[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 34, Number 30 (Monday, July 27, 1998)]
[Pages 1432-1439]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the 75th Annual Convention of the American Federation of 
Teachers in New Orleans, Louisiana

July 20, 1998

    The President. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen of the AFT, 
Senator Landrieu, Congressman Jefferson, Secretary Slater. Mayor Morial, 
thank you for hosting this fine group of America's teachers in this 
wonderful city.
    To President Sandy Feldman and Ed McElroy and your newly elected 
executive VP, Nat Lacour, and all the officers and people who are here. 
Let me say, when Sandy was up here giving her introduction, my mind was 
racing back over lots of events going back to early 1992 when we first 
went to a school in New York together.
    Audience member. Cardozo.
    The President. Cardozo, that's right; you were there, weren't you? 
[Applause] Now, anytime I'm talking, if I mention something that gives 
you an opportunity to flack for your school, you stand up and do it. 
[Laughter] I won't be offended. I think you ought to be proud of what 
you do and where you work and the children that you're trying to help to 
prepare for tomorrow.
    And when you think about where we were then as a nation and where we 
are now, I was so concerned because not only was the economy in the 
doldrums, but our society was becoming more divided; the crime rates 
were going up; the welfare rolls were exploding; there were tensions 
among our people; people were looking for racial or ethnic or religious 
or political reasons to blame other people for the general problems and 
challenges we shared as Americans.
    One of the things that I always admired most about the AFT was that 
I felt that you have always found the right balance between being 
passionately devoted to public education and to the welfare and working 
conditions of teachers, and uncompromising--uncompromising--in your 
advocacy of high

[[Page 1433]]

standards and accountability and educational excellence for every single 
American child.
    Shortly before I came out here, your officers told me that Edie 
Shanker had decided to give the Medal of Freedom that I awarded to Al to 
the AFT for safekeeping. I love that. For it was your legacy, your 
values that he worked so hard to serve. You take good care of it. He 
earned it, and so did you.
    This is a remarkable time in our country's history, a time of 
prosperity and confidence and breathtaking change if you think about 
where we are now compared to where we were on the day that I was 
fortunate enough to be inaugurated President. I don't say that our 
administration is 100 percent responsible for all the good things that 
have happened. That would be foolish. In a free society, the people 
deserve the lion's share of any change that occurs.
    But I will say this, we had new ideas and new policies. We said we 
would take this country in a new direction. And there were consequences 
to those decisions, just as there will be consequences to the decisions 
of those who disagree with us if they hold sway.
    And I think every single one of you should feel a personal measure 
of pride if you helped Al Gore and me win those elections in '92 and '96 
because of what has happened--every single one of you.
    Because when you hear these statistics--I mean, think about this. 
Compared to 1992, we have 16 million new jobs and the lowest 
unemployment rate in 28 years, the lowest crime rate in 25 years, the 
lowest percentage of our people on welfare in 29 years, the first 
balanced budget and surplus in 29 years, the lowest inflation in 32 
years, the highest homeownership in the history of the country, and the 
smallest National Government in 35 years, and the biggest investment in 
education in our Nation's history. I am proud of that, and you should be 
too.
    Now, today I want to ask you to look ahead at where we are and what 
our challenges are. And I want to ask you to help me with a lesson plan 
for America's future. I know you're mildly acquainted with such things. 
[Laughter] I also know that this union represents people who help you in 
schools who are not teachers, and I thank all of them, all the support 
people here who are here. Thank you for your service.
    We have to decide what to do with this moment. And I want to talk 
about education and the role of some other issues. But let me just back 
up and say, there are three things I want you to think about. First of 
all, all these numbers and statistics that I mentioned are very 
rewarding because they represent real positive changes in real peoples' 
lives: incomes for ordinary people are up; poverty is down, as Sandy 
said; 90 percent of our kids are immunized; we've virtually opened the 
doors of college to everyone who will work for it. I'm proud of all 
that.
    But you know and I know that we face some big long-term challenges. 
And I'd just like to mention a couple of them, because I want you to 
talk to your students and to the parents and to the people that you work 
with about them, because people need to understand that just because 
times are good, it doesn't mean we should all be relaxing--except if you 
want to go out in the Sun in New Orleans and relax, I'm for it. 
[Laughter] But I don't want it to be a permanent condition for the 
American people.
    Because we have big challenges facing us if we're going to go into 
the 21st century with the American dream alive for everyone, with 
America coming together as a community across all of our differences, 
and with our country leading the world for peace and freedom and 
prosperity. What are they? Well, let me just mention a few of them.
    Number one, we have to save Social Security and Medicare for the 
baby boom generation. And we have to do it in a way that recognizes that 
they lift millions and millions and millions of seniors out of poverty, 
but that as presently constructed, it is not sustainable because when--
and I'm the oldest baby boomer, so I can say this--when we retire, at 
present birth rates and present immigration rates and present retirement 
rates, there will only be about two people working for every person 
drawing Social Security. So we have to make some changes. If we make 
modest changes now, we can avoid drastic changes later. We must do that, 
and every American must support it. And we must find an American, 
unified way to do it.

[[Page 1434]]

    The second thing we have to do is to recognize--as you can see from 
this sweltering heat--that the Vice President is right: The climate of 
our country and our globe is changing. The globe is warming. And our 
principal contribution to it, human beings everywhere, is that we're 
putting too many greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, primarily because 
we insist on maintaining Industrial Age patterns of energy use when all 
the technology available indicates that you don't have to do that to 
grow an economy.
    So we have got to take advantage of the fact that our children are 
natural environmentalists, to use them, to empower them, to help us all 
to find a way to save our planet, to improve our environment, even as we 
grow the economy. I promise you it can be done, but we've got to get 
people to think differently. This is a huge education issue.
    The third thing we have to do is to prove that we can bring the 
benefits of this great economic recovery to all Americans, not just to 
those who have it now--in our inner cities, in our rural areas, our 
farming areas, on our Native American reservations.
    The fourth thing we have to do is to persuade the American people 
that if we're going to lead the world for peace and freedom and 
prosperity, we have to be farsighted. We have to pay our way in an 
interdependent world. That means we can't walk away from our investment 
in the United Nations. We can't walk away from our investment in the 
International Monetary Fund.
    I was just home for the weekend, and I know what a lot of folks at 
home think. They think, ``Why does Bill Clinton want to spend money on 
the International Monetary Fund? We've got needs here at home.'' I'll 
tell you why. Because unless we help to reform and restore growth in the 
Asian countries, for example, they won't be able to buy our products and 
30 percent of our growth--if you like these 16 million new jobs, if you 
like this low unemployment, if you like the taxes that are flowing into 
local government for education because of the economy--somebody has got 
to buy our stuff around the world, and if they don't have any money, 
they can't buy it. And if they don't have any money, the value of their 
currency goes down, so their products they sell here are cheaper. So our 
trade deficit goes up.
    If you want us to grow in America, we have to grow together with our 
friends and neighbors around the world. We have to be responsible 
partners, and we've got to teach people that.
    Just two other quick points. We've got to be able to live together 
as one America across all the lines that divide us. Many of you teach in 
school districts where there are children from 20, 40, 60, 80, maybe 
even 100 different racial and ethnic groups, speaking dozens of 
different languages as their native tongues. This is a good thing for 
America in the 21st century, in a global economy, an information age.
    If we can overcome the demons of racial and ethnic and religious 
hatred which are bedeviling the world in our time, from Bosnia and 
Kosovo to Rwanda, to Northern Ireland, to the Middle East, to the 
conflict between Greece and Turkey, to the difficulties between India 
and Pakistan, and if you want your country to lead the world away from 
all that, I can just say this: In order for America to do good 
throughout the world, we have to be good at home. We have to be one 
America.
    Finally, the last big challenge that I think we face--big challenge 
for the 21st century--is providing every single child with world-class 
excellence in education. Every child; every child. No one anywhere in 
the world questions that we offer more rich, quality opportunities for 
people to go on to college than any other country in the world. We've 
worked very hard to open the doors of college to everybody who will work 
for it. But no one who is honest would say we don't have serious 
challenges in our elementary and secondary education. There are all 
kinds of different arguments about, well, what caused it or what the 
problems are or what the solutions are.
    You and I, by and large, agree on the solutions. But the main thing 
we've got to agree on is that this is one of the five or six challenges 
that will shape the America our children and grandchildren will live in, 
in the 21st century. If you do not want our country to continue to be 
divided along the lines of income, to continue to grow more unequal,

[[Page 1435]]

if you don't want the 21st century to see an America where there are 
fabulously wealthy, successful people living alongside breathtakingly 
poor people, isolated in areas where opportunity never reaches, we have 
to realize that if this is an information age and if the economy is 
growing by ideas, then it is more important than ever before that 
educational excellence be universal. And we have to provide that.
    Now, I also want to say a few words today about an issue that may 
seem somewhat mundane to people who've never been in the classroom and 
faced it, but America has been thinking about it because of all the 
tragedies in all the schools in the last year or so, and that is the 
whole issue of school safety and the critical role of a safe classroom 
and a safe school and a safe schoolyard play in the work that teachers 
do.
    Every day, you work hard to broaden young minds, to unlock their 
potential, to sharpen skills. You have faith in the possibilities of our 
children. If you didn't, you wouldn't be doing this, because just about 
every one of you could be making more money doing something else. If you 
weren't devoted to our children, you wouldn't be doing this. It keeps 
you in front of a chalkboard or a keyboard; it keeps you up late at 
night grading papers and making lesson plans.
    We have tried to be a good partner with you, as Sandy said. I have 
loved working with you to raise standards, to increase accountability, 
to improve teaching, to give schools the tools and the flexibility they 
need to reach the national education goals, to try to help make sure all 
of our children can read and can log on to the Internet and can go on to 
college.
    We now have, I think, a great challenge before us, because in spite 
of the fact that this agenda is clearly an integral part of America's 
economic success over the next few years, believe it or not, there are 
people who don't want to continue it in Washington and some who 
downright are committed to undoing it. But I have put before the 
Congress an agenda to modernize our schools, to reduce class size, to 
connect every classroom to the Internet, to end social promotion but 
provide more funding for after-school and summer school programs that 
work to give our children a chance, to give more schools who are in 
disadvantaged areas the funds and the support they need to adopt the 
kind of comprehensive approach that Chicago is pursuing with such 
success, to give more students in disadvantaged areas mentors and the 
certainty in junior high school or middle school that they can go on to 
college if they learn and become good citizens and succeed in school, to 
provide more funds to put teachers into underserved areas, to do 
everything I can to help to provide 100,000 more master teachers so that 
we can do what needs to be done in every school building in the country, 
and to support your efforts to improve teaching.
    I salute Sandy Feldman's plan to improve teacher quality, and I want 
to support your efforts. I have always been impressed, I will say again, 
that the AFT was never afraid to say that before a teacher is certified, 
it is reasonable to have the demonstrated competence of the teacher. I 
have always respected that, and I thank you for that.
    But I will also say that while I have strongly supported the testing 
of teachers before they're certified, I also have strongly supported 
paying them once they are certified and strongly supported having master 
teachers in every school building in America and doing the things that 
Sandy outlined in her proposal.
    So, as teachers, you're stepping up to your responsibility. I have 
tried to preserve the gains of the last 5\1/2\ years and put forward an 
ambitious program for the future. And we've had a lot of success working 
with Congress in a bipartisan way for education. In the balanced budget 
bill, as Sandy said, we got this huge increase in funding for education, 
and we got the HOPE scholarship, we got more work-study positions, we 
got big increases in Pell grants.
    We have, earlier than that, got a big improvement in the student 
loan program to open the doors of college. We've got 1,000 colleges now 
participating with their kids in the America Reads program, going into 
your schools. We've got AmeriCorps people, almost 100,000 young people 
have been in AmeriCorps--when I drove by a grade school this morning on 
the way here, there

[[Page 1436]]

were the AmeriCorps volunteers out there with their kids, holding up 
signs, welcoming me to New Orleans. We have been able to do those things 
by working together.
    Now is the time for Congress to turn away from some of these recent 
committee votes where they say no to smaller classes, no to modernized 
schools, no to AmeriCorps. They haven't yet said yes to America Reads. I 
am pleased that we seem to be making some bipartisan progress with the 
proposals to prepare teachers for the classroom.
    But I ask Congress to support all these proposals. They are not my 
ideas. They are the ideas of educators. They are the ideas that we know 
work. All of them came from grassroots America. I was in Philadelphia 
the other day where the average age of a school building is 65 years. A 
lot of those buildings are beautiful, but they need rehabilitating.
    I was in Florida in a little town where there were 17--count them, 
17--trailers outside the major school building because the school 
population had grown so much. If you want smaller classes, they have to 
be held somewhere and there have to be teachers to walk in the 
classroom. We have got to do this. This is important.
    So I ask you to redouble your efforts, to reach out to all Members 
of Congress without regard to their party and say, look, if there's one 
thing in America--even in Washington, DC--we ought to be able to put 
beyond partisan politics, it should be education of our children. Now, 
if you want to fight about whether you believe in vouchers or not, fine, 
let's have an argument about it. I don't mind that. But while we're 
arguing about it, don't forget this: over 90 percent of the people are 
out there in those public schools, and these ideas are good on their own 
merit, and they deserve to be implemented and passed without regard to 
party in Washington, DC. We have the money to do it, it is allocated, 
and we should do it.
    Now, let me also say that you know, better than anybody, learning 
cannot occur unless our schools are safe and orderly places where 
teachers can teach and children can learn. Wherever there is chaos where 
there should be calm, wherever there is disorder where there should be 
discipline, make no mistake about it, it's not just a threat to our 
classrooms and to your mission; it is a threat to the strength and 
vitality of America.
    In a recent study, 81 percent of teachers said the worst behaved 
students absorb the most attention in school--not the struggling 
students, not the striving students, the worst behaved. Seventy-one 
percent of all high school students said there were too many disruptive 
students in their own classes. And only 13 percent of public school 
students said their classmates were, quote, very respectful of teachers.
    Now, teachers can't teach if they have to fight for respect or fear 
for their safety. Students can't study if there is disorder in a 
classroom. And the disruption won't change unless there are clear, 
strict standards for behavior. You know better than anyone that we 
either have discipline in a classroom or we have disorder and, too 
often, danger. Hard experience has taught us this lesson all too well. 
As a nation, therefore, we must recognize that giving you the tools to 
have a safe, orderly classroom is central to the mission of renewing 
America.
    There is another lesson to be learned from all this. In this case, 
it is from the overall decline in crime. And let me back up and say one 
of the cruel ironies of these horrible killings in all these States over 
the last year or so has been that they have occurred against the 
backdrop of a dramatic drop in crime and the first drop in juvenile 
crime in years and years and years. Crime is dropping around the country 
because we're getting serious about community policing, effective 
punishment, and effective prevention. Crime is dropping because whole 
communities, like Boston, are taking responsibility for their streets 
and their neighborhoods and because government is giving them the 
support they need.
    I mention Boston because they went 2 years and a few weeks without a 
single, solitary child under the age of 18 being killed with a gun. 
That's an amazing statistic.
    Now, these things do not happen by accident. They happen by design 
at the grassroots level, but people must have the tools to do the job. 
That's the idea behind our efforts to put 100,000 police on the street. 
When I became President, violent crime had tripled in the last 30 years, 
and the number

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of police officers had only increased by 10 percent. You didn't have to 
be Einstein to figure out that was a mathematical equation for disaster. 
And the police officers told us we can prevent crime if you give us 
enough police to walk the streets, to be on the blocks, to know the 
kids, to know the parents, to know the store owners, to figure out 
what's going on. So that's what we did.
    But if you look at what happened in community after community where 
the crime rate dropped, they first of all put in place a system that 
said we are going to have respect for the law, and here's the system 
we're going to have to maximize respect, hold people accountable who 
don't respect the law. And guess what? More and more people started to 
follow the law in the first place, to behave as responsible citizens, to 
walk away from the prospect of criminal conduct.
    That's what we've tried to do with school safety. We've worked hard 
to tighten security, to give you the tools to do that, to strengthen 
prevention, to toughen penalties. We initiated this nationwide policy of 
zero tolerance for guns in schools. In the '96-'97 school year, this 
policy led to the expulsion of about 6,100 law-breaking students. It 
obviously prevented countless acts of violence. Yet, as we have seen 
from the recent acts of violence, we have to do more.
    When I was in Springfield, Oregon, I was so moved by what the 
parents of injured children said, the parents in some cases of children 
who were killed. The teachers who were there talked about the necessity 
of doing more and developing the right kinds of intervention strategies. 
This is terribly important.
    And one of the things I came here today to do is to say that in the 
fall, I will host the first-ever White House conference on school 
safety, and I want you to be a part of that. We want to bring together 
educators and law enforcement officers and families whose lives have 
been touched by these terrible tragedies to find new solutions to this 
profound challenge.
    Again, I ask Congress also to be our partner. And again I say, this 
should not be a partisan issue. I have proposed a juvenile crime bill to 
ban violent juveniles from buying guns for life and to take other 
important steps to give communities much needed support. I've asked that 
in our balanced budget, $95 million be allocated to the prevention of 
juvenile crime. I urge Congress to invest in prevention.
    You know, when we talk, those of us who have run for office, we all 
like to talk about punishment because everybody has known someone who's 
been hurt, who's been a victim of crime, and because we are outraged 
when we see children have their lives cut short. And I would point out 
that in our '94 crime bill we did more to stiffen punishment for crimes 
under Federal law than had ever been done. But you know and I know that 
we cannot jail our way out of this problem; we've got to prevent more of 
these kids from getting in trouble in the first place.
    Again I say, this is not a Democratic or a Republican issue. We 
should simply invest in prevention because the police officers tell us 
it works, because the teachers tell us it works, because the social 
workers tell us it works, because the religious leaders tell us it 
works, because the children themselves tell us it works. We should be 
investing in a summer jobs program, in the summer school program, in the 
after-school program because it works.
    We also know, by way of lessons, that the small stuff matters, the 
basics matter. In most schools it's not the sensational acts of violence 
but smaller acts of aggression, threats, scuffles, constant backtalk 
that take a terrible toll on the atmosphere of learning, on the morale 
of teachers, on the attitudes of other students. And that's why setting 
strict standards and enforcing them can make a powerful difference all 
across America, as they are doing in many places.
    And let me just give three or four examples. Our first effort has to 
be to get kids inside the schoolhouse doors and keep them there during 
school hours. Truancy is more than a warning sign; it is trouble, a 
gateway to drugs, alcohol, gangs, and violence. Our children will either 
sit in class or stand on the streets. They'll either learn from teachers 
or learn from the gang leaders on the streets. It used to be the rule 
that truancy laws were enforced, that local police knew kids and brought 
them back to school. But in too many places, that has long since ceased 
to be the case.

[[Page 1438]]

    Thankfully, communities again are turning their attention to the 
old-fashioned remedy of enforcing the truancy laws. In Milwaukee, 
officers can now stop students on the street during school hours. In 
Boston, where more than a quarter of the public school students were 
absent 3 weeks or more this past school year, they now have a strict new 
promotion policy. If you don't attend, you don't advance.
    Other cities are forming truancy task forces, a united front of 
schools, social services, community police to keep our children in 
school and out of trouble. This is important. A teacher's day must 
sometimes seem very long. But we know the school day lasts precious few 
hours, and there's no time to waste.
    The other thing I--next thing I'd like to say is when the kids are 
there they need to feel free, and they need to feel free of danger going 
to and from school. That's one of the ideas behind this incredible wave 
of enthusiasm across the country for school uniforms. When I spoke about 
school uniforms in my 1996 State of the Union Address--besides making 
half the kids in America mad at me--[laughter]--it struck a lot of 
people as an idea long out of date. And it was just gathering steam in 
places like Long Beach, California.
    But in the years since, I have been heartened by the flood of 
interest, from New York to Houston, from Dade County to Chicago, school 
districts are adopting school uniform policies. And they're finding ways 
to do it in ways that give the children and the parents and the teachers 
all a say in how they do it and that don't put poor kids at a 
disadvantage when they can't afford the uniforms.
    But students have told me--I've talked to a lot of students about 
this in schools that have uniform policies--when one student is no 
longer obsessed by another student's sneakers or designer jackets, and 
where students are focused not on appearances but on learning, crime and 
violence go down, attendance and learning go up. And I am proud of the 
support we have given to those of you who have done this.
    The next thing I'd like to say--and I know you believe this, because 
you applauded earlier when I mentioned it--is that the responsibility 
that we adults have for our kids doesn't end when the last school bell 
rings. After school, an awful lot of children's parents are still 
working, and there's nobody home to either supervise them there, or know 
where they are or where they're going when they leave school. Well, a 
lot of kids get in trouble after school and youth crime is at its peak 
during the unsupervised hours of 3 to 6. That's why I have said that our 
schools should remain open, to become community learning centers where 
children are safe and can learn and grow.
    In this budget for 1999, for next year, I have proposed a 
significant expansion in our investments for before- and after-school 
programs. And for the later hours when streets become darker and more 
dangerous, I have often urged communities to install curfews, to follow 
the example of New Orleans, where Mayor Morial, who is here with us 
today, put in place community-based curfews with very impressive 
results, in no small measure because the children are also taken if they 
violate curfew to somebody who can help them if they've got a problem, 
and support them and get them back on the right path. But these are the 
things that we have to do if we expect you to have a safe learning 
environment.
    I should also say that I think that the character education programs 
that our Education Secretary, Dick Riley, has done so much to help 
implement across the country are a positive force for a more disciplined 
school environment where the little nagging, terrible problems don't 
occur.
    So we're going to have this conference in the fall on school 
violence. I want the AFT involved. I want the teachers who know what the 
problems are to participate. But I want to encourage every place to 
adopt antitruancy efforts, to consider school uniforms, to look at the 
curfew issue, to look at character education programs, to look to a new 
approach to restoring discipline in our schools and order in our 
children's lives. We can do this. The three R's of the AFT: 
responsibility, respect, results--that's what school discipline is all 
about.
    In closing, let me say I am always struck by how every challenge in 
American education has been solved by somebody somewhere. Therefore, I 
am always frustrated that we have not yet found a way to make sure

[[Page 1439]]

when somebody somewhere solves a problem, we cannot model that and make 
sure it's solved by everybody everywhere. That is one of the things that 
the AFT has been devoted to: finding what works, developing a systematic 
approach, trying to get it done everywhere. And it's one thing America 
needs desperately in this area of school discipline, school order, and 
school safety.
    Again, I say I am very proud to be your partner in building a 21st 
century America that is leading the world to peace and freedom and 
prosperity, an America in which every child is a responsible citizen 
with unparalleled opportunity, in a community that reveals in its 
diversity but is bound together in our wonderful ongoing effort to form 
a more perfect Union.
    You, the educators of our Nation, are the architects of that 21st 
century America. Build well.
    Thank you very much, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 11:30 a.m. at the Ernest N. Morial 
Convention Center. In his remarks, he referred to Mayor Marc H. Morial 
of New Orleans; Ed McElroy, secretary-treasurer, American Federation of 
Teachers; and Edith Shanker, former AFT President Al Shanker's widow.