[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000-2001, Book III)]
[October 24, 2000]
[Pages 2298-2303]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]
Remarks at a Tribute to Governor James B. Hunt, Jr., of North Carolina
October 24, 2000
Thank you very much. Well, first of all, to all our friends from
North Carolina, welcome to Washington. I'm glad you're here. The two
previous speakers have been two of the closest friends I've had in
politics and two of the best Governors with whom I've ever served. And
so I thank them both.
[[Page 2299]]
I want to start by saying a word about Governor Patton and then get into the tribute to Governor Hunt and what
all that means for what we're doing as Americans right now in this
election season.
First of all, Paul Patton ran for
Governor and won in Kentucky after Jim Hunt and I had been out working
on a lot of this stuff for years and years and years, going back to the
seventies. I have personally never seen anybody learn so much so fast
and have such an impact as Governor Patton did in Kentucky. I've never
seen anybody get up to speak so fast on things that he had not
previously lived with and worked with and have an immediate impact. And
along the way, he found the time to help Al Gore and me carry Kentucky
in 1992 and 1996, against enormous odds, where we had absolutely no
right to think we could win. And we sort of squeaked by both times. And
he has done a magnificent job.
But let me just give you one example. Several years ago, when
Secretary Riley, who also served with Jim
and me as Governor back in the seventies, early eighties, was--we
persuaded the Congress to adopt a bill saying that all the States ought
to have academic standards. Then we persuaded Congress to say that
States getting Federal money ought to at least have a system for
identifying their failing schools.
Paul Patton said, ``Well, if we're going to identify them, we might
as well do something about them.'' And so when I was--and I have been
trying to pass, with the support of Jim Hunt and Paul Patton, an accountability measure that Vice President
Gore has advocated in his campaign that
basically says that the recipient--it's real accountability. If Jim and
Paul and I had time, if we had another 30 minutes, we could explain to
you why the proposal of the Democratic nominee for accountability will
work better than the proposal of the Republican nominee for
accountability, based on our combined half-century of experience in
this.
Anyway, Patton says we ought to have--if we've got to identify these
failing schools, we ought to do something about them. So he comes up
with this system. I went to western Kentucky with Governor
Patton a few months ago, to try to persuade
the Congress to pass our bill, saying if you get this Federal aid, you
must not only identify the failing schools, you have to turn them around
within 2 years or shut them down and reopen them under new management.
Now, Jim has done something very like that in the most comprehensive
way in North Carolina, and I'll come back to that. So I'm in this school
in western Kentucky, in this low-income area, where over half the kids
are on school lunch, where 4 years ago this was one of the worst schools
in Kentucky. And they go through this system, and in 3 years, this is
what happened: They went from 12 percent of the kids reading at or above
grade level to about 60 percent; they went from 5 percent of the kids
doing math at or above grade level to 70 percent; they went from zero
kids in the whole school doing science at or above grade level to 63
percent--in 3 years.
And what does that show you? First of all, for those of us who have
been doing this for 20 years, we know something now we didn't know in
the late seventies, or we didn't know in '83 when the ``Nation At Risk''
report was issued. We actually know that you can identify failing
schools and turn them around. And nobody, no State has done it any more
systematically then he has. That school that was an abject failure is
now one of the top 20 schools in the State of Kentucky.
Thank you Governor, for your leadership.
I want to start with something personal. When I was elected Governor
in 1978, I got to serve with Jim Hunt, starting in '79. And he was a big
deal, even then. [Laughter] And I was 32 and looked like I was about 25.
You guys have taken care of that in the last 8 years. [Laughter] And you
know when you come to the end of a certain period in your life, as I am
coming to the end of my service as President--and this is the first
election in 26 years where I haven't been on a ballot somewhere, and
most days I'm okay about it--but you can look back over your life and
see a handful of people who did this, that, or the other thing for you,
without whom you might never have become President.
And in 1979 Jim Hunt told the Democratic Governors they should make
me the vice chairman of the Democratic Governors' Association, which, in
turn, would entitle me to become chairman. And I was, by 9 years, I
think, the youngest Governor in the country at the time. And nobody
had--it would never have happened--the only reason it happened is
because everybody thought he knew what he was talking about, and so they
said okay. [Laughter]
[[Page 2300]]
And it was the first significant national position of any kind I
had. And in 1980 I did become chairman of the Democratic Governors'
Association and got involved in a whole range of things that I had never
been involved with before and might never have come in contact with. So
for good or ill, depending on what you think of the Clinton Presidency--
[laughter]--I'm not sure I'd be here if it weren't for you.
And over more than 20 years now, Jim and Carolyn have been friends to Hillary and me. We always love
being with them. We follow the progress of our families and the ups and
downs and changes in our lives. And I have seen now that--he is the only
Governor I know that served in the seventies, the eighties, the
nineties, and the 21st century. [Laughter]
But as a result--he was kind of like me--if you really love being
Governor, you don't get tired of doing it, because it's the best job in
the world in so many ways. And there's nobody in my adult lifetime in
the United States who has served as a Governor who has done more for
education, children's health, or the long-term economic interests of a
State than Jim Hunt. He has the most sweeping, deep, consistent record
of public service over the longest period of time of any Governor in the
United States in my lifetime. And the people of North Carolina should be
very, very proud of that. It's an astonishing record.
Along the way, he's led your State through difficult times, like
those awful floods, and made sure that we here in Washington did our
part to help you recover. You have not really been in politics until you
have been lobbied by Jim Hunt for something. [Laughter] And if you don't
want to say yes, it's just like going to the dentist and having him yank
your teeth out without any kind of deadening on your gums. [Laughter] It
just never ends, and his capacity to guilt-trip you kind of goes up by
the day. [Laughter] So eventually you say yes, and then after a while,
you learn to say yes the first time you're asked because there's no
point in going through this. [Laughter]
He really did a great job for you on that. I've watched him with
these preschool programs and these early childhood health initiatives
and the efforts he's made to turn around his schools that were
underperforming. And along the way, he's done a lot of things
nationally, but one thing in particular I want to thank him for, because
he introduced me to the idea of the master teacher and National Board of
Professional Teaching Certification, the idea that we ought to have,
eventually, in every school building in America, somebody who has proved
not only that he or she knows the subject that they're teaching
completely, which is a big challenge today because we've got a teacher
shortage, but is also supremely gifted in the classroom and good at
teaching children.
So Jim worked for years and years and years on this National Board
for Professional Teaching Certification, and a few years ago he came to
the White House, and we kicked it off. And we certified, within a short
time, the first 500 teachers. Now we have about 5,000. By the time I
leave office, we'll have almost 10,000. And thanks to his leadership, we
have as part of our education budget the capacity to go to 100,000
master teachers over the next 3 or 4 years. And now we've got this huge
backlog. This is a big deal. The teachers, the men and women who get
national board certification, have to prove they know their subjects
well, that they are extremely skilled in the classroom, that they
understand how to relate to children and families.
And this is a huge professional distinction if they get it. We see
that every time there's one of these master teachers, just in one school
building, he or she can change the whole culture of education in the
building and infect everybody else with a certain enthusiasm and sense
of possibility and learning. This is something that's impossible to make
a headline out of. It's impossible to make it an issue in the
Presidential election. You know, it sounds like something little. It's
something huge. You've all seen that new book that's out called ``The
Tipping Point.'' That's what these master teachers are. They're not only
good in their classroom; they provide the tipping point of influence in
school after school after school.
So long after Jim Hunt is gone from the North Carolina Governor's
Mansion, this passion that he nurtured for years, when no one else was
paying attention, to train, identify, certify master teachers and then
get one in every school building in the country, will be revolutionizing
education and improving the futures of children not just in his native
State but throughout the United States.
[[Page 2301]]
There's nobody like you. And I love you, and I thank you for
everything you've done. Thank you.
Let me just say one other thing. What's all that got to do with this
election? Let me just make a couple of points here. I believe, and it's
already been said, that education is sort of at the center of this
Presidential election, and that's good. And then there are people that
view that cynically, because they say, ``Well, Presidents can get up and
talk about education, but after all, what can they do? It's only 7
percent of the total money we spend on our public schools.'' Well, let
me just say, when I got elected, it was under 6 percent and headed down.
So at least we got it back to 7.
But it seems to me that we ought to say that education is a
constitutional responsibility of the State, the operational
responsibility of the local schools and the districts, but it still is a
national priority. And what I have always believed is that we had a
special obligation, number one, just to invest more, because we've got
the biggest and most diverse group of schoolkids in our Nation's history
and because even though the school populations are bigger in many, many
States, a smaller percentage of the property owners who pay property
taxes have kids in schools. I know that seems counterintuitive, but
that's happening in State after State.
So the States need more resources, number one. And number two, there
is now, as I said a moment ago about the failing schools, we now know
something we didn't know in 1983, when the Governors were responding to
the national report called ``A Nation At Risk.'' We know things we
didn't even know in 1989, when the Governors met with President Bush and
articulated these national education goals for the next decade, to try
to be reached by the year 2000, about how to do this.
And our philosophy has been that we should not tell the States how
to do what they do, but we should fund those things that the research
and the educators tell us work. For example, one of the things--I wish
you had heard this in some of the discussions we've heard in this
election, but one of the things that I'm quite proud of is that under
Dick Riley, who was Governor of South
Carolina, as I said, with Jim and me in the seventies and the eighties,
the burden of regulations the Federal Government imposes on the States
and the school districts has actually been reduced by about two-thirds
below what it was in the previous administration. We have nearly doubled
funding for education and training, even as we have gone from a $290
billion deficit to a $230 billion surplus and shrunk the size of
Government to its lowest point in 40 years.
But we've tried to focus this money on what works. For example, when
I became President, we were giving no support to the States for after-
school programs and summer school and night programs, to turn the
schools into community learning centers, nothing, even though we knew
that we had all these latchkey kids and that they needed some place to
go.
Well, now, we're serving 800,000 of them, and we want to go to 1.6
million of them in this budget. And it's the best money we could spend.
And a lot of these schools have absolutely no capacity to afford things
like this unless we do it. We started in '94. Only 14 percent of our
schools and 3 percent of our classrooms were connected to the Internet.
Because of the leadership of the Vice President and getting the E-rate, which allows even the poorest
schools in North Carolina a 90 percent discount so they can hook on, we
have gone from 14 percent of our schools to 95 percent of our schools
connected to the Internet; from 3 percent of our classrooms to 65
percent of our classrooms connected to the Internet. So we're moving
this thing a long way.
And our basic philosophy is, then, that we should not micromanage
what the schools do but that we should target the funds, since it's only
7 percent, to the areas that the educators and the research says will
have the biggest impact.
Now that's the real fundamental debate in this election. And if you
listen to--both sides say they're for accountability, and they are. And
as I've said, I think our accountability proposal that our candidate for
President, Vice President Gore, and the
others have embraced is better. And I believe Jim and Paul agree with me, but we don't have to argue that out. The
point is, that's the good news. The good news is that the American
people believe that there should be higher standards and accountability.
But we believe it ought to be accountability-plus--plus funds for
100,000 new teachers for smaller classes in the early grades; plus a tax
credit to help to cut the costs of raising bond issues to build or
modernize schools; plus funds
[[Page 2302]]
to help repair 5,000 schools a year. We've got $100 billion school
construction and repair deficit in America today. I bet you there is--no
telling how many schools in North Carolina and Kentucky, where the kids
are going to schools in housetrailers or where big closets have been
converted to classrooms or where old buildings are so old they can't--
I've been in schools that are so decrepit they can't even be wired for
the Internet.
So we have standards and accountability, plus the tools to do the
job. And I think that is consistent with the stunning record of Jim
Hunt. If you look at what he's done, he's gone out there and given local
communities the tools they need to give children early childhood
education, access to health care, and strategies to turn around schools
that aren't performing. It works, and we ought to do more of it.
The only other thing I would say that's highly relevant to this is,
you can't get blood out of a turnip. If you're going to spend money,
you've got to have the money to spend. And that's the other big issue in
this election. I don't want to get into a political debate about the
structure of tax programs or even how the Social Security should be
reformed. I have my own ideas, but someone else will have to make that
decision. But I just want to make a basic point here that I think is
fundamental to this.
People ask me all the time, ``We have such a great economy, and you
and Bob Rubin and Lloyd Bentsen and Gene Sperling, you've got all these
wizards coming in. What great new idea did you bring to economic
policy?'' And I always give a one-word answer, ``Arithmetic.'' I brought
arithmetic to Washington. That's the great thing I got out of living way
out there in the hinterlands. I still thought 2 and 2 was supposed to
add up to 4. And a rosy scenario was not any good until the money came
in. That old Cuba Gooding line ``Show me the money'' is still a pretty
good line when you're making--[laughter].
So what does that all have to do with this election and education?
If you want States to be able to progress in education, they have to
have the funds to do it, which means you have to have continued
prosperity, because when people are prosperous, they send tax money to
the State. And if you want the Federal Government to do it, you have to
continue the prosperity. And the most important thing we can do, I
believe, is to continue a formula that says, find new markets for
American products and services; keep investing in America's productive
capacity, education, and technology and science; and keep paying down
the debt down and make America debt free.
Why? Because it keeps interest rates lower. In a global economy,
where a trillion dollars crosses national borders every day, the
interest rates people pay for homes and college loans and car payments
in North Carolina are affected by whether or not this Nation is a
fiscally responsible Nation.
So whatever you think about the details of these competing tax cuts
or Social Security plans, here is the bottom line: You cannot have a
$1\1/2\ trillion tax cut, a $1 trillion Social Security privatization
program, and several hundred billion dollars worth of promises unless
you go back into deficits. The big argument for our side, for Vice
President Gore and Senator
Lieberman, is, we say, ``Look, we're
going to have a smaller tax cut. We think it's better because we try to
target it to education and long-term care and child care and retirement
savings, but it can't be much bigger than this because we've got to
invest in education and health care and the environment and defense, and
we've got to keep paying off the debt.''
Now, that's the big issue. It's not--I promise you, it's more
important--the arithmetic issue is more important than the details of
who's got the better Social Security plan or the details of who's got
the better tax plan, even though I think our side does, and I'd be happy
to debate it--the arithmetic issue, the big thing here.
The other thing you need to remember is--and we've shown it for 8
years--you can say, ``Well, I'm going to spend this much money over the
next 10 years.'' But if the money doesn't come in, you don't have to
spend it. But if you give it all away in a tax cut on the front end or
the privatization program, on the front end, it's gone. And you're
certainly not going to go get it back when the economy turns down.
So you're going to have a big Governor's race in North Carolina. The
ability of the next Governor--and you know who we all hope it will be
and believe it will be--but his ability to follow in Jim Hunt's
footsteps will rest in no small measure on the success of the North
Carolina economy, in generating jobs, generating opportunity, in
generating revenues to turn around and put in education.
[[Page 2303]]
So that's my pitch to you. I think accountability-plus is better
than accountability-minus in education. And I think arithmetic still
works in economics. And I know if we just keep interest rates one
percent lower a year over the next decade, which is what I believe the
difference will be in paying off the debt and going back to deficit so
you can't pay off the debt--let me just tell you what that is. That's
$390 billion in lower home mortgages, $30 billion in lower car payments,
$15 billion in lower college loan payments, plus lower credit card
payments, plus lower business loan costs, which means more new
businesses, more employees, higher profits, and a bigger stock market.
It's a tax cut for everybody. Getting this country out of debt is a tax
cut for everybody.
So that's what--when you go back home in North Carolina and people
talk to you about, the next 2 weeks, about how this fits into the
decision you have to make in North Carolina, talk to them about
arithmetic and economics and talk to them about accountability-plus and
tell them that Jim Hunt deserves a worthy successor.
Thank you, and God bless you.
Note: The President spoke at 1:25 p.m. in the Monticello Room at the
Jefferson Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to former Treasury
Secretaries Lloyd Bentsen and Robert E. Rubin; Governor Hunt's wife,
Carolyn; Republican Presidential candidate Gov. George W. Bush of Texas;
and actor Cuba Gooding, Jr.