[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000-2001, Book III)]
[October 24, 2000]
[Pages 2303-2306]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]
Remarks on the Legislative Agenda for School Construction and Education
October 24, 2000
Well, first, let me thank Glenda Parsons.
I thought that she was eloquent, insistent, comprehensive, and
enlightening for anybody that hasn't heard about this issue and why it
matters. And let me thank Secretary Riley
for pointing out that the Federal Government helps States and localities
build roads and highways and prisons, and schools are the most important
network to the 21st century of all.
Let me thank you, sir, in a larger
sense, for nearly 8 years of service now, during which you have reduced
the paperwork burden on local school districts and States but mightily
increased the level of assistance we are giving them to do the things
that work. That's one reason--along with the outstanding work being done
at the State level by people like Governor Patton from Kentucky, who is here with us today, and local
educators--that the test scores are up, the dropout rate is down, the
college-going rate is up. We're moving in the right direction, and Dick
Riley deserves his fair share of credit for that, and I thank him very
much.
I would like to thank the extraordinary array of Members of Congress
who are here, including the Democratic leaders of the Senate and the
House, Senator Daschle and Congressman
Gephardt. I would like to thank the
people from the administration who are here who have worked with us to
help to develop this very important proposal, including Secretary Larry
Summers and Jack Lew and Sylvia Mathews from the
Office of Management and Budget.
I want to thank the people who are here from the DC City Council and
the coalition to Rebuild America's Schools, teachers, administrators,
architects, members of the construction trades, and many others. And I
also want to thank the people who came out here all morning, building
our new schoolhouse. We wanted people to have a little red schoolhouse
here to emphasize what this is about. And our special guests from Brent
Elementary School, let's welcome them here.
The little red schoolhouse behind me was erected as evidence of the
commitment of all of us here to give our children the safest and best
schools in the world. In its unfinished state, it's also a symbol of the
unfinished work still before the Congress. Nearly 2 months into the new
school year, the majority leadership still hasn't given a single dime
for school construction and modernization, not even enough to build a
one-room schoolhouse.
Week after week now, I've been signing continuing resolutions to
give Congress more time to work on this year's budget. But the time
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for tardy slips is over. It's time for the leadership to put progress
before partisanship and address at last the needs of our schools and our
children.
For nearly 8 years now, we've worked hard to turn our economy
around. We've replaced record deficits with record surpluses. We now
enjoy the longest economic expansion in history. Today we received even
more good news about the economy. According to our Treasury Department
and the Office of Management and Budget, the surplus for the 2000 fiscal
year is the largest in American history, $237 billion. This is the third
surplus in a row, the first time our Nation has done that in 51 years,
since 1949, when Harry Truman was President.
It's worth remembering, I think, that when Vice President Gore and I
took office in 1993, the deficit was $290 billion. The debt had
quadrupled in 12 years. Economists predicted that this year, instead of
a $237 billion surplus, we would have a $455 billion deficit. Working
together, we turned that around, not by chance but by choice.
Now to the moment at hand. What are we going to do with our
prosperity? What are we going to do with our surplus? It is not the
Government's surplus. It is the people's surplus. How shall we apply it
to our common goals and needs and challenges? I feel very strongly that
we ought to first make a commitment to keep the prosperity going by
paying the debt down over the next 12 years, to keep interest rates
down.
Then I think we ought to take what's left and have a tax cut we can
afford, that focuses on sending our kids to college, providing our
kinfolks with long-term care who need it, helping working families with
child care, and helping all Americans save for retirement, because
savings rates are not high enough in our country today. And I think we
ought to save some money to invest in education and in health care, in
science and technology, in the environment and defense, in the future of
America.
So, in other words, there are big opportunities and big challenges
out there, but I believe we have to first stay with what got us here:
Pay down the debt; strengthen the Social Security and Medicare systems
for the aging of America when all people like me, the baby boom
generation, become too old to work, and we don't want to be a burden on
the rest of you. And we need to then seize this opportunity to take the
money that's left to invest in our future, especially in education.
You've heard what has already been said, but I think it's worth
reiterating. We have the largest, most diverse student body in history.
They are in overcrowded classrooms, but a lot of things are going right
in America. Reading and math scores are up; Hispanic and African-
American students are taking advanced placement courses in record
numbers--over the last 6 years, a 300 percent increase for Hispanic
students, a 500 percent increase for African-American students; the
college-going rate at a record high, because we have provided more
college assistance increase than any time since the GI bill. So a lot of
things are going well. SAT math scores are the highest since 1969, when
we went to the Moon. But we have more to do. And I want to focus on this
today.
And let me just say one other thing I would like to say, because I
really want to thank the Vice President for
this. When we started in 1994 with a goal to hook up all of our
classrooms and schools to the Internet, only 14 percent of the schools
and 3 percent of the classrooms in America were hooked up. Now, 95
percent of the schools and 65 percent of the classrooms are hooked up,
thanks in no small measure to an idea Al Gore led our fight for, the E-
rate, which gives discounts of up to 90 percent to low-income schools so
that all of our schools can afford to hook on.
Now, what's all that got to do with why we're here? The average
public school building in America is 42 years old. Decades of use have
taken their toll: leaking roofs, broken boilers, crowded trailers. It's
hard to educate kids in schools that are falling down. Some of our
schools are so old, they literally cannot be wired for Internet access.
I have been in schools where, when one room works--that is, if they turn
on all the lights, and they're using the lab, and then somebody logs
onto the net in one room, it will literally short out everybody else in
the school building. You also need to know, there are buildings in New
York that are still being heated with coal in coal-fired furnaces. The
average school building in Philadelphia is 65 years old, and about the
same in New Orleans.
So those of us that have been around the country looking at this
know that you've got the problem of the old schools, and then all the
places we've been--including the smallest
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place I've been with a lot of trailers was the community of Jupiter,
Florida, which is not very big, and they had a dozen trailers outside
one school.
So this is a national challenge. They're bad for our children's
education. I might also say that they can be quite bad for our
children's health, especially if they have asthma or if they have other
disabilities. And this is something I think that has been
underestimated. You know, just the cost in education days of asthma in
our children is staggering throughout the United States today. We ought
not to be sending the kids into school buildings that make it worse.
Now, I have asked Congress to send me an education bill that does
the following: First, give us $1.3 billion to fix up thousands of
schools in desperate need of repair right now. And let's do that over 5
years. We can repair 5,000 schools a year over 5 years. It would be a
big thing to do, and it would help a lot.
Second, I have asked Congress to enact the bipartisan--and I
emphasize bipartisan--school construction tax proposal, to provide $25
billion in school construction and modernization bonds. Now, you just
heard Glenda explain why Loudoun County
couldn't bear this burden alone. Even counties where the average income
of the school parents may be above average, there is a limit to how much
you can do. They've got to build 23 schools in 6 years? Can you imagine
how much construction that is? That's in one school district. That's
just one. We estimate the deficit in school repair and school
construction in America, given the condition of the buildings, the size
of the population, and the projected population over the next 5 years,
is somewhere between 110 and 125 billion dollars.
I don't think it's too much to ask the Federal Government, at a time
of record surpluses, to provide $25 billion in school construction and
modernization bonds. It will help to build or modernize 6,000 schools.
In the process, it will create some good jobs. It will be especially
helpful in the poorest areas of our country, like Native American
communities and others with greater needs and the total inability to
raise the money at the local level.
And third, Congress should follow through on our proposal to help
fund 8,000 after-school and summer school programs, to help $2.5 million
kids boost their test scores, stay out of trouble, and get more involved
in their communities. If you think about how overcrowded these schools
are, it is more important than ever that we allow them to stay open in
the afternoon and to provide summer programs, so that the kids that may
not get it during the daytime, when they're being crammed in, pushed
around, and can't even sit down for lunch, according to Glenda, at least to have the ability to stay late or come back
in the evening or come in on the weekend or be involved in the summer
program that will make sure they don't fall behind. So that's also a
very important part of this.
Fourth thing I'd like to urge them to do is to provide $1.75 billion
to help pay for almost 50,000 teachers to reduce class sizes in the
first grades, the next big step of our 100,000 teacher program to reduce
class size in the early grades. We know that new qualified teachers can
help children learn.
And finally, I ask Congress to support our initiatives to improve
teacher training, increase accountability, and to turn around failing
schools or shut them down and open them under new management. We have
here--I will say again what I said at lunch: Governor Patton is exhibit A.
I have been working on this for 22 years now. I was there when,
under the Reagan administration, Secretary Bell issued the ``Nation At
Risk'' report, a brilliant report. I was there when President Bush
invited all the Governors to Charlottesville, Virginia, and we had a
summit and established goals for the Nation. And I helped to write that
document, and it was a great and moving meeting. But I can tell you
something. If somebody asked me what's changed in the years since, I'll
tell you what's changed: We actually know now that failing schools can
be turned around, and we know how to do it, and we didn't before. And so
I want to emphasize this.
I was in a school in western Kentucky with Paul Patton that was one of the worst schools in Kentucky 4 years ago,
where only 12 percent of the kids were reading at or above grade level,
5 percent of the kids were doing math at or above grade level, no kids
were doing science at or above grade level. And under the system he put
in place, that we want for America, in 3 years the numbers went from 12
to 57 percent in reading, from 5 to 70 percent in math, from zero to 63
percent in science. That's one place, one of the best elementary schools
in his entire
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State. We can do that everywhere, and we should.
I mean, I have very strong feelings about this. These kids deserve a
decent place to go to school because they can all learn. I was in Harlem
the other day in a school that 2 years ago--listen to this--2 years ago
had 80 percent of the kids doing reading or math below grade level. Two
years later, a new principal, new morale, school uniforms--something I
like--high standards, in 2 years they went from 80 percent doing reading
and math below grade level, to 74 percent doing reading and math at or
above grade level, a total turnaround. You can do this. We can do this
all over America.
But it is illusory to think that we can tell all these kids and
their parents they're the most important things in the world to us,
``But here, go to school in broken windows and leaky roofs, and sit in
this closet somewhere, or go out into a busted trailer, and we'll get
around to you when we can.'' And meanwhile, we've got all the money in
the world to spend on roads and airports, because they've got a bigger
lobby than little kids do.
Now, this is not complicated here. We have fooled around with this
for 2 years, and the problem is just getting bigger. So I say, before
Congress goes home, let's do this for the kids in the future.
At the end of World War II when my generation was starting schools,
the National Government under President Truman, with Republican as well
as Democratic support, did not hesitate to help our children find the
space to go to school.
In a world where education is even more important than it was then,
where the student body is even bigger, and where it is much more
diverse, in a world that is much more interconnected, there can be
nothing more important than actually acting like we say we believe that
our kids are the most important thing in the world to us. Let's do it
with the school construction proposal.
Thank you very much.
Note: The President spoke at 3 p.m. on the South Lawn at the White
House. In his remarks, he referred to parent Glenda Parsons of Loudoun
County, VA, who introduced the President.