[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

[[Page 1854]]

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.