    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
    [January 21, 1999]
    [Pages 83-85]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks on the Initiative To Provide a Qualified Teacher in Every
    Classroom
    January 21, 1999

        Well, Sergeant, I don't think I need to say anything else.
    [Laughter]
        Let me thank all of you for coming today and welcome you here. This
    is the 21st year of a partnership in education that involves Hillary and
    me and Secretary Riley. We all started
    working together in 1979, and we've been at it a good while now. Few
    things that I have ever been a part of have given--sort of thrilled me
    more than just listening to Arthur Moore talk.
    And I'm sure all of you felt the same way.
        I thank the Members of Congress who are here and all the other
    distinguished guests. I would like to recognize just three: first, we
    have here the President of the Navajo Nation, Kelsey Begaye; and Samuel Penney, the
    chairman of the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee; and Arthur Moore's
    daughter, Andrea, is here, and she must have
    been awful proud of her father today, and I know he's proud of her. So we welcome all of them.
        After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in October of 1957,
    President Eisenhower asked the Congress to rise to the challenge of the
    times and proposed a new Federal program to help public school teachers
    improve their math and science instruction. He understood that teaching
    is an important part of our national security. And I think, therefore,
    that President Eisenhower--and General Eisenhower--would have been very
    pleased to see Arthur Moore as a soldier-
    turned-teacher.
        Two days ago, in the State of the Union Address, I asked Congress to
    rise to the demands of this time, to pass an ``Education Accountability
    Act'' that would offer more investment, demand more accountability, and
    not--as some have implied--have the Federal Government try to run more
    of our day-to-day activities in our public schools but simply have the
    Federal Government respond to what the teachers of this country and the
    principals and the educators have been telling us, and invest in what
    works. We now have an opportunity to do that. With the strength of our
    economy and with the size of our surplus, we have an opportunity. We
    also have an obligation.
        Research confirms what most of us know from our own experience: What
    most determines whether students learn is not family background or even
    dollars spent per pupil but the talent, the ability, and the dedication
    of their teachers.
        Every adult in this room, I know, can recall the names of teachers
    who deeply affected our own lives and helped us to get where we are
    today. I was thinking this morning about my high school band teacher.
    And you say, you wouldn't think that the band teacher would have a lot
    to do with a person becoming President, but he instilled not only in me
    a love of music but also a reminder that I could never manifest that
    love unless I worked like crazy, that I had to learn to work in a team.
    I couldn't play too loud just because I liked the part. [Laughter] And
    because we ran the statewide music festival every year, he taught me how
    to organize and how to manage people and time, all kinds of things that
    teachers teach children that stay with them for a lifetime.
        There are an awful lot of teachers like that in America. But we have
    to face the fact that

    [[Page 84]]

    because our classrooms are bursting with 53 million children, because
    frankly we still don't pay our teachers as much as we should in most
    places, a quarter--listen to this--a quarter of all secondary school
    teachers don't have college majors or even minors in the subjects they
    are teaching. And the deficit is greatest where the need is greatest.
    Schools with the highest minority enrollment, for example, have less
    than a 50-50 chance--now, think about this--less than a 50-50 chance of
    having a math or science teacher with a license or degree in the field.
        I don't know if you remember what I said in the State of the Union
    the other night about what the international test scores show, but
    basically our fourth graders rank near the top of all industrialized
    countries in performance in math and science. Our 8th graders drop to
    the middle; our 12th graders are near the bottom. No one can doubt,
    surely, that one reason is the absence of a pool of teachers who have
    been trained in the subjects they are teaching.
        Now, we have a real opportunity to get more good teachers in
    general, more good education practice, and more properly, specifically
    trained teachers, in particular this year, because every 5 years the
    Federal Government revisits the terms on which it invests $15 billion in
    our Nation's schools; 1999 is the fifth year. We have to do it again. It
    gives us a golden opportunity and a solemn responsibility to change the
    way we invest the money to invest in what works and to stop investing in
    what doesn't.
        So I intend to send Congress a plan that will, among other things,
    require States receiving Federal funds to end social promotion but will
    also provide them the funds for summer school, after-school, and other
    support for children who need it--if you look at what I just said about
    the progression of the test, it is not the students who are failing, it
    is the system that is failing the students, and we need to respond
    accordingly; second, to adopt and enforce strict discipline codes,
    something teachers in the teachers' organizations have asked us to
    support more vigorously; third, to give parents report cards on their
    children's school; fourth, to turn around the worst performing schools
    or close them, and we will provide funds to help States do that; and
    finally, to be accountable for the quality of their teachers, with new
    teachers passing performance exams, all teachers knowing the subjects
    they're teaching, and we will provide support for that.
        We also should build or modernize 5,000 schools, continue our work
    to hook every classroom and library up to the Internet. But I want to
    focus for a moment on the teaching. How can we get more Arthur Moores
    out there? And I'd like to mention just four things that will be in the
    balanced budget I will submit to Congress early next month.
        First, I will call on Congress to invest $1.4 billion to hire new,
    better trained teachers to reduce class size in the early grades. This
    is the next big installment on our goal to hire 100,000 new teachers,
    and it's a 17 percent increase over the very large downpayment we made
    last year.
        Second, I will ask Congress to invest $35 million to provide 7,000
    college scholarships for our brightest young people who commit to
    teaching where they can do the most good, in the poorest inner-city and
    rural schools. This is over 5 times the investment Congress made last
    year, and I think it is a wonderful idea. We came up with this idea
    because it's modeled, basically, on the National Medical Service Corps.
    Some of you may have once lived in rural America. When I was Governor,
    sometimes the only way we could get doctors to go into rural areas is
    that they had taken funds to go to medical school, and they realized in
    return for which they would need to go out into rural areas and practice
    medicine, and they got to pay off a certain amount of their loan every
    year.
        It's also the way the national defense loans worked. I actually had
    one of them in law school. If you taught school for a certain number of
    years, a certain percentage of your loan would be forgiven. And I can't
    think of a better way to give some of the most gifted young people in
    this country a chance to do something they might like to do anyway, in
    ways that would, in effect, work out to supplement the salary they would
    otherwise be earning.
        Third, I will ask Congress to invest $10 million to train 1,000
    Native Americans to teach on Indian reservations and in other public
    schools with large Native American populations.
        Fourth, I will call on Congress to invest $18 million to recruit and
    train retired members of the military to become teachers. Since 1994--
    you heard Arthur say this is his fifth year of teaching--our Troops for
    Teachers Program has helped 3,000 active-duty soldiers who were planning
    to leave the military and find rewarding

    [[Page 85]]

    second careers in teaching. That experience has shown that people like
    Mr. Moore make great teachers and great role models.
        I again want to thank all the Members of Congress--Secretary Riley
    mentioned them; one of them, Chet Edwards, is
    here--for the work that they have done in this regard. Congresswoman
    Mink and I were recently together in Korea
    visiting our troops. And I met a senior master sergeant who was about to
    retire after 29 years in the military. He was 49 years old; he could
    still run a 6-minute mile. [Laughter] And he was going home to Kentucky
    to teach children. He said, ``I think I can do those kids some good.''
        There are a lot of people like this. You go out into--if you visit
    with the people in the military, that make the military their career,
    you just can't fail to be impressed with the accumulated weight of
    experience. They've dealt with every kind of human problem you can
    imagine. They understand, increasingly--and I must say, in the last
    several years, more and more--the importance of balancing discipline and
    creativity, letting people think for themselves but also reminding that
    they have to play on the team and with certain rules. And they
    understand how to manage people and resources--and limited resources--to
    do a job of limitless importance. They tend to have math and science
    backgrounds. And they have shown a remarkable willingness to teach in
    inner-city and rural schools that have difficulty recruiting teachers.
    So these 25 million veterans--and there will be more as time goes on,
    obviously, more and more every year--are an incredible pool of potential
    teacher talent.
        The Secretary of Education always tells
    me that we're going to have to hire 2 million more teachers in the next
    few years, because of the growth of the student population and the
    retirement of the existing teacher corps. So I think we should do more,
    and this is a big downpayment on it. And I must say, Members of
    Congress, if you think that we ought to spend even more money on it,
    I'll support you. [Laughter] I think we should make it easier for people
    who have kept our Nation strong to provide for a strong American future
    in the 21st century.
        Now let me just mention one other program that is very important to
    me, and that's the master teacher program. The National Board for
    Professional Teacher Certification has received almost unanimous support
    from teachers and other educators throughout our country. We are trying
    to get 100,000 certified master teachers, enough so that we'll have at
    least one in every school building in America. And when we do that, we
    know they will have a dramatic impact on improving the quality of the
    existing teacher corps. So I hope we will have support for that.
        And if we do these things, in addition to the other proposals, I
    think that we will be doing our part to ensure that we'll have the kind
    of schools our children need and our country needs in the 21st century,
    because it all starts with a teacher like Mr. Moore.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 12:30 p.m. in the Presidential Hall
    (formerly Room 450) of the Old Executive Office Building. In his
    remarks, he referred to Sgt. Arthur Moore, USA (Ret.), teacher, Harlem
    Park Community School, Baltimore, MD, who introduced the President.