[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 34, Number 9 (Monday, March 2, 1998)]
[Pages 316-323]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the National Council of Jewish Women

February 24, 1998

    The President. Thank you very much. Nan did such a good job I could 
resort to that old parliamentary device--I can say I associate myself 
with the previous speaker's remarks and sit down. [Laughter]
    I thank all of you for making me feel welcome. I'm delighted to be 
here with a number of members of our administration today, including my 
Director of Communications, Ann Lewis; my Director of Public Liaison, 
Maria Echaveste, and her aide, Debbie Mohile, and Lynn Cutler, who is 
known to many of you I know; and our HHS Assistant Secretary for 
Children and Families, Oliva Golden. I thank all of them for coming with 
me.
    This has been a very busy week in Washington, and I think that there 
are a couple of issues I ought to make a remark or two about before I 
begin what I came here to visit with you about. First, let me say a few 
words about Iraq. As you know, yesterday the Government of Iraq agreed 
to give the United Nations inspectors immediate, unrestricted, and 
unconditional access to any site they suspect may be hiding weapons of 
mass destruction or the means to make or deliver them. If fully 
implemented, this means that, finally, and for the first time in 7 
years, all of Iraq will be open to U.N. inspections, including many 
sites previously declared off limits. This would be an important step 
forward.

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    I'm proud of all of our men and women in uniform in the Gulf. Once 
again we have seen that diplomacy backed by resolve and strength can 
have positive results for humanity. We have to be watching very closely 
now to see not just what Iraq says, but what it does; not just the 
stated commitments, but the actual compliance. Let there be no doubt, we 
must remain committed to see that Saddam Hussein does not menace the 
world with weapons of mass destruction.
    I think that there has been a lot of talk, pro and con, about this 
issue in the last several days. I would just tell you that I think that 
many of you are in a position to launch an effort to educate all the 
people of our country about the potential future dangers of chemical and 
biological warfare--how such weapons can be made, how they can be 
delivered, how easy it is to disseminate them to irresponsible groups in 
small quantities that do large amounts of damage. And because you are in 
a position to know that, and because all of you have friends, many 
family members in Israel that feel vulnerable to such things, and 
because you understand that every civilized community in the world could 
be exposed to them in the 21st century, I ask you as citizens just to 
share what you know with your friends and neighbors back home so that we 
can continue as a nation to remain vigilant on this issue wherever we 
have to stand against it. Thank you very much. [Applause]
    I'd also like to say a word about campaign finance reform, an issue 
of concern to many of you. We've been working on this for years now, and 
finally we may have a chance to actually have a vote in the Senate. 
During my first term, every single year, a vote on campaign finance 
reform was put off in the House to see what would happen in the Senate. 
And then the leaders of the other party always killed it with a 
filibuster in the Senate. Now, this year, the McCain-Feingold bill, 
which has--obviously, it's supported by Senator McCain, the Republican, 
Senator Feingold, the Democrat--every Member of the Democratic caucus 
has endorsed the McCain-Feingold bill which ends soft money and imposes 
other limits on the present system of campaign finance.
    There was a difficulty with the bill which was keeping us from 
generating any more Republican support. Senator Snowe of Maine and 
Senator Jeffords of Vermont have brokered a compromise. Just before I 
left to come over here, I was told that all the Democrats are going to 
vote for that. So we're doing our best to do our part to get campaign 
finance reform. If a majority will back the Snowe-Jeffords compromise, 
then once again you will see that it is a minority keeping the country 
from getting it. So when you go up to the Hill today, if you can put in 
a plug for a meaningful campaign finance reform bill, I would appreciate 
it. And we need it.
    I have a lot to be grateful to the National Council of Jewish Women 
for. Many of you have participated in White House conferences on hate 
crimes, on early childhood learning and the brain, on child care. You've 
been involved in our national initiative on race. And I'm grateful for 
all of that. I was talking to Hillary late last night about my impending 
visit here, and she reminded me that the thing that I should be most 
grateful for is that in 1986--I can hardly remember it, it was so long 
ago--[laughter]--Nan Rich came to Arkansas to talk to Hillary and me 
about the HIPPY program. And we embraced it. We were the first State in 
the country--there were a lot of communities that had embraced it, but 
we were the first State that ever tried to go statewide with the 
program. It was a resounding success there, and now I believe there are 
28 States which have statewide efforts for the home instruction program 
for preschool youngsters. It has been a wonderful thing.
    And I might say I don't think I ever did anything as Governor that 
was more moving to me than to go to those HIPPY graduation programs and 
talk to the mothers and see the kids. And so I want to say on behalf of 
the First Lady and myself again, thank you, Nan, and thanks to all of 
you for supporting that. If every child could be in that kind of 
program, it would do as much to strengthen families and later success of 
children who are otherwise at risk as anything we could do. And I want 
to urge you to stick with it and keep going.
    These are good times for America. We have almost 15 million new jobs 
in the last

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5 years, the lowest unemployment rate in 24 years, the lowest inflation 
in 30 years, the lowest crime rate in 24 years, the lowest welfare rolls 
in 27 years, the highest homeownership in history. Today we learned some 
more good news. First, that in spite of the growth of the last year, the 
inflation rate and Consumer Price Index remained absolutely stable and 
very low.
    So we are doing something that I was told after I got elected 
President we could not do. They said we could not grow consistently at 3 
percent or more a year without inflation, and that is not so. We are 
doing that. And I'm very grateful for everybody who is involved in that.
    We also learned just today that the American people are upbeat about 
their prospects not only in the moment but in the future. There are two 
major measurements of consumer confidence in America--one put out by 
something called--a group called the Conference Board; the other put out 
by the University of Michigan. In the figures that will be released 
today, the Conference Board Index is the highest it's been in 30 years, 
and the University of Michigan measurement the highest ever recorded in 
the confidence of the consumers in the United States of America in our 
prospects. And that's good, too.
    But I'd like to reiterate something I said in the State of the 
Union. Good times are a blessing, and they should be enjoyed. But we all 
know in the nature of humankind and the rhythm of human affairs, no 
condition endures forever without interruption. And therefore, the good 
times impose upon us an opportunity and an obligation to prepare for the 
future, to create a framework within which long-term prosperity and 
health and well-being will be supported. That's why I said in the State 
of the Union that before we spend a penny--a penny--of the surplus that 
we estimate will materialize over the next 5 years, we should make sure 
we have secured Social Security in the 21st century so that the baby 
boom generation does not bankrupt the system.
    And that is why we have to tend to the health care of our people. We 
have to continue the work and actually finish the job of insuring 5 
million more children. I hope that Congress will pass my proposal to 
allow people over 55 who, for one reason or other, have lost all their 
health insurance to buy into the Medicare system. We can do that without 
imposing any financial burdens on Medicare, and even though the premiums 
are fairly high, a lot of these folks have children who will help them 
pay the premiums and they're much, much cheaper than just one trip to 
the hospital. So I hope we can do that.
    I hope that we will pass the Patient's Bill of Rights this year, 
because we have 160 million people now in managed care programs, and 
even others in nonmanaged care situations, who don't have the elemental 
rights and protections that I think everyone in the health care system 
should have. I hope that we will continue to move forward with 
environmental protection with the new clean water initiative and with 
the anti-global warming initiatives that I have recommended to help us 
deal with the problem of climate change, which a lot of you, depending 
on where you live, may have been experiencing over the last decade and 
even in this winter, if we can call it a winter.
    I hope that we will continue to make this a safer world. I have 
asked the Congress to vote for the expansion of NATO, to ratify the 
Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, to strengthen the Biological 
Weapons Convention to give us some teeth to deal with the kind of 
problems we've been discussing in Iraq throughout the world. And I hope 
that the idea that was inspired by the First Lady of a gift to the 
millennium that honors our past and imagines the future will find favor 
in Congress where we save our precious historical documents and the 
Star-Spangled Banner, and also devote the largest amount of money in 
history to medical and other research, scientific research to the 
future.
    But if you think about what the leading indicator--you know, 
economists--if you ever listen to any of these talk shows where these 
economists are talking and they always are talking about what the 
leading indicators are, which means they're always trying to figure out 
what happened. And they're kind of like me, half the time they're 
guessing, and they don't want you to know it. [Laughter] So they talk 
gravely about leading indicators are if that will pave the way. But 
there are

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some leading indicators I think that will tell us something about our 
future. For me, perhaps the most important leading indicator of where 
we'll be 10, 20, or 30 years from now is where our children are right 
now in terms of educational attainment. Now, that I think is clearly a 
leading indicator.
    And I believe if we are being honest we would have to say the 
leading indicators are mixed. That's what an honest assessment would be. 
Now, we can do one of two things when we look at the bad news as well as 
the good news. We can say, ``Well, what do you expect? America is a big, 
diverse country; we're the most ethnically, religiously, racially 
diverse democracy in the world, and besides that, there's so much 
difference in the incomes in America and so much difference in the 
neighborhoods, and what do you expect?''
    We can do that, or we can do what we ought to do and just say, 
``Most of this is not rocket science.'' Way over 90 percent of the 
people are capable of learning 100 percent of what they need to know to 
function well in a modern society. And if our children don't do it, it's 
our fault, and we're going to do something about it. This is not rocket 
science, and we can do better.
    Let's just look at where we are. For the last 5 years--and I'll 
speak more about the specifics later--but for the last 5 years, I have 
tried to bring to bear what I learned in 12 years as a Governor to the 
work of having the United States Government do what we could to help 
improve the educational enterprise in America--to raise standards, to 
promote reforms, to increase accountability, to improve teaching, to 
improve quality of education.
    Now, let's start with a certain premise here. I think everybody in 
America believes, and rightly, that we are blessed with the finest 
system of higher education in the world. I don't think anyone in America 
believes that for all of our children we have the best system of 
education, kindergarten through 12th grade, in the world.
    Therefore, it has been easier, in my judgment, to do the best things 
in higher education because you don't have to do so many hard things. 
All I tried to do in college when it came to college education was to 
open the doors of college to all, because college costs were the only 
thing that went up more than health care costs in the 1980's, in 
percentage terms. So what have we done? We passed the HOPE scholarship, 
a $1,500 tax credit for the first 2 years of college, a lifetime 
learning tax credit for the junior and senior years in graduate schools 
and for adults going back for job training; education IRA's, interest on 
students loans as tax-deductible, direct college loans that cost less 
money and are easier to repay, 300,000 more work-study positions, a lot 
more Pell grant scholarships, the biggest increase in aid to college 
since the GI bill. We can actually say we have opened the doors of 
college to any American who is willing to work for a college education. 
That is a very important achievement of which we can be proud.

[At this point, a child in the audience cried.]

    The President. That child obviously doesn't understand that yet. 
[Laughter] But in time.
    Now, when you back up from there, the going gets harder. And let me 
just give you one example. And I want you to ask yourselves as I go 
through this list what do you think caused this. Today our 
administration is announcing the results of the Third International Math 
and Science Study. And I talked about it last year and the year before. 
This is--the TIMSS test, it's called--the Third International Math and 
Science Study, are tests given in math and science to 4th, 8th, and 12th 
graders to a relatively large and representative sample--we believe 
representative sample--of students not only in our country, but 
throughout the world.
    Now, the past TIMSS test showed that the fourth graders in America 
do very well; that in the eighth grade we begin to fall back to the 
middle. And we believe it's in no small measure because as kids go 
through school, children in other parts of the world begin to take 
harder courses than our kids do and undergo a more rigorous learning 
pattern. And a lot of the problems associated with the socioeconomic 
difficulties begin to manifest themselves.
    Today we learned that by the 12th grade, our children trail far 
behind in math and science. Of the 21 countries measured, our

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12th graders outperformed only 2. So we start near the top, we fall to 
the middle, and we come out at the end.
    Now, let me say, first of all, there's some good news in this. The 
4th graders represent the same socioeconomic diversity and indeed they 
are more diverse because of the changing patterns than the 12th graders. 
Therefore, there is something wrong with the system that we are using to 
teach them. I do not believe these kids cannot learn. I am tired of 
seeing children patronized because they happen to be poor or from 
different cultural backgrounds than the majority. That is not true. That 
is not true.
    And let me tell you, just a couple of days ago--I can't remember 
exactly what day, the days fly by up here--but a couple of days ago I 
went to Baltimore, and I visited something called Living Classroom. And 
I walked along the waterway there in downtown, and I watched some kids 
rebuilding wetlands. And literally on the inland harbor they've got 
egrets now coming back to a wetland site. And I watched inner-city kids, 
many of whom had never focused on a harbor before, seen a waterway, 
measuring water quality, having very sophisticated conversations with me 
about the acidic content of the water and what caused it, and what the 
various sources of pollution in seawater are and what could be--what 
that might do to various kinds of fish and other life in the water.
    I watched inner-city kids working a fairly sophisticated computer 
program, monitoring a sailboat race, the Whitbread Race, and monitoring 
the American boat they were watching as it went around Cape Horn. So I 
don't believe all this business about how some kids are just so burdened 
down with their background they just can't learn all this modern stuff; 
that's just not true. But it is true that too many people are not 
learning. And so, I recommend that we take another look at this. Now, in 
'97 in the State of the Union Address, I outlined a 10-point plan to 
help education and ask that politics stop at the schoolhouse door, and 
then in 1998, just a few weeks ago, I talked again about what I thought 
we ought to do about education. And I would like to briefly review the 
list of things that I think are important.
    First of all, I still believe we have to start with the basics. We 
need smaller classes, better teaching, harder courses, higher standards. 
We have smaller classes, better teaching, harder courses, higher 
standards, greater accountability, and more reform. That's basically 
what I think we should be focused on. Even though we do pretty well in 
the fourth grade international tests, I think you know as well as I do 
there are still too many kids that don't get off to the start they need. 
And I appreciate what Nan said about the child care initiative. I ask 
for your support.
    We have substantially increased the number of kids in Head Start. 
We've increased our investment in Federal child care supports by 70 
percent in the last 5 years. We have doubled the earned-income tax 
credit, and that's lifted more and more children out of poverty. But we 
have to do more.
    The budget that I have presented on child care would double the 
number of low-income children receiving Federal assistance subsidies--2 
million; it would give 3 million more working families an expanded child 
care credit. It would actually mean that a family of four with an income 
of $35,000 a year or less that had high child care costs would actually 
not pay any Federal income tax.
    It would improve the safety and quality of child care. It would also 
provide scholarships for good providers to help to train them. And it 
recognizes that we need to do more on the educational component of child 
care. As we learned at the White House conference on early learning and 
the brain, which the First Lady put together, an enormous amount of the 
development of the infrastructure of learning is done in the first 3 
years. So I'm proposing an early learning fund that would help to reduce 
child-to-staff ratios and also help to educate parents more so that we 
could increase the learning component of the preschool years.
    I guess what I'd like to say is that I want to believe that if this 
plan passes, the lessons that are taught through the HIPPY program could 
be taught in homes all across America and all kinds of programs. That's 
what I want.
    One more thing I'd like to say about this, sort of about the out-of-
school hours--another big part of our budget contains funds

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through both the Educational Department and the Justice Department to 
help schools stay open after hours. An enormous percentage of the kids 
who get in trouble, juveniles who commit serious offenses, do so after 
the school day is over, but before their parents get home. Literally, if 
there were no juvenile offenses between like 2 to 3 in the afternoon and 
6 to 7 in the evening, the juvenile crime rate would be cut by way over 
50 percent. So I think it's important to give these children something 
to say yes to. And these after-school programs that we propose would 
help about a half a million children to say yes to soccer and computers, 
and no to drugs and crime. And I think that's a very important thing.
    Now, let's talk about what I hope the Congress will do this year to 
help to deal with the K through 12 years and what we have to continue to 
build on that has been started already. First of all, we need a national 
commitment to reduce class size in the early grades. Our budget would 
enable local school districts to hire 100,000 more teachers and lower 
the class size to an average of 18 in the first, second, and third 
grades and also to modernize or rebuild 5,000 schools so there would be 
classrooms for that to occur in. I think that's important.
    Second, we would continue the America Reads program, which now has 
literally tens of thousands of college students and other volunteers now 
going into elementary schools every week to make sure that no child gets 
out of the third grade without being able to read independently. That is 
very important.
    Next, we would continue our movement toward national academic 
standards and voluntary national exams to measure how our children are 
doing according to high national standards. Last year we took the first 
steps toward a fourth grade reading and an eighth grade math test, and I 
hope that eventually we will have every State testing their children in 
these basics and measuring them by a common national standard, so that 
we can continue on up the ladder academically to deal with the courses 
and the measurement.
    Next, I think it is very important that we support better teacher 
development. One of the problems is in a lot of these later years--and 
you have to pay the teachers well, too--in a lot of these later years in 
these senior-level courses is you have a lot of schools who have to 
offer courses that are taught by people who did not have sufficient 
academic background in the math or science course at issue. And I think 
that is very, very important.
    One of the most important developments potentially over the long run 
in American education in the last few years and gets almost no 
publicity--it's called the National Board for Professional Teacher 
Certification. And it basically is a national board set up to certify 
master teachers in a way that specialists in medicine and other 
professionals get certified. But the teachers are basically picked not 
only because of their substantive knowledge but because of their 
teaching ability, and they are trained. And the idea is that we will try 
to have a core--and there's just a few hundred of them now--a core of 
these teachers all across America. In my budget there's enough money to 
identify, train, and certify 100,000 master teachers. If you put one of 
these people in every school building in America, I believe it can 
revolutionize the culture of learning, and the quality of teaching has 
got to be a big part of what we're trying to do.
    The next thing I'd like to do--I want to talk about two other things 
that I think would really help performance in the later grades. I think 
it's important that we encourage the school districts to end the process 
of social promotion, but to do it in a way that lifts kids up, not puts 
them down. That is, if you look at what Chicago is doing now--an example 
which is truly astonishing--I mean Chicago used to be known by the 
annual teachers' strike. We all saw a picture in the paper of the 
Chicago teachers' strike every year. They have adopted a policy that 
basically says--and it's school by school, supported by grassroots 
parents groups--if the children do not perform at grade level, they 
cannot go on. But they have mandatory summer school, which also, by the 
way, has done wonderful--wonders for juvenile problems.
    They have mandatory summer school. So nobody just gets held back for 
spite or because of carelessness or callousness. There's a serious, 
disciplined comprehensive effort to give all the kids a chance to learn 
at grade

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level. I think that's very important. The Secretary of Education got a 
directive from me this week to come up with, basically, a plan and a 
program to help every school district in the country adopt a similar 
approach, particularly those that have a significant problem.
    Now, in addition to that, we are trying to pass in Congress this 
year some funds that will help universities comprehensively adopt 
schools where there are large numbers of disadvantaged children, 
starting in the sixth grade. So we can go to sixth and seventh graders, 
and not only give them college students as models and mentors but say to 
them in the sixth or seventh grade, look, here's the deal: If you make 
your grades and you take these courses and you learn these things, we'll 
be able to tell them now, here is the amount of college aid you can get. 
You will be able to go to college; this is the aid you will get; and 
this is what the college that is working with you is prepared to do.
    Now, this has the chance, I think, to dramatically lift learning 
levels in inner-city schools and other isolated schools with large 
numbers of poor children. And it's based on a number of different 
programs that have been bandied around in America over the last 20 
years, and especially the work of a Congressman from Philadelphia named 
Chaka Fattah. So I'm very excited about it. I hope you will support it.
    You just think, if every troubled school in America or every school 
with a lot of kids who are poor in America had a college adopting it, 
with kids in that school from the sixth grade on from the college, and 
at the same time actually contracting with the children and their 
parents, saying, this is the amount of college aid you're going to get 
if you do what you're supposed to do for the next 6 years, I believe you 
would see these scores begin to go up dramatically. And I hope that we 
can get a lot of support for that.
    Finally, let me say, we have to continue to support the reforms that 
are already underway. More school choice, more charter schools, and we 
have to finish the job of connecting every classroom and library to the 
Internet by the year 2000. That will enable more stories like the one I 
told you about Baltimore, because once you get everybody on the 
Internet, we can use technology to dramatically increase the quality and 
quantity and sophistication of material pouring into every school in 
America without regard to its resources and wealth. The Federal 
Communications Commission is helping us with an E-rate which will save 
the schools a couple of billion dollars a year in hookup costs and 
payment for time used. So that's very, very important.
    I say all these things to you again to point out that it is not 
inevitable that we have low scores on comparative exams, but it is a 
leading indicator. There's a coalition of schools in northern Illinois 
called the First in the World Coalition, and they take these 10 steps; 
they prepare for them; they work on them, and they do well with them. 
Now, most of the schools are in upper income neighborhoods. That's not 
why the kids do well. They do well because they prepare. They take hard 
courses, they work hard at it and they believe they're going to do well. 
And if we do that for every school in America, if we can give them the 
hard courses taught by well-qualified teachers in an environment that's 
supportive, and convince them that they can do well, they will do very 
well.
    Our present levels of performance are unacceptable. They are not a 
good leading indicator. But we have lots of indicators that we can do 
what we need to do.
    So I want--I ask you again; you have to really think. You clapped 
when I said this before--you have to think about whether you believe 
this. Do you believe all children can learn? The HIPPY program shows 
that's right. The Israeli experience of the HIPPY program shows that's 
right. If you believe that and if it's not happening, then there is 
something wrong with the systems. And it is our generation's 
responsibility to fix it. You cannot blame the schoolchildren. And if 
their parents don't have a lot of education and don't know what to do, 
you sure can't blame them. We have to--this is--this cannot be rocket 
science. There is no excuse for this. So again, I say, I am hoping and 
praying that we can continue to put aside partisan politics when it 
comes to education and continue to move forward on these things, because 
it's so important for our future.

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    If you think about it, a lot of the challenges we're facing today 
are not so different than they were back in 1893 when this organization 
was founded. Think about it, right? [Laughter] We've got a new economy. 
And there was a new economy in 1893. And we've got to figure out how to 
make it work for everybody instead of just a few people.
    We are overwhelmed by a big influx of immigrants from different 
kinds of countries, and so were we in 1893, and we have to bring 
everybody into the American mainstream. We are about to enter a new 
century with a lot of confidence but a lot of challenges. We have to do 
what we've always had to do at such times as Americans. We have to make 
sure we deepen the meaning of our freedom; we widen the circle of 
opportunity; we strengthen the Union of our people.
    The Talmud says every blade of grass has its angel that bends over 
and whispers, ``Grow, grow.'' Our children are blades of grass. You must 
be the angels.
    Thank you.

Note: The President spoke at 11:28 a.m. in the Regency Ballroom at the 
Hyatt Regency Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Nan Rich, national 
president, National Council of Jewish Women; the Home Instruction 
Program for Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY); and the First in the World 
Consortium.