    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
    [February 1, 1999]
    [Pages 135-139]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the National School Boards Association
    February 1, 1999

        Thank you very much. First of all, Barbara Wheeler, thank you for your remarks. You covered everything I was
    going to say. [Laughter] You talked about the Capitol Steps. [Laughter]
    I think they're funny, too, but you must surely know, having heard them,
    that it is not the school boards association that is the Rodney
    Dangerfield in this town. [Laughter]
        Let me say I'm delighted to be on this platform with Anne
    Bryant and your other leaders behind me and
    to be here with all of you. I see Delegate Member of Congress Robert
    Underwood from Guam here. I'm delighted
    to see him. I was in Guam with him recently. If you haven't been, I
    recommend it.
        And I want to thank you for the wonderful, wonderful welcome you
    gave to Secretary Riley. We have been
    working on education together since we first met, over 20 years ago, and
    he is not only the longest serving, I think, clearly, the finest
    Secretary of Education this country ever had.
        We've had a very good day at the White House today, and I thought I
    would tell you about something we did at the beginning of the day that
    does not directly, but surely will indirectly impact on you and what you
    do. This morning I presented my budget for this coming year, and there
    are a lot of good things in it for education. But the point I want to
    make is that we were illustrating today that with last year's surplus
    and the surplus we project this year, that if the Congress will do what
    I recommend and set aside over 75 percent of this surplus for 15 years
    so that we can secure the retirement of the baby boomers with Social
    Security and Medicare--since we won't need the money while it's being
    set aside for about, in the case of Medicare, 11 years, in the case of
    Social Security, more--we will, while we're saving it, be paying down
    the national debt.
        Now, when I took office, the national debt was 50 percent of our
    annual income, and it was projected to grow to 80 percent. When I took
    office, we were spending over 14 cents on the dollar of every tax dollar
    just servicing the debt. It's now down to 44 percent of our annual
    income, the debt; we're spending a little over 13 cents on the dollar.
    But if we set it aside for 15 years, we will take the debt down to 7
    percent of our annual income, a third of what it was in 1981 when we
    started this deficit binge, the lowest it's been since 1917 before we
    got into World War I. And it will only cost 2 cents of every tax dollar
    you pay to pay interest on the debt.
        That will, as compared with now, free up another 11 cents on the tax
    dollar every year from then on, that we could be investing in our
    children and in education and in the future. It's an amazing statistic.
    It will also keep interest rates low and will free up trillions of
    dollars to invest in the economy. And all of you know, running local
    school boards, that if the economy is strong, then you'll have your tax
    revenues coming in at the local and State level.

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        So this is a compact among the generations. It's not simply a way to
    save Social Security and Medicare, although that, too, is good for
    younger people because it means that when we baby boomers retire, our
    kids won't have to give money to us that they could be investing in
    their grandchildren--in our grandchildren.
        But it was a very good day. And it is a part of what I am trying to
    get our country to focus on, which is that we have opportunities now
    that people who came before us, over the last several decades, could
    only have dreamed of. And we have to decide how we're going to use those
    opportunities.
        I think our most profound obligation is to say that at a time like
    this with the economy running well, with the lowest peacetime
    unemployment rate since 1957, with all the economic indicators strong,
    but with trouble overseas which could affect our economy, we have got to
    take this opportunity to deal with the long-term challenges our country
    faces, finally, not only to have America working again but to really
    build that bridge to the 21st century I've been talking about for so
    long.
        And all of you know that education has to be a critical part of
    that. You know better than I all the problems that your president just
    mentioned. You know better than I that we have the largest group of
    school children we've ever had and that it is more diverse in every way
    than it has ever been. The future of our whole country rests so much on
    how well we educate our children, and you have been chosen in your
    communities to carry that torch into a new century. It is a great honor
    and a heavy responsibility, and I thank you for assuming it.
        I believe that here in Washington, our duty is to help to give you
    the tools you need to meet the challenge. And we've worked hard for 6
    years, with all the economic challenges we faced at first, to do that
    duty.
        In the last 6 years, while we have reduced the size of the Federal
    Government to it's lowest point since President Kennedy was in office
    and eliminated hundreds of programs in order to balance the budget, at
    the same time we have almost doubled our investment in education and
    training. We've helped States who adopted tougher standards. We've
    helped school districts to deal with the challenges of drugs and gangs
    and violence and guns. We've cut regulations in our Federal programs
    affecting elementary and secondary education by two-thirds, thanks to
    Secretary Riley's efforts. We've granted
    dozens of waivers to States and school districts to give them the
    flexibility they need to try new approaches. We've begun to organize an
    army of tutors, including young people in the America Reads program from
    a thousand colleges to help in schools to make sure our young people can
    read at elementary school, and a new group of mentors in the GEAR UP
    program to mentor middle school and high school students to prepare them
    for college and to make sure they know they can go.
        We have increased our investment in early childhood, including Head
    Start, as Barbara said. We are making dramatic progress in connecting
    all our classrooms and libraries to the Internet by early in the next
    century. And this year the new E-rate, the education rate, comes on-
    line, and that should save about a billion dollars in the cost of
    hookups, something for which we've fought very hard.
        Also, something--I think it's very important that all the high
    school seniors and juniors, and maybe even earlier, know that in many
    different ways we have basically opened the doors of college. Millions
    of young people this year will get the HOPE scholarship tax credit,
    which is worth about $1,500 for the first 2 years of school. There are
    tax credits for junior and senior years of college, for graduate school.
    We've increased the size and reach of the Pell grant program, lowered
    the cost of student loans, added hundreds of thousands of work-study
    positions, and tried to basically put you in a position to say to the
    children in your school districts, ``Look, if you make the grades, if
    you don't have any money, you can still go to college. No matter what
    the cost is, you can still go.''
        Last year, we got the first big downpayment on our goal of helping
    you to hire 100,000 highly trained teachers to lower class sizes in the
    early grades. And that, plus what all of you have been doing, is really
    paying off. I mean, the SAT scores are up, the math scores are up almost
    everywhere in the country. We see in some of the most difficult learning
    environments dramatic turnarounds where the proper attention has been
    paid to schools.
        But if you look at the country as a whole, there are still some very
    challenging problems. Number one, reading scores haven't budged. Now, I
    think that's pretty explainable when you

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    consider the increasing percentage of our children whose parents don't
    speak English at home. You couldn't expect aggregate reading scores to
    be going through the roof. That doesn't mean that we can give up on
    making sure those kids are fluent in English. It just means we have to
    work harder; we have to work smarter; we have to do better.
        Even more troubling to me is the fact that our relative standing on
    these test scores goes down as the kids go up in school. Our fourth
    graders were ranked in the top of the world last year in comparative
    math and science scores. And keep in mind, when we engage in this, we
    take a representative sample of kids--by income, by race, by region,
    every demographic category--and they're doing well. Our 8th graders are
    about the international average, and our 12th graders rank near the
    bottom. That tells us that there are things we have to do if we expect
    to be globally competitive that we're not doing. And I believe we can do
    better.
        Probably most of you heard my State of the Union Address, in which I
    said that we, in my judgment, in the Federal Government, should change
    the way we invest Federal funds to emphasize what you have proved to us
    works and to stop investing in things that don't work. We will have an
    opportunity--and again, I believe, an obligation--to do that this year,
    because Congress must reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education
    Act. I intend to send them, later this year, an ``Education
    Accountability Act'' to require States and school districts receiving
    Federal help to take five steps that most of you are probably already
    taking and that I think all of us would admit have been shown to work.
        The components of this bill basically came to us from educators,
    from people like you, from principals especially, from teachers in some
    cases, and from our own on-site observation, not just mine and Secretary
    Riley's but all of us, of what we have seen working.
        We believe that every district should have a policy of no social
    promotion but not identifying the children as failures, and therefore
    there should be after-school and summer school programs to support their
    continued learning.
        All over America, teachers groups, not just the national
    organizations but grassroots teachers groups, have pleaded with us to
    say, if you're going to invest Federal money, say that every school
    district must have a reasonable discipline code and it must be enforced.
        We believe that parents should get report cards on their children's
    schools. We believe there should be a strategy in every school district
    to turn around or shut down schools that fail.
        I appreciated the comment you made about vouchers. You know, I have
    steadfastly opposed them. I believe when I was a Governor, I think we
    were the second State in the country after Minnesota to have a statewide
    public school choice bill pass the legislature. And I have steadfastly
    supported the charter school movement in America, and I still do. But we
    must have a strategy that deals with failing schools. If you want to win
    the argument with people who don't do what you do every day--on
    vouchers--you must have a strategy that deals with failing schools. And
    it's very important.
        I think we have to do more to ensure that all of our teachers are as
    well-trained as they possibly can be in the subjects they are teaching.
    Sometimes I think our teachers get a little bit of a bum rap, with the
    schools exploding and all of you having to compete for bright people
    with other forms of work, not just teaching. It should hardly be
    surprising to people that we have, in many of our school districts,
    teachers teaching subjects which they don't have degrees in, which they
    may not even have college minors in. But we have to do something about
    it. We have to do more to try to help support teachers. And the
    teachers, through their organizations, are clamoring for more investment
    to help develop skills and learning, to raise their qualifications in
    these academic subjects.
        I'm going up to Boston tomorrow, and I'll be able to discuss some of
    this in greater detail. But what I wanted to say to you today is we need
    your help. We need your help. We need Congress to understand that--I do
    not believe the Federal Government should run the schools. I didn't wake
    up one morning and come up with these five ideas. I believe that you
    were showing us what works, and that is what we should invest in. And I
    think that, both as taxpayers and school board members, knowing the
    challenges we face, you should expect us to invest this money based on
    what you believe will work and what you have seen will work.
        Nothing we can do here involves picking this person or that person
    or the other person to teach; involves how you select your principals;

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    involves how the climate of learning or the culture of the school is
    developed, school by school. We can't do any of that. But with limited
    Federal funds, which I have done my best to increase, and an enormous
    challenge out there, we ought to be investing in what works, and we
    ought to stop investing in what doesn't. And I ask for your help to
    persuade the Congress that that is in the interests of the local school
    districts of the United States. Essentially, we ought to try to take
    what is common sense to all of you and make it common practice in all of
    our schools.
        Today, as I said, I released my budget, and I wanted to talk a
    little bit about what it does. First of all, it calls upon Congress to
    invest $1.4 billion to hire new, better trained teachers to reduce class
    sizes in the early grades. This is a 17 percent increase over the budget
    I signed last fall, and it brings us another step closer to our goal of
    100,000 new teachers. We have to make sure that Congress continues this
    financial support.
        I might say, there were some people who didn't want to do that, but
    the arguments I heard about this were the same arguments I heard in 1994
    against my crime bill when local police officers said, ``Mr. President,
    the violent crime rate has tripled in the last 30 years, and the police
    forces have increased by 10 percent.'' It was not rocket science to
    think that if you had more police officers and they were walking the
    streets and working with neighborhood groups and others, that they could
    prevent crime from happening in the first place, catch criminals when
    they commit crimes, and drive the crime rate down. We now have the
    lowest violent crime rate in 30 years, the lowest overall crime rate in
    25 years.
        It is not rocket science to know that if you've got a teacher
    shortage now and a looming one in the future, that the Federal
    Government, if we have the resources, ought to be giving you the tools
    to hire more teachers. So I ask you to help us pass this through the
    Congress.
        The budget also calls for investing $35 million to provide 7,000
    college scholarships for bright young people who commit to teach in
    places where the need is greatest, in the poorest inner-city and rural
    schools. That's 5 times the investment that Congress made in these
    scholarships last year when we inaugurated the program. It increases by
    $25 million funding to train bilingual and English-as-second-language
    teachers. It contains $30 million to train middle school teachers to use
    technology in the classroom. It calls for $10 million to train 1,000
    Native Americans to teach in Indian reservations and other public
    schools with large Native American enrollments. It has $18 million to
    recruit and train retired military members to become teachers.
        We had an event on this at the White House last week, and we had
    this marvelous retired Army sergeant who is
    teaching in the Baltimore schools come and make a presentation. He's a
    special education teacher in the Baltimore schools. It was an
    overwhelming, emotional event.
        And I remember when I was in Korea recently I met a senior master
    sergeant there who gave me one of his little military coins. And I said,
    ``How long have you been in the service?'' And he said, ``Twenty-nine
    years.'' And I said, ``How much longer are you going to stay?'' He said,
    ``About a year.'' And I said, ``What are you going to do?'' He said,
    ``I'm going home to Kentucky to be a teacher.'' So I hope you will
    continue to support this.
        The budget continues support for the master teacher program, to make
    sure our finest teachers get the recognition, the reward they deserve,
    and the opportunity to spread the skills they develop in going through
    the certification process with others in their schools. Our goal there
    is to try to get up to 100,000 board-certified master teachers in the
    country, enough to make sure that, with your help, we can have one in
    every school building in America. And I think that would be a very good
    thing, indeed.
        The budget increases by $26 million funding to mobilize tutors and
    trained teachers, to make sure all of our third graders can read
    adequately. It doubles funding for our efforts to provide middle school
    students with tutors, with mentors, to spark their interest and their
    capacity in going on to college.
        We also, again, will try to pass the provision of the budget that
    would use tax breaks to enable us to build or modernize 5,000 schools.
    And that is very important, indeed. Again, I heard the argument last
    year, ``Well, this is really not something that the Federal Government
    ought to be doing.'' Well, the Federal Government puts a lot of money
    into State highways, and this is our road to the future.
        I, frankly, wish we were doing more. I don't know how many schools
    I've been in where

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    there were as many kids back in the housetrailers as there were in
    regular classrooms. I don't know how many I've been in where there were
    rooms closed off because the buildings were breaking down. We have
    schools buildings in some of our cities now that are so old they
    literally cannot be hooked up to the Internet without a whole rewiring.
    I think this is very important.
        But again, I say it's important that you understand that you've got
    to go out and talk to Members of Congress of both parties and say,
    ``Listen, this is not some cockamamie idea that the President had some
    person with a Ph.D. think up in a windowless office in the White
    House''--[laughter]--``you know, you go out and stroll around the
    schools of America, and it will come screaming back at you: We need some
    help here.''
        So I ask for your help. And finally, let me say, our Federal after-
    school programs began just 2 years ago with a million bucks; that's all
    I could get for it. And we went to $40 million. Then in the third year,
    in our last budget, that I signed just a couple of months ago, we went
    to 200 million. This budget calls for 600 million, and that's enough to
    keep one million children in school and off the streets, learning and
    safe, in after-school programs. I ask for your support for that.
        So this budget comes from Secretary Riley and me, two old--
    increasingly old--[laughter]--Governors who believe deeply in education
    and its promise, who believe deeply in the leadership of people like you
    at the local level. We don't want to micromanage the schools. We don't
    want to take resources away from people who need it. But it is
    unconscionable to continue to support that which doesn't work and to
    fail to support that which does. So we ask for a partnership that will
    invest more in our public schools and to invest in ways that you, out on
    the frontlines of change, have demonstrated will work so that our
    children will learn more. That's all we ask.
        Again, I say, as I was thinking today when we started the day, Dick
    and I did, with the rest of the Cabinet and 31 Members of Congress and
    we were looking at this line with the debt going down and what was going
    to happen in the future--you just think about where America is and you
    think about people who were Presidents, Secretaries of Education,
    Members of Congress, Governors and school board members, 10 years ago,
    15 years ago, 20 years ago. There were people who would have killed to
    have had an opportunity like this. This is a high-class dilemma we've
    got here. [Laughter] You know? Why are we worried about the aging of
    America? Because before you know it, our average life expectancy will be
    over 80. That's a big problem. I like it better as the days go by--
    [laughter]--and the same thing with the surplus. But history is full of
    examples of people who had golden opportunities and squandered them
    because there was an easier, more well-trodden path to take.
        And so I ask you--I don't think you know the influence you can have
    if you're determined to bring it to bear. This is a time for decisive
    action. Don't just go up to Congress and ask them to reauthorize the act
    the way it was and give you as much more money as you can get. You've
    got 53 million kids out there. They're from 200 or more different racial
    or ethnic groups, every religion in the world, every linguistic
    background in the world, and they are America's gold mine for tomorrow
    as the world becomes smaller and more and more interdependent.
        This is a gift. It is a high-class challenge. And we have the
    resources, and we have the knowledge to do what is right. We have to do
    it.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 4:55 p.m. at the Grand Hyatt Hotel. In his
    remarks, he referred to Barbara M. Wheeler, president, and Anne L.
    Bryant, executive director, National School Boards Association; and Sgt.
    Arthur Moore, USA (Ret.), teacher, Harlem Park Community School,
    Baltimore, MD. The President also referred to the comedy troupe Capitol
    Steps.