    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [October 22, 1999]
    [Pages 1849-1854]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks to the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards
    October 22, 1999

        Thank you. Thank you so much. I was thinking how much help I need in
    trying to get what I say to certain people in the Congress not to go in
    one ear and out the other. [Laughter] And that maybe I should go through
    this training program. [Laughter] I believe everything Carole Moyer
    said, except the part about having been a teacher for 32 years.
    She looks like she was about 12 when she
    started. [Laughter]
        I want to thank Carole and your chair,
    Barbara Kelley. Thank you, Jim
    Kelley and Bob Wehling and Betty Hastert and all the
    others that are involved with the board. I'm glad to see the president
    of the National Education Association, Bob Chase, here. Thank you for coming, sir, for your support.
        And I have been honored to support this endeavor, since before I was
    President, as has been said. But the person who deserves all the credit,
    in my view, without whom none of us would be here today, is Governor Jim
    Hunt from North Carolina. Thank you.
    Thank you.
        I've told this story before, but I probably wouldn't be here today,
    either, because in 1979, Jim Hunt, who
    was a far senior Governor to me then, decided that I should become the
    vice chair of the Democratic Governors' Association. And then I became
    the chair. Then I became the youngest former Governor in history, but
    that wasn't his fault. [Laughter] But it was sort of my board
    certification in national politics that Jim Hunt gave me. So I might not
    be here as President today if it weren't for him, either.
        This has been a great week for me and for our administration. We
    celebrated the fifth anniversary of AmeriCorps, our national service
    program. And we've now had 150,000 young people serve and earn credit
    for going to college. It took the Peace Corps about 23 years to have
    that many volunteers. So that's been really great. And we also, I might
    say, have been able to get from the Congress the largest expansion in
    the Peace Corps in a generation, as well. That's been a very good thing.
        Today Hillary and I are sponsoring a White House Conference on
    Philanthropy. And we're going to try to find ways not only to increase
    the aggregate level of private giving in the aftermath of the vast
    amounts of wealth that have been generated in our country in the last 7
    years but to target it in the right way, in ways that I hope it will
    help your children and your concern.
        I even had a pretty good meeting with the congressional leadership.
    [Laughter] We're actually working to try to work through our differences
    on the budget, and I'll have more to say about that in a few moments. A
    couple of them who weren't there persist in trying to accuse us of doing
    what they have done on the Social Security surplus. But I'm committed to
    turn the other cheek until we see if we can work it out together. I
    guess it's easier when you're not running for anything to do that.
    [Laughter]
        You might find this interesting, as a sort of a prelude to what I
    want to say. Hillary had this great
    idea that we should do some special things for the millennium, that we
    shouldn't build a big building or anything like that; we should try to
    preserve as many of our big, national treasures as possible, like the
    Star Spangled Banner and the Bill of Rights and the Constitution and the
    Declaration of Independence, all of which are in danger--and so we have
    been working to raise the funds to do that--that we should go around the
    country and help people in every community preserve their own piece of
    our national heritage; that we should have a big--then we should think
    about the future we want and make a big effort to increase research
    dollars, which we have done; and that we should sponsor at the White
    House

    [[Page 1850]]

    an unusual set of what she called Millennium Evenings, where we would
    talk about topics that were either important to the last century, the
    one we're leaving, or important to the next century.
        It has been an amazing experience, an amazing educational
    experience. C-SPAN covers all of these. Sometimes CNN takes a big chunk.
    But the main way by which we communicate with the rest of the country
    and the rest of the world is through the Internet, and at the end of our
    little programs, we take Internet questions. They always come in from
    all over the world. It's just an amazing experience.
        We started out with the great professor of American history and
    constitutional history Bernard Bailyn, from
    Harvard, who talked about our past and our institutions and how we got
    started and how that will be relevant to the 21st century. We've had all
    kinds of other fascinating topics. We had the three last poet laureates
    of America come with inner-city kids from Washington and just ordinary
    citizens, read poetry and talk about what it meant. We had the great
    Wynton Marsalis, the only living musician
    from New Orleans--he is the only living musician who is both the best
    classical and the best jazz musician in his instrument in the world,
    come and talk about the history of jazz as a uniquely American art form
    in the 20th century.
        We had the great British scientist Stephen Hawking, who has lived longer with Lou Gehrig's disease than anyone
    else, come and talk about black holes and undiscovered galaxies in space
    and how our notion of time will alter and our understanding of it will
    alter in the 21st century. Elie Wiesel came and
    talked about the price of indifference, from the Holocaust forward, and
    all the racial and ethnic turmoil we've had. It's been amazing.
        But last week we had a man named Vint Cerf there, who was sort of the creator of the architecture of
    the Internet, who sent the first E-mail, 18 years ago, to his profoundly
    deaf wife, who had been deaf from early
    childhood and so deaf that no hearing aids would help her. So the E-mail
    got started as a way of communicating. He was there, along with a
    professor from Harvard of genomics, named Lander, who was talking about our efforts to complete the human
    genome project, to break down all the secrets of the gene.
        Now, what they did was, they talked about the interconnection of the
    computer revolution to the genomics revolution. And both said, ``Look,
    we couldn't be unlocking the mysteries of the gene if it weren't for
    computer advances, because that's really what enables us to map out the
    gene, chart it, and see what's going on. And it will also enable us to
    actually find practical applications for the challenges we find when we
    look at the human gene structure.''
        And then Mr. Cerf, who was the Internet
    fellow who did the E-mail 18 years ago to his wife said, ``Now, for example, my wife was profoundly deaf
    for 50 years. And a very small digital device has now been inserted deep
    within both her ears, and she can hear after 50 years of total
    deafness.'' And he introduced her, and she stood up, and she talked
    about what it was like. She said, ``I went to a James Taylor concert the
    other night''--[laughter]--some of you are too young to appreciate this.
    [Laughter] And she said, ``I'm quite sure I'm the only person who heard
    `Fire and Rain' for the first time in the late nineties.'' It was an
    amazing thing. She talked about what it was like to hear the birds sing
    in the morning.
        But the point is, digital technology combined with medical science
    made this possible. And they speculated that--we've been spending a lot
    of time in the medical research trying to help people with spinal cord
    injuries. And last year we had a nerve transplantation in a laboratory
    animal from the legs to the spine in a way that for the first time ever
    in the lab with an animal allowed an animal with a severed spine to
    recover movement in its lower limbs. Stunning! These people were saying,
    what we may be able to do now is to develop digital technology, key to
    the genetic breakdowns in the nerves, that we can insert--we can
    actually insert a device in the spine that will replicate the normal
    spine and give people movement without having to figure out whether the
    nerve transplants will take.
        What does all that have to do with you? First of all, it means that
    it's important that all of our children learn and that we develop a
    level of comfort with basic technology and basic scientific concepts
    that most people didn't need in times past.
        The second point I want to make to you, which will be important to
    you because you know we have the largest and most diverse student
    population in history, is the genomist

    [[Page 1851]]

    said--a fascinating thing--he said we've got these 100,000 genes and
    billions of possible permutations, but what you should know is that all
    human beings, genetically, are literally 99.9 percent the same.
        He said the second thing you should know, which he said was to him
    even more amazing, is if you take any given racial group--let's say you
    had a bunch of Hispanics here and a bunch of Asians here, and you had
    people from the Mediterranean countries and Europe here, and people from
    an African country over here--he said, if you get 100 people in each of
    these separate racial groups, the genetic differences of the individuals
    within the group would be greater than the genetic differences from
    group to group--very interesting--providing scientific support for what
    you try to do every day, which is to convince your kids that all
    children can learn, that there is no reason for us to fight with one
    another because of our differences, that all these troubles that are
    gripping the world, all over the world, the racial, the ethnic, the
    tribal, the religious differences have to be somehow overcome by
    understanding and teaching people that our common humanity is more
    important than the differences and that once you accept that, then the
    differences become interesting and make life more fun. But it is a very
    important thing, and it shows, again, the importance of learning to our
    common progress on this Earth.
        Now, that's why I think what all of you have done with the board
    certification is so important. I remember when you came to the White
    House with only 177 board-certified teachers. Some of you were there
    then. Now there's not enough room to keep you all in the White House,
    and the next time we might have to use RFK Stadium to have a meeting of
    all of you, and I would like that very much. [Laughter]
        I am very grateful for the progress that our country has made
    economically, socially, and in education. I am grateful that we've got
    the longest peacetime expansion in history and 19\1/2\ million new jobs,
    the lowest unemployment rate in 29 years, the lowest welfare roles in 30
    years, the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, the lowest crime rates in
    26 years, lowest murder rate in 31 years, first back-to-back budget
    surpluses in 42 years, and the Government is the same size it was when
    John Kennedy was here in 1962, 37 years ago. We have worked at this.
        But it's not enough. I am glad that we have virtually opened the
    doors of college to all people with the HOPE scholarships and the
    expanded Pell grants. I am glad we probably will succeed in connecting
    all of our classrooms to the Internet by 2000, except in the places
    where the school buildings are literally too decrepit to accept the
    wiring. I am glad that we have dramatically increased our investment in
    after-school programs. But there is more to do.
        I am very proud that the idea of standards is now taking root around
    the country. In 1996--listen to this--in 1996 there were only 14 States
    in the country that had measurable standards for student performance.
    Today there are 50. But there are still only about a dozen that have
    genuine accountability measures when the standards aren't met and
    aggressive strategies to identify failing schools and to turn them
    around. North Carolina does. That's one of the reasons they've had the
    best increases in student performance in the country. But all over the
    country, you see test scores going up even in the poorest inner-city and
    rural schools.
        Now, I say that and I gave you all this introductory information to
    try to set the proper context for the present budget debate. To most
    Americans, it's a lot of numbers and a lot of noise. To most Americans,
    it's the Republicans making the absurd claim that the Democrats want to
    spend the Social Security surplus, which has nothing to do with anything
    that's really going on up there.
        But there are things going on in the budget debate which are, in
    some ways, different from the ones we've had in the past but still very
    important. When it comes to education, the debate is not so much about
    money anymore as it is about values, priorities, and direction, not just
    about how much we spend but how we spend it. And a big part of this
    debate is about honoring our obligation to our children and our future.
    I was glad that you said your classes were smaller but still not small
    enough. [Laughter] There are many, many tens of thousands of teachers
    who can make that statement because we had the biggest class, biggest
    student load in history.
        So last year, right before the election, when everybody said--you
    know, there was so much acrimony in Washington; we can never get
    anything done. We passed this remarkable education budget that provided
    more funds for after-school programs and a big downpayment

    [[Page 1852]]

    on my commitment for 100,000 more teachers to lower class sizes, first
    in the early grades and then, when those class size numbers are met, the
    districts can have the money to use it elsewhere.
        And it was wonderful. The money we appropriated was enough for about
    30,000 of those 100,000 teachers, which is a lot in one year. It took
    us, for example, 5 years to get to our goal of 100,000 police officers.
    So I look forward to coming back this year and taking the second
    tranche. And imagine my surprise when the leadership of the Republican
    Congress, who had gone home and happily campaigned on this and how it
    might have been a Republican program because there was no bureaucracy--
    we just gave the school districts the money, and they hired the
    teachers--all of a sudden voted to do away with it, not only not to
    expand it above 30,000 but to take away the requirement that the money
    that was going to the teachers, go to them.
        Now, I don't understand exactly what's going on, but I do intend to
    stop it if I can because I think that's a mistake. That's bad
    educational policy. We need to help the school districts hire more
    teachers. Last year we agreed, and we should do it again. So one of the
    things the budget debate is all about is whether we will continue our
    commitment to help our schools hire 100,000 well-qualified teachers. And
    we have to reject the idea that we can't raise both the numbers of
    teachers in the classroom and the standards we hold them to.
        Our budget invests in improving teacher quality. We know one of the
    most important factors in a child's educational success is a trained,
    dedicated, talented teacher. And through your good work, we're adding
    more and more, and I intend to keep supporting you in every way I can. I
    wish and I hope that as time goes on we'll get more explicit support
    from the majority in Congress for this program, because it's so
    important.
        For all the good work you're doing, the fact is, a quarter of all
    secondary school teachers don't have college majors or even minors in
    the subjects they teach. Students with the highest minority enrollment
    have less than a 50-50 chance of having a math or science teacher with a
    license or degree in the field. Now, we can do better than that. And we
    have to.
        I think we should require States and school districts receiving
    Federal funds to stop the practice of allowing children to be taught by
    uncertified teachers. School districts should do that. So when we
    reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, one of the
    things we ought to do is to say, if you want the Federal money, this is
    one of the things you have to do. I think it's important. That's one of
    the things that our debate is all about.
        But we also have to invest. I've asked Congress to invest in
    recruiting, training, and supporting high-quality teachers in high-
    poverty areas. We have offered scholarships to a number of people that
    go to school and then, in effect, wipe off the cost of their education
    if they will go into areas where there is a high need. I have asked for
    an expansion of the troops for teachers initiative, which has already
    helped 3,000 active duty soldiers, who were planning to leave the
    military anyway, find rewarding second careers in teaching in our public
    schools.
        The budget bill, even though it has quite a lot of money in it--for
    reasons I don't understand--underfunds the teacher quality initiatives
    and doesn't provide a single penny for the troops for teachers programs.
    We need more and better teachers. The skills that a lot of these career
    military people have are desperately needed in a lot of the places where
    there is a significant teacher shortage. So that's what I am fighting
    for. It's not about money. It is about things that we know will work
    that will help our kids. That's one of the things this budget debate is
    all about.
        It's also about accountability. Where there is rising accountability
    to go with rising standards and a strategy to help people meet the
    standards, not just define them as failures, we have seen progress. Two
    years ago, North Carolina sent assistance teams to their 15 lowest
    performing schools. A year later, 14 of them had met their goals and
    were taken off the list--one year. We have seen the same kind of
    improvement in Chicago, Dade County, many other places. I was in one of
    the poorest neighborhoods in Chicago, in the large Robert Taylor Homes
    project, where they had an elementary school with terrible performance.
    In 2 years--2 years--they doubled their math scores and tripled their
    reading scores.
        So we can, by the same sort of concentrated effort--remember, if
    we're 99.9 percent the same genetically, we owe it to these kids to give
    them their chance at the brass ring of their life.

    [[Page 1853]]

        Our budget has $200 million to help States and school districts
    identify, turn around, or shut down the lowest performing schools. For
    example, districts could send board-certified teachers to help students
    and teachers get their schools back on track. Unfortunately, this
    Republican budget bill doesn't put a dime into the strategy of turning
    around low-performing schools. This is not just about saying, ``Well, I
    put that money up there, and they'll figure out how to spend it.'' If
    you know what works, based not on what somebody in Washington thinks
    works but based on what you proved works at the grassroots level, we
    have an obligation, in a world of limited resources, to spend the money
    on what you have told us and what you have demonstrated to us, works.
    That's what this budget debate is all about.
        That's why we've invested in after-school and summer school
    programs, providing extended learning time so that school districts can
    say, ``Okay, we're ending the practice of social promotion, but we're
    not branding the kids failures. We're giving them a chance to succeed.''
        And let me say another thing that I think will be increasingly
    important as we try to come to grips with the dropout rate and the
    consequences of it, is to reach young people at an early age to get them
    excited about academic achievement and to give them the sense that they
    have a personal possibility in the future.
        That's why we have worked hard to establish last year this GEAR UP
    mentoring initiative which allows college students and others to go into
    middle schools and show young people that if they do their work and they
    learn their subjects that they can all go on to college. Explain to them
    the HOPE scholarship. Explain to them the Pell grant. Show them, let
    them take home to their families exactly what kind of assistance they'll
    be able to get, so that they will know it is actual reality. It isn't
    enough to open the doors of college to all Americans. People have to
    know they've been opened. They have to be aware of these things.
        We do things in Washington; I sign a bill; we just assume everybody
    knows about it. That is the beginning, not the end. If nobody knows
    about these things, they might as well have not have been done. So
    that's a big part of what this budget is all about.
        We also have to ensure greater access of all kinds of students to a
    successful and complete high school education. That's what our Hispanic
    education action plan is all about. That's our fastest growing student
    group. And the Hispanic dropout rate exceeds 30 percent. It's a big
    problem. Last year, for all practical purposes, the African-American and
    white majority high school graduation rates were identical. There was a
    smidgen of a difference for the first time ever in our history. That's
    very good.
        I might say that I don't think either one of them were quite high
    enough, but they're good. They're up in the high eighties percent. Our
    national goal that we set 10 years ago was 90 percent on-time
    graduation. But that's good. But the Hispanic dropout rate--I think
    largely rooted in the fact that you've got a lot of first generation
    immigrant families whose first language is not English, compounding the
    fact that a lot of those kids may think they can get out and work for
    their families because they all just got here. And all first generation
    immigrant families, going back 100 years or more, have had a heritage of
    people of all ages in the family working.
        But the point is that long-term economic consequences to these
    children, and therefore to their families, are far more adverse and far
    more severe now than they would have been 30 years ago to dropping out.
    And a 30-percent dropout rate is simply too high.
        So one of my problems with this budget bill is that it underfunds
    the after-school programs, the summer programs. The House bill actually
    would have shut down the GEAR UP program that they created last year and
    bragged about in the election, and it's way short on the Hispanic
    education action priority. So we've got to give people the tools they
    need to succeed.
        Finally, this was mentioned earlier, but I am still fighting for our
    bill to build or modernize 6,000 schools. There are too many kids in old
    school buildings that can't be wired, too many kids in housetrailers,
    and too many school districts that can't undertake the costs of the
    building program all by themselves. So here is where we are. The good
    news is that we have, I think, an appropriate amount of money that has
    been set aside for education. The good news is yesterday we had our
    voucher debate, and the public school side won.
        That's the good news. But we do not have anything like having--
    because at this moment we have this surplus and we're at a moment of
    prosperity, we were able to agree generally

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    on what I think is an adequate increase in funding. But there is no
    commitment yet for more and better teachers, for smaller classes, for
    increased accountability, for higher standards, for giving the tools out
    there that we know that you know work.
        So the good news is that the debate is not about dollars. But the
    more important news is it is very much about direction. It is very much
    about direction. And just as I fought to get a modest amount of Federal
    money to support your program, because I do believe that when you are
    certified and you go through this process, it is not only good for you
    and good for your students; it's good for everybody that you come in
    contact with in your school.
        We were talking about, now you can see on the near horizon 25,000 of
    them. The reason that I said 100,000--that I want at least 100,000
    board-certified teachers is I do believe when you are dense enough, when
    there is one of you in every school building in America, there will be
    an exponential increase in your impact, that it will change the whole
    culture of virtually every school. And your skills and what your learn
    and how you will impart it to your colleagues will then be exploding,
    echoing across the country in a way that will embrace all the children
    in all our schools.
        But if you believe in what you've done, then I ask you to also
    believe in this, and help us say, ``Okay''--to the Congress--``thank you
    very much for not trying to cut out the money anymore. That's a big
    first step. But it does matter how you spend it.''
        And we're not trying to micromanage the schools. Dick Riley has gotten rid of two-thirds of the paperwork
    requirement on States and local school districts. We have scrapped more
    rules and regulations than all the previous administrations who railed
    about the Federal Government put together. But what we have not done is
    to abandon our responsibility to take the research and the reports from
    the grassroots level and say, if we're going to spend this money, since
    it's limited, we have to spend it in ways that it will have the highest
    impact: more teachers, higher standards, the tools that you need to do
    what you're out there trying to do.
        So I ask you to support it and help us, and I think we will prevail.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 10:25 a.m. in the Yorktown Ballroom at the
    Hyatt Regency Washington. In his remarks, he referred to Carole D.
    Moyer, National Board Certified Teacher, Salem Elementary School,
    Columbus, OH; Barbara B. Kelley, chair, James A. Kelley, founding
    president, and Robert L. Wehling, vice chair, National Board for
    Professional Teaching Standards; Betty Hastert, wife of House Speaker J.
    Dennis Hastert; Vinton G. Cerf, senior vice president for Internet
    architecture and technology, MCI WorldCom, and his wife, Sigrid; and
    Eric Lander, director, Whitehead Institute/MIT Center for Genome
    Research.