[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1999, Book I)]
[January 7, 1999]
[Pages 14-17]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]
Remarks on Funding for Quality After-School Programs
January 7, 1999
Thank you very much, Mr. Vice President. I want to thank all those who have spoken before and all
of you who are here. I say a special word of appreciation to the Members
of the Congress who have come, the members of the education community,
the employees of the Department of Education.
I want to thank Congressman Ford for
his stirring speech. I was looking at Congressman Ford, thinking, you
know, I was 28 once. [Laughter] And when I ran for Congress at that age,
I got beat. I see why he got elected. [Laughter]
I thank Senator Kennedy, for his
lifetime of literally an example of unparalleled service in
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the United States Senate, and Secretary Riley, who has been my friend since we started our governorships
together over 20 years ago now. And I'm glad to see Mrs.
Shriver here, and I thank the family
of Congressman King for coming, my colleague
in the Irish peace process. We're glad to see all of them.
But most of all, I want to thank Lissette Martinez and Leonard for showing
up and reminding us why we're all here today, because they were great.
When she held her children's pictures up here, I thought, if those kids
and their parents are the future of America, we're going to be just
fine--we're going to be just fine.
Even though the definition of well-educated was very different over
200 years ago when this country was founded, our Founding Fathers
thought it was of pivotal importance. In 1787, they declared that all
new territories set aside land for public schools, establishing the
principle that public education, though a State and local
responsibility, must always be a national priority. In 1862, President
Lincoln signed the legislation creating the land grant college system.
In 1944, the GI bill gave millions of returning veterans tickets to what
became the first mass middle class in the history of the world. In 1958,
the launch of Sputnik led to Federal funds to improve science and math
education in our country. In 1965, Federal support for education
expanded further to bring minorities and the poor, long shut out of the
classroom, inside to the full benefits of public education. At each of
these turning points in our history, our country strengthened public
education to match the challenges of the times.
Now in our time, as others have said, we face another challenge, the
emergence of a global economy that is fast-paced, technologically
sophisticated, driven by information and, at the same time, the
emergence in our country of a breathtakingly diverse group of young
people, diverse by race and ethnic background, by religion, by culture,
by income, by circumstance.
We now have an economy in which the workplace is no longer just for
men but also for women; the workday is no longer bound by the hours of 9
to 5; and the workplace is increasingly at home. When I became President
6 years ago, only 3 million Americans were earning their living at home;
when I ran for reelection, the number was 12. Today there are about 20
million Americans earning their primary income out of their homes. This
is a stunning statistic.
To meet the challenges of this new economy with our new society, we
have to rely on our old values, but we have to make sure that we
manifest them in modern ways. That means our public schools must change.
They must teach our children while reflecting the way we work and live
now and will work and live in the 21st century.
In the last 6 years we have worked hard on this, with the help of
all of you in this room and those whom you represent throughout the
United States. Forty-eight of our 50 States have now adopted tougher
academic standards which we called for when the Goals 2000 program
passed back in 1994.
Thousands of schools have become safer, better learning
environments, cracking down on gangs and guns, violence and discipline,
adopting school uniforms and other systems designed to create a better,
more equal learning environment. The percentage of students who report
being threatened or injured at school nationwide is down.
We've begun to organize an army of tutors to help elementary school
children learn to read and middle school and high school students to
prepare for college. And I'm very proud of all the young people all
across America who are working in these tutoring and mentoring programs.
We've dramatically increased our investment in early childhood
learning through the Head Start program. We're making real progress in
connecting every classroom and library to the Internet by the year 2000.
And as Secretary Riley said, the E-rate for which the Vice
President fought so hard means that we've
not only hooked up those classrooms, but they can actually afford to log
on.
Last fall, we fought for and won from Congress a downpayment on
100,000 new highly trained teachers to reduce class sizes in the early
grades, and we made a beginning on our proposal to offer to pay off the
college costs of young people who will go into our most underserved
areas and teach for a few years when they graduate from school. I hope
the new Congress will keep up the payments so we can keep the teachers
going. And I hope they will work with me to build or modernize 5,000
schools.
The charter school movement, which I have championed since 1992, is
growing. When I took
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the oath of office as President, there was one charter school in the
whole United States, a public school organized by parents or teachers
within the school system but free of a lot of the bureaucratic
limitations that are on so many schools. In 1996, there were 700. There
are now about 1,000. We are well on our way to our goal of having 3,000
by the year 2000.
All these efforts and others are beginning to show up in SAT scores,
which are up; math scores, which have risen in nearly all grades
nationwide; even on a lot of the international tests, when we didn't do
so well for years and years, our younger people are tending to do better
and better.
We should be pleased and thankful, but we should not be fooled into
complacency. Why? First, reading scores have hardly budged, and many of
our foreign competitors are improving their schools faster than we are.
Secondly, while our children do very well on these international test
scores in elementary school and reasonably well in middle school, by the
time they're in high school their rankings have dropped dramatically.
We know we have more to do. We know that a majority of our schools
have not kept pace with the new family patterns and work patterns which
dominate America. We know that more and more parents are being drawn
into the work force. On any given day, as many as 15 million school
children are left to fend for themselves at home, idle in front of the
television or out on the streets, vulnerable to gangs, drugs, and crime.
On any given day when school lets out, juvenile crime goes up and also
the number of children themselves victimized by crime. On any given day
when school lets out, tens of millions of working parents look nervously
at the clock, hoping and praying their children will be okay.
It is no secret that I believe that the best way for our Nation to
meet these challenges is to expand the number and improve the quality of
our after-school programs. With quality after-school, parents and
educators will be given the tools they need to succeed; students learn
their lesson in the schoolhouse, not on the street; youth crime and
victimization plummet. Quality after-school programs both enhance
opportunity and bolster responsibility. In so doing, they strengthen our
communities; they honor our values; they benefit our Nation.
That's why I've supported grants for these kinds of quality programs
through the 21st Century Community Learning Center initiative, first
introduced by Senator Jeffords from
Vermont, championed by Senator Kennedy and
Senator Boxer, Congresswoman Lowey from New York, and others.
Two years ago, this program received $1 million from Congress. Then
it grew the year before last to $40 million, and then last year, to $200
million, in the budget I signed, serving a quarter of a million
children. Yet, the demand for quality after-school programs, the
bipartisan support it has gained, and its potential to transform public
education in America and the futures of our children far, far outweigh
the investment we have made to date.
Therefore, today I am pleased to announce that in the new budget I
will present to Congress this year, we will triple our investment in
academically enriched after-school programs to give over 1 million
children across America somewhere to go.
Now, you heard Lissette talking about the Chicago system. It's one I
particularly favor. And last year I asked the Congress to set aside some
funds that we could give to other school systems to help to adopt the
comprehensive approach they have there. That is, no social promotion;
more parent involvement in the schools; high standards, but don't flunk
anybody because the system is failing the kids, don't say the kids are
failing; give them the after-school programs, give them the summer
school programs, give them the tools they need to succeed. So we are
going to give priority to communities that end social promotion in the
right way.
She talked about that eighth grade test. Hillary and I, when we were
working together in Arkansas on education, made our State the first
State in the country to have an eighth grade exit exam. But I never saw
it as a way of identifying children who were failing. I thought it would
identify the schools that were failing and give the children a chance to
succeed. And that's what they believe in in Chicago and what we should
believe in everywhere.
So I'm looking forward to working with all the Senators and House
Members who care so much about this, both to improve after-school
programs and to end social promotion but to do it in the right way. We
have to do everything in our power--after school, smaller classes,
better teachers, modernized facilities, Internet
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hookups, summer programs--to help our kids succeed. We have to have high
standards not only for students but for the preparation of our teachers
and for the performance of our schools. And I'll have more to say about
that later.
Scarce dollars should not be spent on failed policies. If we've
learned anything, Hillary and Dick Riley and I, after 20 years and more
of working at this, listening to teachers and parents, going into
schools, it is what Congressman Ford said: We do believe all children
can learn. And that gives a much greater urgency to this work.
Look, this is not really just about making the American economy
strong or even making sure that when we baby boomers retire we'll be
supported by two workers that made B's or better instead of a 1.7.
[Laughter] It makes a good point, but that's not really what this is
about. Everybody just gets one chance. Everyone just has one life. This
is about giving people a chance to make the most of that one life. This
is about the sure knowledge we have that the rest of us will just be
fine, everything is going to work out all right, if we give our children
the chance to make the most of their lives.
I watched Harold Ford up here giving
that speech, and I thought, there's a 28-year-old young guy with his
whole life before him. And I knew that he had a family that told him he
had to show up in the morning, that his work was school, that he was
expected to learn. And I want that for every child.
You know, I go to a lot of schools. Today when I speak to children--
I was out in Maryland or Virginia not long before last November, and I
was talking to this group of kids, this wonderful group of kids. And
they said, ``You know, all the parents are going to come, and we just
only wish we had time to translate your remarks into Spanish and into
Arabic, because there are so many parents who can't understand you.''
That's the America of tomorrow.
In a global society where we're trying to get other people to put
aside their hatreds, to lay down the burdens of the past, to embrace one
another, to reach across the lines that divide them, that's a great
resource. But the challenge of giving all of the children, from whatever
backgrounds they come from, the chance to make the most of that one life
is more formidable than ever. Because of these after-school programs, a
million kids will have a better chance. That's really what this is all
about, a million more stories like those two beautiful pictures that
Lissette showed us today. And that's what
we should always, always remember.
Thank you very much.
Note: The President spoke at 3:28 p.m. in the East Room at the White
House. In his remarks, he referred to Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founder,
Special Olympics; and Lissette Martinez, parent-mentor coordinator,
Frederick Funston Elementary School, Chicago, IL, and her husband,
Leonard.