[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 33, Number 11 (Monday, March 17, 1997)]
[Pages 351-360]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to a Joint Session of the North Carolina State Legislature in 
Raleigh

March 13, 1997

    Thank you very much. Lieutenant Governor Wicker, Speaker Brubaker, 
Senator Basnight, the other State elected officials who are here; my 
good friend Governor Hunt; Mayor Fetzer. I'd like to thank those who 
came down here with me today. I brought some of the Members of your 
congressional delegation home. They don't need to hear this speech, 
they've heard it before, but I was glad to have them here in moral 
support: Congressman David Price; Congressman Bob Etheridge, your former 
superintendent of education; Congressman Mike McIntyre; and 
Congresswoman Eva Clayton. I thank them for coming.
    I also want to say I'm glad to be joined today by your neighbor, the 
Secretary of Education, Richard Riley, former Governor of South 
Carolina, and by our new Secretary of Defense, Bill Cohen of Maine. 
We're glad to have him with us today, too. Thank you, Secretary Cohen, 
for coming.
    I was glad that you mentioned my Chief of Staff, Erskine Bowles. He 
wouldn't come here with me today because he was afraid all of you would 
think that he was shirking his duties and not at work. But let me tell 
you, he is doing a magnificent job. I'm very proud of him. I couldn't 
believe it when he agreed to come back to Washington and take this job, 
especially because I knew it would cost him a small fortune. And he 
reminded me that his father used to tell him, ``Once you have the tools, 
you've got to spend some time to add to the woodpile.'' So he's up in 
Washington adding back to the woodpile. And you should all be very proud 
of him. He is a remarkable man. He's doing a good job.
    I'd also like to thank the other North Carolinians on my staff. Two 
of the three of them are here today. Doug Sosnik, my former political 
director and senior counselor, is not

here, but my Director of Communications, Don Baer, is here, and Charles 
Duncan, the Associate Director of Presidential Personnel. They both came 
home with me, and they were glad to have the excuse to come home. And I 
appreciate their being here and their service.

    I was told that this was the first time a sitting President has 
addressed the North Carolina State Legislature. If it's not true, don't 
disabuse me now, because I'm about to say something good. [Laughter] And 
I am very honored to be here. Even more important, I've spent a little 
time here over the years, and I am honored and mildly surprised that you 
are here, because it's tournament time and you've got four teams, as 
usual, in the tournament.
    You may know that I am something of a basketball fanatic. And you 
may know that one of my most memorable basketball experiences--I once 
saw North Carolina and Kentucky play in the Dean Dome, and the car that 
I came in was towed. [Laughter] But I had so much fun at the ballgame, I 
would have walked all the way back to Arkansas after it was over. 
[Laughter] I make it a point never to take sides in basketball games 
unless my home team in Arkansas or my alma mater, Georgetown, are 
playing. But I am looking forward to the day when the great Dean Smith 
breaks Adolph Rupp's record.
    There is much for the rest of the Nation, and especially the rest of 
the South, to admire in North Carolina, the determined and visionary 
leadership that has characterized this State for many decades in 
education and economic development, in bringing harmony among peoples of 
different backgrounds.
    When I was a young man, I followed the work here of then-Governor 
Terry Sanford, who later became my friend and colleague.

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Eighteen years ago, when I first started my career as Governor of 
Arkansas, my best mentor and friend was Jim Hunt. And he is still my 
mentor and friend. Dick Riley and I were laughing with Jim Hunt--we were 
together 18 years ago as the Governors of Arkansas, South Carolina, and 
North Carolina, and we were laughing that Jim was probably the only one 
of us who could still get elected Governor in our home States after 18 
years. [Laughter] And I applaud him on that.
    It was in Chapel Hill that the cornerstone was laid at our Nation's 
first publicly funded university, in Kitty Hawk where man first took to 
the skies. And today, North Carolina is an aeronautics and an air travel 
hub center for millions of people. Your State universities receive the 
highest level of funding for research and development in the Nation. You 
have connected more of your communities than any other State in the 
country to the information superhighway, something I'm trying to do for 
every classroom and library in America by the year

2000. The Research Triangle has one of the highest per capita 
concentrations of Ph.D.'s in the world, and you are clearly one of 
America's most dynamic centers of economic activity.

    The most important thing about all this is not for me to brag on 
you, you know that already, but to emphasize the main point: These 
things do not happen by accident. They are the product of vision and 
disciplined, long-term effort.
    Now our country faces the challenges of a new century, a whole new 
economy, a whole new way in which people will work and live and relate 
to each other here at home and around the world. It is driven by 
information and by technology. Its best hopes may be undermined by its 
darkest fears, by the old demons of racial and religious and ethnic 
hatreds, by terrorism and narcotrafficking and organized crime.
    This new time that we're moving into, that coincidentally will be 
part of a new century and a new millennium, will give more people in 
this State and this Nation the chance to live out their dreams than at 
any period in human history, if we take advantage of it to seize our 
opportunities and deal with our challenges.
    There is unprecedented peace and prosperity now, and it has been 
very rare in our country's history. You can go back and find maybe a 
couple of other examples when we've had real security, a feeling of 
prosperity, and yet, a whole lot of challenges before us. Usually when 
people feel secure and relatively prosperous, one of two things 
happens--neither of them very laudable, but it's part of human nature--
we either get sort of happy and self-satisfied and don't do anything, or 
because we are not gripped by big differences, we fall out with each 
other over small things, and petty things make us less than we ought to 
be.
    The point I want to take today is that we cannot afford either to be 
complacent or to be divided among ourselves about small things. For we 
have been given an opportunity almost unique in American history to 
fashion a future that will embrace everybody. And we cannot and dare not 
blow that opportunity.
    If you look at where we are now, you can see the vistas of the 
future. Our economy produced 12 million jobs in 4 years--never happened 
before in a 4-year period. We've had constant decline in crimes. We've 
had the biggest drop in the welfare rolls in American history in the 
last 4 years. In North Carolina, you've seen the unemployment rate drop 
to 4.2 percent, 75,000 people off the welfare rolls, 350,000 new jobs. 
That's going on all over America. But you know that we have more to do.
    I have been going around the country, to the Michigan and the 
Maryland State legislatures--today the Vice President

is in California speaking to the State legislature as I am here with you--
because I know that to achieve the vision that we share for America, we all 
have to do our part. I've said many times that the era of big Government is 
over. Your Federal Government is now 285,000 people smaller than it was the 
day I took office. It's the smallest it's been since President Kennedy was 
in office, in real terms. As a percentage of the civilian work force, the 
Federal Government is now as small as it was when Franklin Roosevelt was 
sworn into office the first time, before the New Deal.

    But the challenges we face are still very big, indeed. If they 
cannot be solved by gov

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ernment alone, and especially by the Federal Government, obviously, a 
new partnership is required. And new efforts, new activity, new 
responsibility is required of people at the State level, at the local 
level, and in their private lives. The biggest challenge we face today, 
I believe, is the challenge of creating a world-class education system 
that embraces every child that lives in this State and in this Nation. 
And this must not be a political football.
    In the cold war, because we knew that communism threatened our 
existence, it became commonplace that politics would stop at the water's 
edge, and the Democrats and the Republicans would fight like cats and 
dogs over whatever it was they were fighting about, but when it came to 
standing up to the threat of communism, we were together. If the 
President of one party went abroad on a mission of world peace, he was 
never criticized back home by members of the other party because 
politics stopped at the water's edge. I think we understand today, 
intuitively, that education holds the key to our future in the 21st 
century. And I believe politics must stop at the schoolhouse door.
    When I was Governor, a long time ago now, North Carolina already had 
the highest percentage of its adults in institutions of higher education 
of any State in the South. The economy was growing, and it was 
diversifying, and yet you still had more success in maintaining 
manufacturing jobs than any State in our region and, indeed, in the 
country. You know all this. Last year you had the biggest increase in 
eighth grade math scores, I noticed, in the country. I was in Michigan, 
and I said that they had the second biggest increase in math scores, and 
the minute I got in the car, Governor Hunt made sure I knew who was 
number one. [Laughter] So I knew that.
    The Governor chose to be sworn in at the Needham Laughton High 
School, his old school, to make clear that school standards and teaching 
excellence will be his top priorities. But with all the progress that we 
have made, you know we've got a lot more to do.
    Between 1992 and the year 2000, 89 percent of the new jobs created 
in this economy will require more than a high school level of literacy 
and math skills--89 percent. Today, even though over 80 percent of our 
children are graduating from high school, more than half--or about half 
the people entering the work force are not prepared with these skills. 
We all know that is true.
    For 20 years, inequality among working Americans grew. In the last 
few years it started to shrink--in the last couple of years--as we've 
gotten--more and more of our new jobs are becoming higher wage jobs and 
as growth and productivity are permitting wages to rise again.
    Many people, just a couple of years ago, were saying, ``Well, is the 
middle class vanishing in America? Will it always be squeezed? Are we 
going to create a country with a huge number of people that are very 
well off and an even much larger number of people that are poor, with a 
smaller middle class?'' We've seen in the last few years that that does 
not have to happen. We can begin to grow the middle class again with 
productivity and growth and the right kinds of new jobs, but we have to 
be able to provide the people with the skills to hold those jobs, if 
we're going to maintain a high-wage, high-growth, high-opportunity 
society in America in the 21st century. And our schools are still 
turning out millions of young people who simply cannot do that.
    That is why our number one priority has to be to make America's 
education the best in the world. We have to have a nation in which every 
8-year-old can read independently, every 12-year-old can log on to the 
Internet, every 18-year-old can go on to college, and every adult 
American can keep on learning throughout an entire lifetime.
    In my State of the Union Address, I laid out a 10-point call to 
action for American education that describes the steps we have to meet. 
First, we have to make sure that all of our children come to school 
ready to learn. Our balanced budget will expand Head Start to a million 
children. But we all must do more, and a lot of that has to be done at 
the State level. And I hope every State in the country is looking 
closely at the Smart Start program in North Carolina.
    The idea of having all elements of a community in a community 
nonprofit environment working on not only education but health care and 
parenting skills and child

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care, trying to give our poorest children a coherent early childhood, is 
terribly important. Scientists have discovered that learning begins in 
the earliest days of life. And now we have to explore how parents and 
educators can best use these findings.
    On April 17th, the First Lady and I will host the White House 
Conference on Early Childhood Development and Learning in Washington, 
and I want Smart Start to be an important part of what is considered 
there.
    Let me just give you one simple example of the scientific findings. 
Over half of the capacity of the brain to absorb and to learn and to 
grow--the capacity is developed in the first 4 years of life. In the 
first 4 years of life, if a child has parents who understand this and 
who constantly--whether they have a Ph.D. or they were high school 
dropouts, but who constantly work at nourishing the child's learning 
capacities, that child will get 700,000 positive contacts. But in the 
typical experience of a child with a single parent, let's say, with very 
little education and no self-confidence about parenting and no training 
and no understanding and a sense that no difference can be made, and the 
child that's left in front of the television in the first 4 years, that 
child will get 150,000 positive contacts, a more than four-to-one 
difference.
    Now, you tell me what the future is going to be like for them. Smart 
Start can change that. And our cooperative efforts can change that. But 
we have to understand that we have totally underestimated the impact of 
this whole thing. And the new scientific findings impose upon all of us 
a heavier responsibility than we have ever had for developing the 
capacities of our children in their earliest years. So I look forward to 
that.
    I believe we have to do more to give constructive alternatives, 
creative alternatives for our young children in our public schools. I 
favor public school choice. I've been a pioneer supporter of the charter 
school movement. I think that it's important to open schools that stay 
opened as long as they do a good job, but only as long as they do a good 
job. And I know that this afternoon, your State board of education has 
the opportunity to open more charter schools than any State has ever 
opened at one time, to foster innovation and competition and renewal. I 
hope the board will take that step today, and one more time, North 
Carolina will be in the vanguard of a movement you can be proud of.
    We have got to have a commitment to rebuild our schools and give our 
children the facilities they need to learn in. We have the largest 
number of children in public schools in history. The Secretary of 
Education never gets tired of reminding me, since I am the oldest of the 
baby boomers, that our generation has finally been eclipsed in numbers 
by the people that are in the public schools today. We also have the 
physical facilities in many of our schools deteriorating at a rapid 
rate. So, for the first time in history, I have proposed a program that 
will enable us at the national level to support local efforts to

increase their investment in the physical facilities of the schools by 
making sure that the interest rates are lower and the costs are lower in 
the places where the need is most critical.

    I'm going to Florida after I leave you, and tomorrow morning, I will 
be at a school where there are 17, I understand, according to my 
briefing, 17 trailers for classroom space around the existing school 
facility in a modest-sized community in Florida. That is not an atypical 
experience in many of our States.
    We have to meet our national goal of connecting every classroom and 
library to the Internet by the year 2000. We have to open the doors of 
college to all. North Carolina pioneered, with your network of 4-year 
and 2-year higher educational institutions, pioneered the idea that 
education ought to be a lifetime experience and that the doors ought to 
be open to everyone.
    In the last 4 years, we have lowered the cost and improved the reach 
of the student loan program, added 200,000 slots to work-study, opened 
up almost 70,000 slots for college through the national service program, 
AmeriCorps. We have worked very, very hard, but I think we have to do 
more.
    It is clear to me, if you look at the job profile, where 89 percent 
of the new jobs will require more than a high school education, we have 
to make 2 years of education after high school, the 13th and 14th 
grades, just as universal in America by the year 2000

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as a high school diploma is today, every bit as universal.
    To achieve that, our balanced budget plan proposes a $1,500 HOPE 
scholarship, a tax credit that reflects the cost of the typical 
community college tuition in America, modeled on Governor Zell Miller's 
HOPE scholarship program in Georgia. We propose to give people a tax 
deduction of up to $10,000 a year for the cost of any education after 
high school, an expanded IRA that you can withdraw from tax-free if the 
money is used to pay for higher education, and the largest increase in 
Pell grants in 20 years, along with another 100,000 work-study slots. 
That will help North Carolina, and it will help America.
    Finally, let me say on this subject, we know we have to make sure 
learning continues throughout a lifetime. We know that we have older and 
older students going back to community colleges, changing their careers 
and getting new careers and opening up new vistas. We have a Federal 
response which I think is totally antiquated. There are at least, 
conservatively speaking, at least 70 different Federal programs that 
were developed with the best of intentions, to try to help to pay for 
various training programs for people who lose their jobs or people who 
are grossly underemployed.
    I have proposed for 4 years, with a Democratic Congress and with the 
Republican Congress, getting rid of these programs and putting the money 
in a pot and sending a skills grant to an unemployed person or an 
underemployed person who has qualified for any of them and let them go 
to the nearest community college or 4-year college if it's the 
appropriate one, whatever is nearest and best to get their education. We 
do not need a lot of Government intermediaries here. People know--people 
know what they need. They're capable of making a judgment.
    In a State like North Carolina and most places in the country, 
nearly everybody's within driving distance of a community college that 
works. And that's--I call that my ``GI Bill'' for America's workers. And 
if you could prevail upon your legislators to support it, I would 
appreciate it. I've been trying for 4 years to pass that thing. I would 
appreciate it.
    I think the most important thing we have to do is to make sure that 
our children have met certain national standards in basic courses. In 
1989, when President Bush and the Governors met at the University of 
Virginia, I had the honor of being the Democratic Governor chosen to try 
to write the Nation's education goals. And at the time, we always 
assumed that out of those goals there would come national standards and 
a system, a nationally recognized system of testing our children to see 
if they met those standards.
    Well, that hasn't happened yet. And as a result, we still don't 
know. We don't really know whether every child in every classroom knows 
what he or she needs to know when he or she needs to know it in math and 
in basic language skills. I have challenged every State in this country 
to adopt high national academic standards, not just in math and language 
but in other areas as well, to participate nationally by 1999 in an 
examination of fourth graders in reading and eighth graders in math, so 
that we can see how every child is doing in meeting those basic 
standards.
    Now, this is, I know, somewhat controversial. There are people who 
have actually argued that you couldn't possibly have a national 
examination reflecting national standards in a country as diverse as 
America, as if it's some sort of plot, as if math is different in 
Raleigh than Little Rock or any board of education could rewrite the 
rules of algebra for Alaska as opposed to Florida. I think that is 
inherently implausible.
    When you compete here in North Carolina for a new high-tech plant, 
when the Research Triangle finds some new breakthrough, you do it based 
on an international competition; you have to win based on standards that 
are imposed. We have to be willing to hold our children to the same 
standards and to hold ourselves to the same standards.
    Governor Hunt told me today that he will endorse our call for 
national standards and a testing plan. North Carolina, therefore, would 
be the third State to do so. The Republican Governor of Michigan joined 
in, along with his legislative leaders, just a few days ago.
    But let me say what I think we need to do. A lot of you know a lot 
about this. We

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have some standardized tests in America, but we don't have any test to 
nationally accepted standards. The closest we have is the so-called NAEP 
test, the National Assessment of Education Progress. But as all of you 
know, it only is given to a sample of students in various districts. 
There is no examination in America which says, here are the standards 
that everyone should know in language or math, and here is a test which 
reflects those standards, and it doesn't matter whether you're first or 
last in your class, it matters whether you get over this bar. If you're 
first in your class and nobody is over this bar, nobody knows what they 
need to know. If you're last, but you're over the bar, you're still 
going to do okay in this old world. I think that is very important. We 
all need to know that. We all need to know that.
    You know--and let me also say that I know it won't be easy, because 
some of our kids won't do all that well at first. If you saw the State 
of the Union Address, you know that I introduced two students from 20 
school districts in northern Illinois who took the Third International 
Math and Science Survey, and the 20 school districts up there tied for 
first in science and second in math in the survey, with Singapore for 
first. But if they had finished dead last I would have been equally 
proud of them because they were willing to actually hold themselves to 
international standards of achievement and measure themselves.
    And this is where we need all of your help. I'm convinced that one 
of the reasons that we've never done this in America is that we were 
afraid if the news was bad, we wouldn't know what to do about it. And I 
think that in so doing, we have sold our children short. All the 
evidence is, all the scientific evidence is, all the anecdotal evidence 
is that almost all of our children, without regard to their race, their 
income, and where they live, can learn what they need to know to compete 
and win in the global economy. And when we do not hold them to high 
standards because we are afraid that in the beginning they won't meet 
them, we are selling their futures down the drain and we are insulting 
them, because they can meet these standards.
    What we have to be willing to do is to say, ``Okay, we'll have these 
exams. We'll hold people to high standards. Some people won't make it at 
first. We don't want to punish people. We want to lift everybody up, but 
we can't know how to lift people up unless we know where we start.''
    When I go around the world, people find it unbelievable that we have 
no national standard in America to tell our parents and our school 
leaders whether our children know what they're supposed to know in the 
basic skills that are necessary to learn all the other more 
sophisticated things we want people to know.
    And I tell you, I believe in the kids of this country. I have been 
in schools in circumstances where it would be unthinkable that people 
could learn because of crime in the neighborhoods and because of poverty 
in the neighborhoods. And I have seen children performing at very high 
levels, meeting standards that would be acceptable in anyplace in the 
entire world. And I am tired of people telling me that there is some 
reason we shouldn't have that opportunity given to every American child. 
We are not protecting our children by denying them the chance to develop 
their God-given capacities to measure up to what they need to know and 
do, to do well in the future. And we ought to stop it and do better.
    Now, on a lighter note, you may wonder why the Secretary of Defense 
is here with me today. [Laughter] Before I came down here, Senator Helms 
asked me to tell you that he is not the guard that Jesse once said I 
would need to come to North Carolina. [Laughter] Ever since I got a 
Chief of Staff that does not speak with an accent, we've been getting 
along a lot better, Senator Helms and I. [Laughter]
    There is another reason that the Secretary of Defense is here today. 
We want to set an example. We think we ought to start the standards 
movements with the schools that we run at military bases. At 66 schools 
across our country and 167 more around the world, our Department of 
Defense educates 115,000 of our children every year. The Department of 
Defense runs a school system as big as that of the state of Delaware. 
And I met some of the children, some of the teachers, and some of the 
parents out at the airport when I came in today.

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    Sixteen of those schools are at Camp LeJeune and Fort Bragg, right 
here in North Carolina, and nearly 8,000 students attend them. It's 
important that we give these children the best possible education, too, 
especially these children, because their families sacrifice. They live 
far from home. They often risk their lives for their country. It's 
important, too, because these students come from every racial and ethnic 
background. They move from place to place as their parents are 
transferred from base to base.
    Because of this mobility, no group of students better underscores 
the need for common national standards and a uniform way of measuring 
progress than this group. If standards can work in these schools, they 
can work anywhere.
    So I am pleased to announce today that, with the strong support of 
the Secretary of Defense, the Department of Defense schools have stepped 
forward to ask that their students be among the first to take the new 
tests when they become available. The Secretary of Defense and the 
Secretary of Education Riley have both committed their work.
    Starting in 1999, students and classrooms, from Wiesbaden Air Force 
Base in Germany to Kadena Air Force Base in Okinawa, to Camp LeJeune 
will learn the same rigorous material and take the same national tests 
as students throughout this State and, I hope, throughout our entire 
Nation. We can make our public schools just like our military, the best 
on Earth, if, like our military, we are willing to adhere to high, 
rigorous standards for all people, regardless of their background. 
That's what we ought to do. And I thank you, Mr. Secretary, for being 
here today.
    Let me also say that we know we have to do more work to prepare all 
of our students. And the Department of Defense is being directed today, 
through its school system, to use every resource to prepare the students 
for 1999 when the new math and science tests--or math and reading tests 
are ready.
    Let me mention one other thing that I think is very important, and 
it goes well with a lot of what you are doing here with your preschool 
years and your early years. It is appalling to me that 40 percent of 
America's 8-year-olds cannot read a book on their own, but it's true. 
And the rest of this stuff is just sort of whistling the breeze, if 
people can't read. So we have launched the America Reads initiative, 
through the Department of Education, to mobilize an army of a million 
reading tutors, properly trained, to help make sure that by the year 
2000 every 8-year-old can read independently.
    Thirteen North Carolina college presidents have pledged to commit a 
portion of their work-study students to serve as tutors, and I thank 
them for that. We're going to have 300,000 new work-study students over 
a 4-year period. If we can put at least a third of them into reading 
instruction for our young children, we'll be a long way toward those 
million volunteers.
    We ought to be clear about something else, too, and here's something 
that I really take my hat off to Governor Hunt for. We cannot expect our 
children to meet high standards unless we demand that our teachers meet 
high standards. We have to do whatever is necessary to make sure that 
they do.
    Last year, the report of Governor Hunt's National Commission on 
Teaching and America's Future laid out a blueprint for the road ahead. 
And all of you have come together across party

lines to develop a comprehensive legislative agenda that implements the 
report's recommendations. We have to start by recognizing and rewarding our 
best teachers. We all know what a difference a good teacher can make in the 
life of a child. I know what a difference my teachers made in mine.

    The National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, led by 
Governor Hunt, has encouraged teachers all over the country to improve 
their skills and seek certification as master teachers. North Carolina 
already has more certified national teachers--master teachers--than any 
other State in the country. And the Governor was kind enough to bring 
five or six of them out to the airport to meet me, and they were not 
ashamed of the fact that they had been board-certified master teachers.
    Over 20 percent of all the teachers that have been certified are 
here in North Carolina. That's the good news. The bad news is that only 
about 500 teachers have been certified. In our balanced budget plan, 
there's enough money to help 100,000 teach

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ers achieve this important credential. Now the States need to do things 
like North Carolina has and offer to pay. The Governor's plan would pay 
master teachers another 12 percent more. You have to encourage people. 
But we need 100,000 at least, because what we really want is at least a 
board certified master teacher in every single school building in 
America. If you get one in every single school building in America, we 
know from the research that they will change the education environment 
and help lift the standards that other teachers achieve and help to lift 
the quality of teaching in all the classrooms.
    So that is one of the things that we're trying to do in our budget. 
But again, I'd say that we are following your lead and especially the 
years and years and years that Governor Hunt has put into this. In 
April, Secretary Riley will hold a national forum on attracting and 
preparing teachers with 50 of our Nation's best teachers and thousands 
of others. And we are going to have to do more to encourage our 
brightest young people to become teachers.
    Finally, we also have to make sure, as the Governor said, that while 
good teachers get a raise, the truly bad teachers who can't measure up 
should get a pink slip. We have to do that in an expeditious and fair 
way. Today, that is too time consuming and costly. In some States it can 
cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. That same money could be and 
should be used to reward good teachers and to train those who are trying 
to improve their skills. We can change this, as they have in Cincinnati 
where school boards and teachers unions have worked together in 
partnership to find more efficient and fair ways to remove teachers who 
should leave the classroom. Encouraging teachers is not easy or cheap, 
but again, I say, we know what a phenomenal difference it makes.
    Finally, to elevate teaching, I think we have to reform the way we 
spend money in our schools and give parents the tools to demand more 
accountability. Today the Vice President is discussing that at the State 
legislature in Sacramento, California. His reinventing Government 
initiative has helped us to shrink the National Government to the 
smallest it's been in three decades and to take that money and invest it 
in education, invest it in technology, invest it in transportation, 
invest it in growing the economy and building a better future. We have 
to have the same sort of national effort to analyze the way expenditures 
are made in public education throughout America, so that we can support 
those who are committed to reducing unnecessary bureaucratic 
expenditures and increasing expenditures on children and teachers and 
learning.
    Yesterday I did a town hall meeting with 35 children, on drugs. And 
I asked all these kids--and some of these kids had been on drugs and 
were off drugs, a couple of these kids were in treatment, some of them 
had been in families of gang members who had been involved in drugs, and 
then some of them had never used drugs. It was a whole panoply of kids. 
But I went through child after child after child, and I asked them to 
tell me about their circumstances. And they all said, ``We need mentors. 
We need programs we're interested in.'' And one after another they kept 
telling me about how their school had had to abandon its music program 
or its art program, its physical education programs, its intramural 
athletic programs, all the things that happen after school or on weekend 
that keep kids involved in positive things.
    We have to understand that however much money we have for our 
schools, we have to make sure we are spending it first and foremost on 
instruction and, secondly, on ways designed to give the children the 
best chance to live productive, wholesome, good, constructive lives, and 
that ought to be a national effort as well.
    We have found phenomenal amounts of money that we could redirect in 
the Federal Government to reducing the deficit or investing in our 
future simply by slowly, but deliberately, eliminating hundreds of 
unnecessary programs, thousands of unnecessary regulations, and 
reducing, without running people off, just slowly reducing the size of 
Government until we have got it to the point where I mentioned to you 
earlier.
    And we have to work on that in our schools because we cannot afford 
to waste a single dollar when it comes to these children's future. And 
it is folly to believe that we're not

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paying for it when we take these kids away from a chance to have a full, 
wholesome experience and to be in those schools after school hours or 
before school hours and doing things in addition to their academic 
learning. So I hope you will support that. [Applause] Thank you.
    Let me just say one final word in closing about another big job we 
have to do together. We have to finish the work of welfare reform. In 
the first 4 years of my Presidency, we gave waivers from Federal rules 
to 43 States to do all kinds of things to help move people from welfare 
to work. We now know that partly because of the growing economy, partly 
because of State welfare reform efforts, and partly because of a 50 
percent increase in child support collections nationwide, the welfare 
rolls went down by 2.6 million in 4 years, a record number.
    Then the Congress passed, and I signed, the welfare reform bill, 
which says there will still be a national guarantee for poor children 
for food and medicine, but there's a limit to how long an able-bodied 
person can be on welfare without going to work. And we're going to give 
it to the States and let the States decide how to design their plans to 
move people from welfare to work.
    Well, what I want to tell you folks is that this is like that old 
country singer Chet Atkins, who used to say, ``You've got to be awful 
careful what you ask for in this old life, because you might get it.'' 
And now you've got it. And here is what you have. In order to meet the 
demands of the law that was supported by almost every Governor and every 
State official in the country, we must move about another million people 
from welfare to work. Now keep in mind when we reduced the welfare rolls 
by 2.6 million, some of those were children; only about a million of 
those were people moving from welfare into the work force. So we moved a 
million people in 4 years when the economy created almost 12 million 
jobs. We have to move another million in the next 4 years because of 
what the law says, whether the economy creates the jobs or not. And it 
is your responsibility to design a plan to get that done.
    Now, I want to help. And I have proposed Federal legislation to give 
a tax credit of 50 percent for up to $10,000 in salaries for people who 
hire people specifically off welfare. I have proposed to give extra cash 
to high-impact, high-unemployment areas so people can do public service 
work, community service work, if necessary.
    But there are more things you can do. Your Work First program here 
in North Carolina is encouraging private employers by subsidizing 
paychecks and holding job fairs. These are the kinds of things we have 
to do everywhere. But you really need to look at how your program works. 
And you need to look at whether you have a system for challenging 
private employers to look at the incentives that are available. And you 
need to figure out how many people every county is going to have to move 
from welfare to work in order for you not to have a train wreck at the 
end of the next 4 years.
    Every State has to do this. And it's going to have to be done county 
by county, community by community. Because I'm telling you, everybody 
that ever said people who are able-bodied on welfare ought to have to 
work, now has a moral obligation to make sure that the people who have 
been told they have to work, actually have jobs so they can work. We 
have to do that.
    Let me just say, I have been to a lot of States and looked at a lot 
of programs. In Missouri, they go to employers and say, ``We'll give you 
the welfare check for up to 4 years if you need it, but you have to pay 
people $1.75 over the minimum wage, and we'll give you the welfare check 
as an employment-in-training supplement. And you can have it for a slot, 
but not for a particular individual, for up to 10 years, if you'll just 
keep being part of our program.'' So they've got a lot of employers, 
small, medium, and large, who are part of that.
    You have to do something like that to do something for the employers 
who are not taxed. Community nonprofits and religious organizations can 
hire a lot of people from welfare into their ranks and have a lot to do 
with integrating their families into the mainstream of life in North 
Carolina. But they have to have some incentive to do so.
    The second thing I would urge you to do is to make sure that as you 
realize savings from people moving from welfare to work, I think you can 
meet your goals better if you

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turn around and invest at least the initial of those savings back into 
the transition. We did a good job of adding $4 billion to child care for 
people moving from welfare to work. But we still may not have enough 
child care to do the job. And we know that is a huge barrier. You cannot 
ask people to hurt their kids when they go to work. And a lot of folks 
entering these entry-level jobs don't make much money. Now, we can carry 
them over with Medicaid health insurance for their kids for a while. 
They've got to have the child care.
    This bill gives you a lot of flexibility, and now you have to design 
this program. I would just implore you to really get down to brass 
tacks, get the facts: How many people does North Carolina have to move 
from welfare into jobs in 4 years? How many is that per county? How many 
is that per community? What are the tools we have? Who have we asked to 
do the job?
    I believe that the private sector is anxious to be asked to 
participate in this. I believe they want to end the permanent under 
class in America and help people move into the thriving, growing middle 
class. But we have to do it in an organized, disciplined way, State by 
State. We're going to do our part, but we need you to do yours.
    Finally, let me say that it is obvious from looking at education 
that we have to have a new partnership in America. Washington can lead 
the way, but the work has to be done by all Americans. North Carolina 
has led the way for a long time.
    I was smiling today when I got up and I thought about coming down 
here, and I thought about the first time I was ever in a meeting with 
Governor Hunt and Governor Riley--18 years ago--we were all much younger 
then. And we had this idea that all the Southern States would reach the 
national average in per capita income and have all these great 
opportunities for our people if only we could have an education system 
that was as good as anyplace in the country and it would reach 
everybody, without regard to race or income.
    And ironically, the mission that many of us who are southerners have 
carried for 20 or 30 years in our hearts, is now the mission of America 
in a global society dominated by information and technology. And it is 
within our reach, literally, to give every single child in America the 
greatest future in human history, if we create the conditions in which 
we can flourish--that's partly our job, through national defense and 
meeting the security challenges and providing a good economy--but also 
having the tools.
    We cannot guarantee the future for any child, but we can give every 
child the tools to make the most of his or her own life. That is now 
America's mission. It is a mission this State has pursued for a long 
time. If you will lead the way, America's best days are still ahead.
    Thank you, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 11:09 a.m. in the House of Representatives 
Chamber. In his remarks, he referred to Gov. James B. Hunt, Jr., and Lt. 
Gov. Dennis Wicker of North Carolina; Harold Brubaker, speaker, North 
Carolina House of Delegates; Marc Basnight, president pro tempore, North 
Carolina State Senate; Mayor Tom Fetzer of Raleigh; and Dean Smith, 
men's basketball coach, University of North Carolina.