    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [October 28, 1999]
    [Pages 1897-1905]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at a Blue Ribbon Schools Award Ceremony
    October 28, 1999

        Thank you. Good morning. Congratulations. I want to begin by
    thanking Ruth Summerlin for her introduction
    and for the power of her example which includes not only turning her
    school around but asking for a little more help. Did you notice the way
    she slipped that in there? [Laughter] That was pretty impressive.
        I want to thank Secretary Riley for his
    wonderful leadership. All the things he said about me, he might have
    said about himself. He is clearly not only the longest serving but the
    ablest, the most dedicated, and most effective Secretary of Education we
    have ever had.
        When the new millennium rolls around in January, we will have
    completed 21 years of working together, as friends and colleagues, since
    we were young Governors in the South trying to start our education
    reform programs,

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    more than two decades ago. And every year has been a joy, and I'm very
    grateful for what he's done in this
    administration.
        I want to acknowledge the presence in the audience of Vincent
    Ferrandino, the executive director of the
    National Association of Elementary School Principals. And I also want to
    thank Bill Ivey--as the Secretary did--the
    chair of the NEA and say just a brief word about--before I get into a
    couple of other announcements--about what Ruth said about bringing the
    arts back into the schools. I would urge all of you to see this new
    movie that's out, that I had screened at the White House, starring Meryl
    Streep, called ``Music of the Heart,'' about
    the East Harlem violin program.
        But I have been mortified at the collapse of the availability of
    music and the arts in the schools all over America because of all kinds
    of issues that you understand better than I do. But I've been active in
    VH1's effort to get people to donate instruments and other support for
    music programs back in the schools. The NEA has worked very hard to
    support arts programs in the schools.
        There is not only concrete evidence that such programs improve
    student learning in others areas because of the way they make the brain
    work; there's also a lot of evidence that many people with equal
    learning capacities learn in different ways, in ways that sometimes are
    nonlinear. And I think it is a terrible mistake to deprive these
    children of access to music and the arts if we can avoid it at all. So I
    urge you to look at the movie. And for those of you who agree, this
    movie may give you a lot of boost, because I'll be surprised if it's not
    also a commercial success. It's a terrific film.
        Now, I'd also like to say a word about some new economic news before
    I get into talking about education. When I came here as President,
    almost 7 years ago, our administration--Vice President Gore and I--we
    said we would try to turn America around. And a lot of people have
    forgotten it. There was a lot of economic distress then, an enormous
    amount of social division--we'd had that big riot in Los Angeles--a lot
    of alienation, and a sense of political drift. And so we said, ``Give us
    a chance, and we will have economic policies that promote opportunity
    for all, social policies that promote responsibility from all, and a
    community of all Americans. We'll try to pull this country together and
    move it forward.''
        A big part of our economic policy was investing in our people, from
    early childhood up, also expanding our ability to sell American
    products, and finally, getting this deficit down and getting rid of it,
    which was keeping interest rates high and stagnating the economy all
    over America.
        We just got the news today that in the third quarter of this year--
    that is the quarter ending on the last day of September--our economy
    grew at an amazing rate of 4.8 percent, after growing 4.3 percent last
    year, 4.1 percent in 1996, and all of this with the lowest inflation
    rate in decades, while we were actually cutting the size of the Federal
    Government.
        So in the years since I've been President, the economy has grown 3.8
    percent. If you take out the shrinking of the Federal Government and the
    shrinking of the deficit, it's grown over the last 7 years by well over
    4 percent and with no inflation. It's virtually, as far as I know,
    unprecedented in our time.
        It has given us over 19 million new jobs; along with the welfare
    reform law, it's given us the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years; the
    lowest poverty rates in 20 years. And in the new housing numbers
    released today, more Americans now own their own homes, over two-thirds
    of us, for the first time in the history of the United States.
        The percentage of Hispanic- and African-American homeowners has also
    broken new records, as Hispanic- and African-American unemployment has
    dropped to record lows since we've been keeping separate statistics,
    nearly 30 years ago.
        This new report shows, once again, that if we have strong fiscal
    discipline, strong investment, and a strong commitment to education and
    the new economy, we can get an investment boom and maximize the benefits
    of the information and technology revolutions now going on all over the
    world.
        If we keep this going, in February, without having had a war, we
    will have the longest economic expansion in history. It's now the
    longest peacetime expansion in history. Wars guarantee you an economic
    expansion. In February, it will be the longest economic expansion of any
    kind in history, without a major conflict. And we can be very grateful
    for that. It's a tribute to the American people and their innovation.
        Yesterday I pointed out that we had the first back-to-back budget
    surpluses in 42 years; 42 years since the Government was in the black

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    2 years in a row. And that has saved us about $1.7 trillion in debt over
    what it was projected to be when I took office. And those savings are
    worth, to the average American family, $2,000 in lower mortgage rates,
    $200 in lower car payment rates, $200 in lower college loan rates.
        This is the good news. But we now have a chance that no generation,
    at least in my lifetime, has had to shape the future of our dreams for
    our children in the absence of an overarching threat from without and in
    the absence of an overarching crisis within our borders. And I say that
    because the last time the economy was remotely this good was when I was
    a young man finishing high school in the early 1960's. But we had to
    deal with the civil rights challenge. It was an honor and a
    responsibility, but it had to be done. And then we had to deal with all
    the controversy about the war in Vietnam, our role in it, the cost of
    it, and we never got around to finishing our assault on poverty and
    doing a lot of other things.
        But a lot of great things happened then, including Medicare and
    Medicaid and the first substantial Federal aid to education, because of
    the potential. But never in my lifetime have we had the chance we now
    have to shape the future of our dreams for our children.
        And since all of you deal with children all the time, I think you
    know the wisdom of something a wise, old sage told me 20 years ago in
    politics when I got elected Governor at 32. I was too young to know what
    I was doing, I think, at the time. [Laughter] But he said, ``Let me tell
    you something, Bill. In this life, you're always most vulnerable when
    you think you're invulnerable.'' And if you think about it, what I want
    you to understand is, countries are no different than businesses or
    schools or families or individuals. When things are rocking along really
    good, because we're human, it's easy to get distracted. When there is a
    threat, it's easy to be focused.
        I told somebody the other day--I got a big laugh--I said, ``You
    know, I get so angry at all these conflicts around the world and these
    expressions of hatred here at home based on race or religion or sexual
    orientation. If we were being attacked by space aliens, like in that
    movie, `Independence Day,' we'd all be looking for a foxhole to get in
    together and a gun to pick up together.'' The absence of a threat
    sometimes causes us to lose our sense of focus, our center, our
    concentration.
        But the truth is that this is the greatest opportunity that we've
    had in my lifetime. And so we have to look to the great challenges of
    the future, because we know that they're out there. There's going to be
    twice as many of us over 65 in 30 years, only two people working for
    every one person drawing Social Security. So for younger people, it's
    imperative that we reform Social Security and Medicare, so that the baby
    boom generation, when we retire, doesn't bankrupt our children and their
    ability to raise our grandchildren.
        We know the recovery of our economy has left a lot of people and
    places behind, probably in a lot of communities represented here. We now
    have a chance to embrace those places and the working poor of our
    country in a way we never have. And we better do it now, when the
    economy's good.
        We know that we have a chance to get not only--now we're paying down
    the debt. We paid the debt down $140 billion in the last 2 years. The
    most we ever did. We can actually get rid of it in 15 years. Can you
    imagine, in 1992, if I'd run for office and said, ``Folks, we've got
    this $300 billion deficit. Vote for me. I'll give you back-to-back
    surpluses. I'll pay $140 billion on the debt, and I'll show you how to
    get us out of debt for the first time since 1835?'' People would have
    said, ``You know, he seems like a nice young man, but we'd better send
    him home to Arkansas. He's a little touched in the head.'' [Laughter]
        But we can do that now. And we ought to do it, because we ought to
    keep the interest rates down, we ought to keep the economy going, we
    ought to keep things moving. And I'm smart enough to know when this
    happens, the State taxes roll in, and the State coffers are in good
    shape, and they have more money to give to schools. And that's
    important, to keep the economy going to help the schools. It's
    important.
        But one challenge above all we have to look at, and that is the fact
    that we now have the largest and most diverse group of students in our
    history and more diversity everywhere. And my home State of Arkansas,
    which, in the 1980 census was second only to West Virginia in having the
    highest percentage of people living in the State that were born in the
    State, this year was second in the country in the percentage

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    growth of the Hispanic population. There's a Catholic church in the
    northwest part of my State in an area where there were no minorities 20
    years ago, literally, none when I started out in politics, that now has
    to have mass in Spanish every single Sunday.
        Across the river here, there's a Baptist minister from Arkansas who
    is the cousin of my minister at home, who moved up here to find that the
    biggest congregation he had besides the regular one at 11 o'clock every
    Sunday morning was a separate Korean congregation. And he now has these
    massive language classes in his church. These things--America is
    changing, and all of you are dealing with this.
        Now, our Founders understood all this. If you go back to the dawn of
    the Republic, Thomas Jefferson said, ``an enlightened citizenry is
    indispensable to the proper functioning of a republic.'' And keep in
    mind, what does the Declaration of Independence say? We're establishing
    a democratic republic because it's the best way for people to pursue
    life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Then Jefferson said,
    because an enlightened citizen is indispensable for the proper
    functioning of a republic, he went on to say, ``therefore, educate and
    inform the whole mass of people.''
        So they knew then what is even more true today because of the nature
    of the economy and society in which we live. Every one of you
    representing every one of these 266 blue ribbon schools is, therefore,
    living out the faith of the Founders of this country, that all of our
    children can learn and that all of them must learn. And for that, we are
    all in your debt. There are schools here from every region and every
    neighborhood. In each of your schools there are many differences, but in
    each school, students are learning at a high level.
        We have already made some real progress in the last few years, and I
    think it's worth pointing out. The very idea of standards, which was
    championed in our Goals 2000 legislation and embodied in 1989 in the
    National Education Goals, is now taking root across the country. But it
    takes a good while to turn the education system around. In 1996, as late
    as 1996, there were only 14 States with measurable performances for
    students, measurable standards for students' performance--1996. Today,
    there are 50. That may be one reason why reading and math scores are up
    nationwide, including in some of our most disadvantaged poor areas,
    urban, small town, and rural.
        More and more schools are reducing class size with the help of the
    initiative begun last fall, the bipartisan support of Congress to put
    30,000 of our goal of 100,000 new, highly trained teachers in the
    classroom. Greenwood Elementary in Newport News, a blue ribbon winner,
    hired new teachers this fall, bringing class sizes down in the first and
    second grades, from 27 children per teacher to 20. And you just heard
    Ruth say that they had used the class size funds to have teachers in her
    school.
        Many other blue ribbon schools are using the Vice President's E-rate program to connect their classrooms and
    libraries to the Internet. I just want to talk about that a minute. A
    few years ago the Vice President and I went out to California for the
    first of our NetDays, and we hooked up--we wired a school so that all
    the classrooms could be hooked up to the Internet, as part of our goal
    of trying to get everybody hooked up by the end of next year. And we
    were wiring this school, and I looked at him, and I said, ``Well, how
    are these places going to afford to use the Internet?'' It's sort of an
    Alphonse and Gaston routine we do; the fact that I'm technologically
    challenged has become legendary in our administration. [Laughter]
        And he said, ``Well, we've got to give them a discount.'' And so we
    came up with this idea in the Telecommunications Act of giving the
    Federal Communications Commission the ability to give a discount for
    schools and hospitals and libraries. And there was the awfulest
    squalling about it you ever heard around here for a long time. And our
    political opponents started calling it Gore
    tax--[laughter]--you know, on the takeoff, because he likes to run
    around in GORE-TEX, I guess. [Laughter] But we were attacked for it. We
    were opposed in it, but we hung in there. And it was the right thing to
    do, and that E-rate has literally empowered--some of our poorer schools
    get a 90 percent subsidy for the E-rate. And it has been a wonderful
    thing, because one of the things we cannot do in this country is allow a
    digital divide to develop. It already exists. We're determined to close
    it.
        Our objective is to see Internet access in America become as
    universal as telephone access. And if we can do that, we will open up
    all kinds of educational and economic opportunities to people and places
    left behind. I also

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    believe if we can have the same sort of penetration around the world in
    poor countries of cell phones and the Internet as quickly as possible, a
    lot of countries with whom we deal and whom we'd like to help could skip
    30 years of economic development and make a great leap into the new
    century.
        So I want to thank you, all of you who supported us with the E-rate
    program, because it's making a big difference. For example, to mention
    one of the schools here, with the help of the E-rate, seventh graders at
    Whitebead School in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, are communicating directly
    with scientists conducting research in Africa. I didn't do that when I
    was in the seventh grade. [Laughter] Students are writing papers based
    on that research. The E-rate gives every seventh grader in America at
    least the chance to do that as we get the schools wired and hooked up.
        And Secretary Riley would never forgive
    me if I didn't mention this, just parenthetically. Some of our schools
    are too old to be wired and too decrepit. And they need to be modernized
    and rewired in all kinds of ways. One of our proposals here that is not
    particularly costly would allow us to help local school districts build
    or modernize 6,000 schools. And if you're for that, I hope you'll help
    us pass it.
        In Philadelphia, the average school building is 65 years old; New
    York City, 40 percent of the schools are over 70 years old--40 percent.
    All kinds--there's a large number of schools that are schools that are
    still heated by coal furnaces. And then I've been to--I was in a little
    town in Florida the other day where they had a dozen trailers behind the
    school building--a dozen--just one little school. So this is a big
    issue, and I hope that we can continue to work on it.
        But to begin with the good news. You should all be very proud, not
    only of what you have done but of what you represent. In the last 16
    years since the issuance of the ``Nation At Risk'' report in 1983, there
    has been a sea change in attitudes and commitments on the part of
    American educators and their supporters, among parents and business
    leaders and community leaders, and a genuine commitment to excellence in
    education from all kinds of schools in all kinds of places.
        And it's been a difficult process because some schools have adequate
    funding and some don't, and because, at least for the public schools,
    they get their money from three different places, which means that you
    have to hire more people in the administrative arm of the schools to
    keep up with and be accountable to. And there are all kinds of issues
    here.
        But we are getting it, and you prove that all of our kids can learn
    and that we can turn America's education system toward the 21st century,
    and that is the good news. But it is terribly important that we all
    recognize that we still have work to do and that this will always be a
    moving target. No one believes, yet, that we are giving every child in
    America a world-class education in K through 12. Everybody knows we have
    the best system of higher education in the world. Therefore, we cannot
    quit until we know that we have done the same with K through 12.
        And I think that this is the attitude we ought to have. Keep in
    mind, you don't know when we'll have an economic time like this again.
    You don't know when we'll be living through a time when we feel secure
    from outside threat again for this long a period of time. And I think
    when you go home, you need to try to give people some historical sense
    of this. And in your communities, you need to get people imbued with a
    passionate commitment about this and every other challenge.
        I'll give you another example. We've got the lowest crime rate in 30
    years now. Now, that's wonderful--[inaudible]--everyone who thinks it's
    low enough, please raise your hand. [Laughter] You see what I mean? So
    why should we quit until America's the safest big country in the world?
    If we want to be the freest big country, why not? Why shouldn't we be
    the safest big country in the world? Why shouldn't we keep working to
    keep guns out of the hands of criminals and children? Why shouldn't we
    keep working to make our--we should do it.
        The point I want to make--again, I know I'm preaching to the choir
    here, but this is important--is that this is a time for intense focus
    and commitment, and we are most in danger of being distracted and
    drifting around because things seem to be going so well. But make no
    mistake about it, we will pay an enormous price in opportunities
    foregone and future problems in our lap if we don't use this magic
    moment to build the future of our dreams. And it's especially true in
    education.
        And I am worried that what we see in Congress today in this debate
    on education is an

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    example of the kind of mental lapse or focus on short-term politics that
    we can see in other areas, not only in the Congress and in Washington
    but in the country, because it's so easy to indulge yourself in
    whatever's in front of your nose when things are rocking along and
    you're doing well. But it's a huge mistake.
        Now, in Washington the good news is--assuming we work through this
    attempt to have an across-the-board cut, which includes education, that
    I'm against, but assuming we do that, the big issue in Washington now is
    more on how we spend money. I mean, I've been fighting for 4 or 5 years
    on whether to spend adequate amounts of money; now, we're fighting about
    how to spend it.
        For example, last year we reached an agreement with Congress to
    begin hiring 100,000 new, highly trained teachers to lower class sizes
    in the early grades for obvious reasons. The size of our schools is
    exploding. And the research is clear that smaller classes and quality
    teachers bring higher achievements. Last year congressional Republicans
    not only agreed to it, they went home and campaigned on it and bragged
    about the fact that the proposal I made reflected Republican principles,
    because there was no bureaucracy in it. We just gave the money to the
    schools, and they hired the teachers. We disbursed the money; schools
    have gone out; they've hired new teachers.
        Now suddenly, the same people who, just before the election last
    year, thought this was the greatest thing since sliced bread, have not
    only refused to add any more teachers, they have abandoned the
    commitment to the ones we've already hired and proposed, basically, to
    just send the blank check to the districts, and if they don't keep the
    teachers, fine.
        So you have to understand, one of the key things in my mind about
    what this education debate is about is whether we're going to keep what
    we've done and continue to add to our goal of putting 100,000 teachers
    in the classroom. [Applause] It's very important. This debate is eerily
    reminiscent of the debate I had in 1994 in the Congress about putting
    100,000 police on the street. And it wasn't rocket science: Violent
    crime tripled between 1964 and 1994, and the size of our police forces
    went up 10 percent. A third-grade arithmetic student could figure out
    the ratio had gotten worse, and that was part of the problem. And part
    of the reason we've got the lowest crime rate in 30 years is we put
    those 100,000 police out there, ahead of schedule and under budget.
        So if it was true in law enforcement, it will be even more true in
    education. It's a very important issue. I thank you for your applause,
    but I want you to stay with us on this. This is not a partisan issue
    anywhere but Washington. And frankly, I still can't figure out how it
    got to be a partisan issue since just a year ago we were all being
    canonized by the same people for doing this.
        Now the budget debate is also about accountability, about getting
    real results for the education dollars. When all of us are held
    accountable for meeting higher standards and all the actors in education
    are given the resources they need to meet those standards from smaller
    schools to after-school programs, we have progress. And we have seen
    whole schools can be turned around in a relatively short period of time.
    Ruth explained how her school was selected by
    the State of South Carolina, given more resources, and turned itself
    around. This is not an isolated case.
        Two years ago, North Carolina drew up a list of the State's 15 worst
    performing schools, sent assistance teams to each school, and focused on
    them. A year later, 14 of the 15 schools had been taken off the bad
    performance list.
        Last year, I was in Cabrini-Green in Chicago, one of the biggest
    housing projects in the country, one of the most difficult areas in the
    country, and one of the poorest areas in any big city in the country, to
    visit an elementary school which has had unbelievably poor performance.
    In 2 years, under the new system they have there, they doubled their
    math scores and tripled their reading scores. That's pretty good in 2
    years. And even though they started from a low base, they're moving in
    the right direction. If you double your performance every 2 years, you
    can go from a very low base to 100 percent in no time. So it's very
    important.
        Our budget has dedicated $200 million to set aside funds to help
    States and school districts all over America put together teams that
    would identify and help to turn around or shut down the lowest
    performing schools. It's not a lot of money, but it's a very big deal
    because not every State is doing this. And I have a very strong
    conviction that--you know, I believe that social promotion should be
    ended. But I don't think you should identify schools or students

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    as failures and then tell the kids there is something wrong with them
    when the system is failing them. So I think we have to have systems in
    every State in the country to turn around these schools, because they
    can all be turned around.
        I don't understand why the Congress has refused to put a dime into
    this $200-million proposal to turn around low-performing schools. I know
    there is not going to be a press conference where the Republican leaders
    stand up and say, ``We are unalterably opposed to accountability,'' or,
    ``We're fine on accountability, but we want to punish the students
    instead of make the schools better.'' Maybe they think people just wake
    up in the morning knowing how to do this. But if everyone knew how to do
    it, it would be done now in every State in the country, in every school
    district.
        So again, I ask for your help here. I presume in this room there are
    people who are Republicans and Democrats, people who disagree on all
    different kinds of issues. But if we've got something that we know
    works, then--to go back to the Framers; they said all of the States were
    supposed to be the laboratories of democracy. But in a laboratory, when
    you find a scientific discovery, you publish the results as soon as
    possible. Then everybody takes it on board, and they build on that
    scientific discovery and go on to the next one.
        In education, when somebody does something that's a true
    breakthrough, sometimes it takes 3 years to get 15 miles down the road.
    [Laughter] You know this is true, don't you? You know this is true. This
    is true. I've been working this for 20 years. I can say it's one of our
    continuing difficulties here. So that's what we're trying to do.
        Now, I don't believe that the leaders in Congress can explain why
    they thought the 100,000 teachers was a good idea last year and this
    year they're against it. I don't believe they can explain why we have a
    measure here that we know has succeeded in turning around failing
    schools in more than one State--that, I might add, the Republican
    Governors have come out and endorsed--that they won't fund.
        They also are opposed to our proposal to help build or modernize
    6,000 schools. Now, they also are opposed to funding our troops-to-
    teachers program, which has been very successful but very limited,
    trying to get retired military people to go into the schools in the
    areas where there's a teacher shortage. Very important where we need
    more male teachers, particularly for role models. It's a very important
    issue here.
        Although, I might say, because the military has opened up more
    opportunities for women, more and more women are staying as career
    officers and coming out, too, and enlisted people. But this is a really
    successful program. And I asked them to make it much bigger because
    we've got to hire 2 million new teachers, as Dick Riley has been telling me for years, as so many retire. So we've
    got a large number of teachers retiring, more and more kids coming into
    the schools; we've got to hire more teachers.
        But again, for reasons I do not understand, there was no funding for
    our troops-to-teachers program to get more of these good people who are
    leaving the military, many of them quite young, in their forties, to go
    into the schools and give 20 more good years or more to the education of
    our children.
        So the labor and education appropriations bill that the Congress is
    about to consider shortchanges education. You should also know that now
    they're proposing to make across-the-board cuts in everything from the
    FBI to national defense to the environment to education. Now, if that
    bill passes, I will veto it, because I think we need more teachers, more
    accountability, and more investment in education.
        I do not believe that the proper response to America's education
    challenge is fewer teachers, no accountability, and across-the-board
    cuts in education. I want to hire 100,000 more teachers, 50,000 more
    police. I want to protect the environment. I want us to invest in
    education strategies that work.
        Look, we've got the first back-to-back surpluses in 42 years. The
    debate you're hearing over the budget is because, for the first time in
    decades, it is now possible for us to separate the budget that comes
    from--the surplus that comes from your Social Security taxes from the
    surplus that comes from other things. All these years before last year,
    all these years, for 20 years, you've been seeing what the deficit was.
    If you took away the surplus we got from people paying more into Social
    Security than they were taking out, which was a way of preparing for the
    baby boomers, the deficit would have been much bigger.
        So for the first time--you need to know that's why we're having
    this--you must think this is

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    crazy, why--they've got a surplus, and they're cutting stuff. What is
    going on here? What you need to know is that leaders of both parties
    agreed at the beginning of this year that they would not spend the
    Social Security surplus anymore and only spend money coming out of the
    non-Social Security surplus.
        Now, the good news is that that helps us pay down the debt. It
    doesn't do anything for Social Security, however, unless you take the
    interest savings from paying down the debt and put it into the Social
    Security Trust Fund, as I have recommended, so we can take it out to
    2050 and take care of all the baby boom retirement, take a big burden
    off all your minds. That's another issue that I want to do.
        So the reason we're having this budget fight is that our prosperity
    and this surplus made it possible for the first time in two decades to
    segregate out the Social Security surplus. We've been spending the
    Social Security surplus up here since who shot John. [Laughter] And
    economically, there's no difference in the two. It's just a good thing
    to set it aside, because it helps us to pay the debt down. And then it
    will make it easier, I hope, for Congress next year, if not this year,
    to agree with me to take the interest savings from paying the debt down
    and put it into Social Security, which so far, they haven't done--which
    leaves a much smaller amount of money to fund things. And this Congress
    has already spent $18 billion more than that, and they tried to say they
    weren't spending the Social Security surplus, trying to blame us with
    wanting to, which is a miracle how they got that done. [Laughter]
        But you need to know, and when you go back home--I can imagine the
    American people must be totally bumfuzzeled--keep announcing surpluses,
    and we keep having budget fights. That's what's going on here. They
    committed to start right now not spending the Social Security surplus.
    So I said, ``Okay, if you want to do that and you want to spend all this
    money on defense and we're going to adequately fund education, the
    environment, and health care, then here's what we ought to do. Here's
    some corporate loopholes we ought to close. We ought to make the
    polluters pay for their toxic waste dumps. And I think we ought to have
    an increase in the cigarette tax, and that's good health policy
    anywhere.'' That's what I said.
        They said, ``Nah, we don't want to do any of that.'' So they did
    things like say the census was an emergency. We've seen it coming for 10
    years; most emergencies are something of a surprise. [Laughter] They
    said that--I mean, this is a strange world up here. [Laughter] I want
    you to know what's going on here. They also said that a lot of the
    ordinary expenses of the Pentagon--I mean, people go to work over there
    every day--they've said that these are emergencies, even though the cold
    war's over. Just showing up for work is an emergency. [Laughter] I mean,
    this is--because if they can--you know, they take this stuff off the
    books, and then that helps them play these budget games.
        And then when I say, ``But you're not spending enough on education,
    and we've got to fund the Middle East peace process, and we've got to
    fund our efforts to take down and destroy nuclear weapons in Russia,
    make the world a safer place, and we've got to fund our responsibilities
    to the United Nations,'' then they go out and say, ``Oh, Bill Clinton
    wants to spend the surplus for foreign aid,'' run all these little ads
    and stuff. It's a strange world up here.
        And what I'm saying is--you all laughed when I said this before, I
    referenced that movie, ``Independence Day,'' but you know, if we were
    being attacked by space aliens, we wouldn't be playing these kind of
    games. These kind of games are only possible because the economy is
    strong and the American people are self-confident, and people believe,
    therefore, that this is a moment when they can do frivolous things that
    they otherwise would never consider doing to try to get short-term
    political advantage. But it's a huge mistake, because our children are
    still out there and they are bigger and more diverse than ever before as
    a group and they have these massive challenges. And all of you have
    proved that we can give them a world-class education. So we don't have
    any excuse anymore. You show up in town, and you say, ``Look, all
    children can learn. Look what we did. We don't have any excuse.''
        So I will say again, this should not be a partisan issue. We can
    find a way through this budget business. It's about accounting and
    taking modest, difficult measures. But we cannot sacrifice our
    responsibility to meet these big, long-term challenges, because we have
    never had a chance like this in our lifetime. Everybody in this audience
    that's anywhere remotely my age, you just think about it. Think about
    it.

    [[Page 1905]]

        We spent the 1930's trying to survive the Depression. We spent the
    1940's trying to survive World War II and get ready for the cold war. We
    spent the 1950's and the 1960's trying to survive the cold war, dealing
    with the civil rights crisis, and then dealing with Vietnam, and it drug
    into 1975. And then we had the oil price shocks and all of our economic
    problems that went all the way into the 1980's. The Berlin Wall fell 10
    years ago. We spent the early part of this decade turning the economy
    and the social problems around of this country and getting us in a
    position where we could literally explode. That's where we are now.
        You represent proof positive that we can give every American child
    the education that he or she deserves, not only to thrive in the new
    century but to ensure the success of the United States. And your
    dedication to tomorrow and the fact that every day you have to get up
    and think about not only today's lessons plan but what these little
    children are going to turn out like, that is the attitude we need here
    in Washington, across party lines.
        So I ask you all--you have shown us the way--do what you can to
    effect the attitudes here. Do what you can to be heard here, and say,
    ``Let's take this way beyond partisan politics. There's plenty to argue
    about down the road, but our children deserve our best. And our best
    should be driven by what our local principals and our local educators
    say, what the education research says, what we know works.''
        You have proved to us what works. All I'm trying to do is to figure
    out how to spread it more quickly and give people who are in real
    economic binds the opportunity to access things that others regularly
    take for granted.
        We could be going into America's greatest years. I believe we are.
    But we dare not squander this magic moment.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 10:23 a.m. in the International Ballroom
    Center at the Washington Hilton Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to
    Ruth Summerlin, principal, Beaufort Elementary School, Beaufort, SC. A
    portion of these remarks could not be verified because the tape was
    incomplete.