    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
    [April 19, 1999]
    [Pages 577-581]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at the Award Ceremony for the National Teacher of the Year
    April 19, 1999

        Thank you very much. Thank you, Terry. I also want to acknowledge and welcome Congresswoman
    Patsy Mink from Hawaii, who is here with her
    husband, John. We're very delighted to see them.
    I'd like to thank the Chief State School Officers for sponsoring this
    award along with Scholastic, and I believe Gordon Ambach and Ernie Fleishman are both
    here.
        Terry said I'd given 131 speeches on education. I didn't know that
    until I just came in here. [Laughter] I wasn't keeping count. It is true
    that a few years ago I started reeling off all my teachers, beginning at
    kindergarten. And when I started running for office a long time ago now,
    I remember I asked--the fellow who was helping me put my first campaign
    together said, ``People don't know much about you; we've got to do a
    little biographical film, and we ought to put one of your teachers in
    it.'' And I said, ``Well, I still carry on a correspondence with my
    sixth grade teacher, Kathleen Scher.'' I did until she died at about 91
    years of age. And I used to see her about once a year.
        ``But you can't use her,'' I said. And they said, ``Well, why? That
    sounds like a wonderful story.'' I said, ``It is, but she's liable to
    tell you what she told me the day I finished my elementary school
    career.'' [Laughter] True story. My sainted sixth grade teacher, who is
    one of these wonderful--she lived with her first cousin, and they lived
    until their late eighties or early nineties, and they taught school for
    a gazillion years. And she looked at me when I left elementary school
    for the last day and she said, ``Bill, I just don't know about you.''
    [Laughter] She said, ``You know, if you ever learn when to talk and when
    to keep quiet, there is nothing you can't achieve. But if you don't
    learn the difference, I'm not sure whether you're going to be Governor
    or wind up in the penitentiary.'' [Laughter] So we found someone else to
    do the film. [Laughter] But Kathleen Scher continued to write me for the
    rest of her days, including a letter I have that I received just a week
    before she passed away.
        So I want to thank all of you for being here today. I also would
    like to thank Terry for the
    magnificent perspective she's provided to us for years now, in the
    Department of Education, on education and on teachers. And I'd like to
    thank

    [[Page 578]]

    her for mentioning Kosovo today. I know a lot of you--probably in every
    school in the country, now, children are looking at maps and learning
    about the world we live in. And I think that's very important because it
    is such a small world, growing smaller.
        I went out to San Francisco a couple of days ago to speak to the
    newspaper editors, and I said that it is truly ironic that here we stand
    on the verge of a new century and a new millennium, where education is
    more important than ever before, because we have this explosion in
    technology, drawing us closer to different people of different cultures,
    and our own country is becoming more diverse; we can imagine a future
    that is more prosperous and more peaceful and more interconnected, in a
    very human way, than ever before; we got by the cold war--thank
    goodness--without any nuclear weapons falling; and now we've found that
    that future was threatened by the oldest demon of human society, which
    is our fear of people who are different from us.
        I'm sure at one point it was rational when tribes roamed around in
    isolated ways in prehistorical times and fought over limited resources
    and saw people in different tribes who were different from them, and
    they were maybe afraid for rational reasons. But today we have an
    opportunity to sort of celebrate our differences and enjoy them, as long
    as we understand they have to operate within a framework that says,
    underneath, the common humanity we all share as children of God is more
    important than those things which distinguish us one from another.
    That's really what's at stake there.
        And it would be ironic, indeed, if after two World Wars and a cold
    war being fought on the continent of Europe, and all the lessons we have
    learned over this century, that it would be in southeastern Europe and
    the Balkans where our vision of the 21st century would come apart.
        So this conflict in Kosovo, in a fundamental way, is either the last
    conflict of the 20th century or the first conflict of the 21st century.
    And it's very important that our children understand that.
        I just want to say one word about it, and then I will come back to
    the task at hand. But I do have to announce today that I intend to send
    to Congress an emergency funding package to pay for our military and
    humanitarian needs for the operation in Kosovo; to ensure that we have
    the resources to sustain the air campaign until we achieve our goals,
    while maintaining our high level of general military readiness; to
    provide critical humanitarian assistance and relief to the hundreds of
    thousands of refugees; and to provide for resources for the nations in
    the region, the neighbors of Kosovo, who have suffered so much from the
    effects of this conflict.
        One of the things that a lot of people don't understand is that this
    is putting an enormous burden on Albania, the poorest country in the
    region, taking all those refugees, struggling to maintain a democracy.
    It's putting enormous burdens on Macedonia, a very small country trying
    to manage its own ethnic differences, now having these refugees loaded
    on top of them. It causes real problems for Bulgaria and Romania. This
    is a difficult thing for the neighborhood.
        So I hope that the Congress will act on this. The need for this
    funding is urgent, immediate, clearly in the national interest. There
    are literally lives hanging in the balance. And so I hope, in the spirit
    of genuine bipartisanship, the Congress will move the package right
    away.
        Now, let's talk about why we're here. The first Teacher of the Year
    Award was presented in 1952 by a man who was one of my heroes as a child
    growing up, Harry Truman. He did it right here on the White House
    grounds. The recipient was a Miss Geraldine Jones, who taught first
    grade in Santa Barbara, California, in a school whose name I rather
    like, the Hope School. [Laughter] Harry Truman said on that occasion
    that next to one's mother, a teacher had the greatest influence on what
    kind of a citizen a child grew up to be.
        Every year since, Presidents or members of their families have
    personally handed out this award, as Terry said, to recognize not only
    the awardee and all of you, but, through you, all teachers in our
    country.
        Eight hours a day, 5 days a week, 9 months a year, teachers hold the
    future of America in their hands. They teach our children to read, to
    write, to calculate, to sing, to play, to paint, to listen, to question,
    hopefully to work with others, and think for themselves. They excite our
    children's imaginations, lift their aspirations, open their hearts, and
    strengthen their values.
        Everyone probably can recall a story like the one I told you at the
    opening of my remarks today. Many of us can remember our teachers

    [[Page 579]]

    in stunning detail, their faces, their expressions, their voices, their
    favorite admonitions, the way their hands gripped the chalk at the
    blackboard. We can still, most of us, summon the pride we felt when they
    praised us and the absolute chill we felt when we were scolded.
    [Laughter]
        The role of teachers, while hard to exaggerate, unfortunately, is
    too often easy to overlook. Teachers do their jobs, quietly, largely
    isolated from other adults. Their work, therefore, is seldom glorified
    by Hollywood and rarely sufficiently rewarded by society.
        Andy Baumgartner is our Teacher of the
    Year. He spent 2 years in the United States Marines. He gained inner
    confidence, self-motivation, physical stamina at Parris Island and Camp
    Lejeune. I imagine they have been useful to him in dealing with young
    children. [Laughter]
        Since he is a former marine, I think
    it's worth pointing out that today we rightly honor the men and women
    serving in and around the Balkans as patriots. We should also honor our
    teachers as patriots.
        Andy's colleagues marvel at the way he
    rivets the attention of his kindergarten students by keeping himself in
    constant creative motion. That's the first impression I had of him.
    [Laughter] I have met a person who has even more energy than I do.
    [Laughter] One minute he's using popcorn and M&M's to teach counting.
    The next, he's conducting a sing-a-long to ``This Land Is Your Land.'' A
    few minutes later, he's marching the class up the hill behind the school
    to conduct a solemn funeral for a departed pet tarantula named ``Legs.''
    [Laughter]
        As the father of a son with a learning
    disability, he knows firsthand the struggle many parents go through to
    get the individual attention their children need. He works hard to give
    that kind of attention to all his students.
        When he's not teaching, he can be found directing a school play,
    teaching other educators, writing guidebooks for parents, working in
    community theater, participating actively in his church. He is an
    example of the kind of vital, active American that Alexis de Tocqueville
    marveled at when he came here so long ago and talked about the unique
    quality of our citizenship.
        If he were alive today, de Tocqueville, I think, would agree that
    America could do more to honor classroom teachers like Andy Baumgartner.
    Perhaps more of our best and brightest young people would choose
    teaching as a career if we did more to lift our teachers up and honor
    them. Even though I am one, we don't need many more lawyers; we have
    plenty of financial analysts on Wall Street, but we desperately need
    more teachers.
        When our finest young people pass up teaching, they're missing out
    on rewarding careers, and we're missing out on a chance to put our
    talent where we need it the most today. With 53 million children in our
    public schools, the greatest number ever, from more diverse backgrounds
    than at any time in our history, certainly since the turn of the
    century, with enrollments growing and a wave of teacher retirements
    about to hit, our schools will have to hire 2 million more teachers in
    the next decade.
        At the same time, we're trying to bring down class size, and that
    requires more teachers. And the new teachers must be better trained. A
    quarter of all secondary school teachers today do not have majors or
    even minors in the subjects they are teaching. And of course, the
    deficit is worse in low-income neighborhoods where the need is greatest.
        Now, these are enormous challenges. I believe we can meet them if we
    act now, when our economy is the strongest it has been in a very long
    time. But we have to act now. There are things the Federal Government
    can do, to be sure, and I want to talk a little about them. But I'd like
    to point out that we provide only about 7 percent of the funding of
    total public school funding in America. That's a higher percentage than
    it was when I became President. When we were cutting the deficit and
    cutting programs, we doubled our investment in education in about 5
    years. But it's still important to remember that a lot of this has to be
    done at the State and local level.
        And so as the Governors of our various States enjoy great
    prosperity, and as the crime rate comes down and presumably, therefore,
    they don't have to keep spending all their new money on building
    prisons--as was the case when I was a Governor, too often--I certainly
    hope that as much money as possible will be put into our public school
    systems to hire those teachers and to raise teacher pay. That has to be
    done at the State level, primarily, and it is absolutely imperative.
        At the national level, we're going to do what we can to pass a bill
    to build or modernize thousands of schools, to help to hire 100,000
    highly trained new teachers to reduce class size

    [[Page 580]]

    in the early grades. The studies, of course, confirm what a lot of our
    teachers have been saying for a long time, that smaller classes means
    more individual attention, more discipline, and more learning. Last fall
    Congress reached across party lines to put down a downpayment. They paid
    for about a third of these 100,000 teachers. I certainly hope we can
    finish the job this year.
        We have to redouble our efforts to recruit more of the best and
    brightest young Americans into teaching. A lot of our young people in
    the AmeriCorps program are getting some of their college education paid
    so they can go and become teachers. Our budget now calls for an
    investment to provide 7,000 college scholarships for students who will
    commit to teach in the poorest inner-city and rural schools. It calls on
    an investment to get 1,000 Native American young people to teach on
    Indian reservations and in other public schools with large Native
    American populations.
        It calls for more money to recruit and train members of the United
    States military when they retire to become teachers through our Troops
    for Teachers program, something that has really been very, very
    successful. Our 25 million veterans represent a vast pool of potential
    teachers. Many of them, because they're drawing military retirement, can
    actually afford to be teachers. [Laughter] And most of them have their
    kids grown. So it's a pool that we need to look at and draw on. Our
    Teacher of the Year, here, is pretty good
    evidence that soldiers can be quite good teachers. We ought to make it
    easier for others to do the same thing.
        Third, in our budget we provide more funds for teacher training. I
    think it's quite important that teachers, our new teachers especially,
    demonstrate that they know what they're supposed to teach. But we cannot
    expect the schools out there, who have to teach the kids, to be able to
    do what they're supposed to do unless we provide--we in the public
    sector--provide the resources we need not only to recruit but to
    properly train the teachers in the subjects they have to teach.
        Fourth, we should do more to make our schools attractive places
    where people want to work. In our ``Educational Accountability Act,'' we
    have a lot of funds for better schools and for turning around schools
    that aren't performing and for after-school and summer school programs
    to help the children who need extra help.
        Now, last thing I'd like to say is something I've already said. I
    know I've given 131 speeches on education--I now know that--so I've
    learned a new fact today, and I love facts. But the larger truth is
    this: Everybody is for education in general, but not enough people are
    for it in particular. It's easy to give a talk and harder to foot the
    bill. And I think it is very important that we not only remain committed
    to substantive reforms--you know, I believe that every school district
    should have a ``no social promotion'' policy, but I don't think the kids
    should be branded failures. I think if they're not making it, then they
    should get the extra held they need. And that's why we have moved on
    from $1 million, and $20 million, to $200 million, to $600 million this
    year in Federal support for after-school programs and summer school
    programs. We're working at this. But America needs to focus on this.
        We're going to honor Andy. I'm going to
    bring him up here to give him his award, and he's going to give a
    speech, and we're all going to practically laugh or cry. And it will be
    a wonderful thing. But I want America to hear this when they see you
    tonight on television. We have 2 million teachers to hire in the next
    few years. And in the best of all worlds, they would, every one of them,
    be just as committed and just as knowledgeable and just as effective as
    you are. And it isn't going to happen unless we make the necessary
    decisions and put the necessary priorities in place, not only in
    Washington but in every State capital and every local school district in
    the country.
        So I say today, the best way we can honor America's teachers is for
    the rest of us to give them the tools to succeed with our children in
    the 21st century. [Applause] Thank you.
        Ladies and gentlemen, the 1999 Teacher of the Year, Mr. Andy
    Baumgartner.

    Note: The President spoke at 10:10 a.m. in Presidential Hall (formerly
    Room 450) in the Old Executive Office Building. In his remarks, he
    referred to Therese Knecht Dozier, Special Adviser on Teaching to the
    Secretary of Education; Gordon M. Ambach, executive director, Council of
    Chief State School Officers; and Ernest Fleishman, senior vice
    president, Scholastic, Inc. The transcript released by the Office of the
    Press Secretary also

    [[Page 581]]

    included the remarks of Mr. Baumgartner, kindergarten teacher at A.
    Brian Merry Elementary School in Augusta, GA.