked the hardest for was to bring average class 
size down to 20. If this 100,000 teachers proposal goes through, we can 
bring it down to an average of 18 in the early grades. It will make a 
huge difference--a huge difference.
    In the wake of all the terrible school violence our country 
sustained in the last years--particularly in the last year or so--I 
asked Secretary Riley and Attorney General Reno to prepare a booklet 
that could be sent to every school in the country about how to identify 
kids that might be in trouble, how to stop bad things from happening in 
the first place. And so they went out across the country to listen to 
educators, and they came back and said, in place after place after place 
they were told, ``Give us smaller classes in the early grades; we'll 
find the kids that are troubled, and we'll have a chance to help them 
lead good, productive lives.''
    I just want to echo what Mr. Gephardt said. Every time you see a 
State legislature having to build another prison--because the court will 
order you to build prisons that aren't overcrowded, but not schools that 
aren't overcrowded--every time you see that, you can bet your bottom 
dollar that 90 percent of the people going into that prison, if they had 
a little different childhood, could have been somewhere else. And we 
should never forget that.
    The second thing I asked Congress to do was to give us the tools to 
help local communities modernize crowded and crumbling schools. We had a 
record number of schoolchildren start school this year--52.7 million, a 
half-million more than last year, more than at the height of the baby 
boom generation. In a recent study from the General Accounting Office, 
it concluded that as many as a third of our classrooms--a third--are in 
need of serious modernization or repair; one-third of our kids in 
substandard classrooms. I have seen old school buildings that are fine 
and strong--buildings, frankly, we couldn't afford to build today with 
the materials and the dimensions they have. But they have peeling paint 
and broken windows, bad wiring. They can't be hooked up to the Internet 
and the lights are too dim. And I have seen today, and in many other 
places, trailers that we call ``temporary,'' but unless we do something 
about it, they are anything but temporary. Now, we see stories of 
teachers holding classes in trailers and hallways and gyms. I don't 
believe a country that says it's okay for a huge number of its children 
to stay in trailers indefinitely is serious about preparing them all for 
the 21st century. And I believe we can do better. I believe you believe 
we can do better.
    Now, this proposal, which has been championed in the Senate 
especially by Senator Carol Moseley-Braun from Illinois, and by 
Congressman Charles Rangel from New York and others in the House--Nita 
Lowey--I want to say to you, we want to come clean here; this has never 
been done before. And the members of the Republican majority are 
philosophically opposed to it. They say somehow it's an intrusion into 
local control--I frankly don't see--if we help the State provide more 
classrooms for this school. From what I just saw of her, I think your 
principal would still be in control. I do not believe that we would be 
running this school. [Laughter]
    We want these classrooms to be more accessible to people with 
disabilities. We want these classrooms to be more accessible so they'll 
all be able to be hooked up to the Internet. We want them to be 
physically connected. You know, Senator Daschle and I were talking on 
the way out here. If you live in the Dakotas in the wintertime and 
you've got to walk just this far, you may be walking in 30-degree-below-
zero temperatures.
    And we believe that this proposal is good. It targets the 
investments where they're needed the most. It maintains our balanced 
budget. And it works in this way: There are targeted school construction 
tax cuts that are fully paid for; we don't take any money from the 
surplus. Yesterday, since Congress has not acted on this in 8 months, my 
budget team brought to Capitol Hill a detailed proposal to pay for these 
badly needed cuts, dollar for dollar, by closing various corporate 
loopholes.
    Right here in Maryland, our plan would mean tax credits on more than 
$300 million of the bonds to build or modernize schools. That would save 
a ton of money for Maryland in building or modernizing schools. In 
Florida, where in the small community of Jupiter, I visited a school 
like this one and saw 12 facilities like this outside one small 
building--12--the

[[Page 1798]]

Vice President is visiting today. There, our proposal would help to 
build or modernize more than 300 schools.
    As I said, there are a lot of other important elements in our plan: 
funds for after-school programs, before-school programs, summer school 
programs, money to connect all our classrooms to the Internet, money to 
promote the development of voluntary national standards into basics, and 
a nonpartisan, supervised exam to measure fourth grade reading and 
eighth grade math. But if you think about the most pressing big issues, 
the numbers of teachers and the conditions in crowded classrooms demand 
immediate national attention.
    I wish I had time to win the philosophical debate with our friends 
on the other side, who somehow see helping more teachers teach and 
providing more school buildings as an intrusion into local affairs. It 
is not. Secretary Riley has dramatically reduced the regulations on 
local school districts and States' departments of education that were in 
place when we arrived here. What we are trying to do is to make sure 
people like you can give children like this the future they deserve. I 
think it's worth fighting for, and I don't think we should go home and 
pass a budget that doesn't take account of the educational needs of our 
children and the future of our country.
    Let me remind you that in 1993 and '94, when I said we ought to put 
100,000 more police officers on the street, I was told the same thing by 
the same people. They said, ``Oh, this won't work; it won't help 
anything; it's an unwarranted intrusion into local government.'' It was 
weird--I had police departments begging me for the police, and I had 
Congressmen on the other side telling me, ``Oh, these police chiefs 
don't know what they're talking about. You're really trying to run their 
business.''
    And anyway, we prevailed. And today, we've paid for 88,000 of those 
100,000 police, and we have the lowest crime rate in 25 years. Wouldn't 
it be nice if we had 100,000 more teachers and we had the highest 
educational attainment in 25 years, or the highest educational 
attainment in history? [Applause]
    Now, school is almost out of session on Capitol Hill. The Members 
are eager to return home for the election holiday. But we haven't 
finished our coursework yet, and the final exam has not been passed. And 
so I say to you--and let me say once again, I don't really relish 
education as a partisan debate because over the long run, that's not 
good for America. I don't have a clue whether these kids' parents are 
Democrats or Republicans or independents, and frankly, I could care 
less. I want them to have the best. I want America's future to be the 
best.
    We are here fighting this fight because we have no other way, no 
other recourse to prevail on this important issue. We have worked 
quietly and earnestly for 8 months with no result. So now, for a few 
days, we are shouting loudly to the heavens; we have a moment of 
prosperity and a heavy responsibility to build these children the 
brightest possible future we can.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 1:40 p.m. in the schoolyard. In his 
remarks, he referred to Carolyne Starek, principal, Forest Knolls 
Elementary School; Nancy J. King, president, Montgomery County School 
Board; Paul L. Vance, superintendent, Montgomery County Schools; Isiah 
Leggett, president, Montgomery County Council; Gov. Parris N. Glendening 
and Lt. Gov. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend of Maryland; and Ralph G. Neas, 
candidate for Maryland's Eighth Congressional District.