[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

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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.