[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 1 (Monday, January 11, 1999)]
[Pages 14-17]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks on Funding for Quality After-School Programs

January 7, 1999

    Thank you very much, Mr. Vice President. I want to thank all those 
who have spoken before and all of you who are here. I say a special word 
of appreciation to the Members of the Congress who have come, the 
members of the education community, the employees of the Department of 
Education.
    I want to thank Congressman Ford for his stirring speech. I was 
looking at Congressman Ford, thinking, you know, I was 28 once. 
[Laughter] And when I ran for Congress at that age I got beat. I see why 
he got elected. [Laughter]
    I thank Senator Kennedy for his lifetime of literally an example of 
unparalleled service in the United States Senate and Secretary

[[Page 15]]

Riley, who has been my friend since we started our governorships 
together over 20 years ago now. And I'm glad to see Mrs. Shriver here, 
and I thank the family of Congressman King for coming, my colleague in 
the Irish peace process. We're glad to see all of them.
    But most of all, I want to thank Lissette Martinez and Leonard for 
showing up and reminding us while we're all here today, because they 
were great. When she held her children's pictures up here, I thought, if 
those kids and their parents are the future of America, we're going to 
be just fine. We're going to be just fine.
    Even though the definition of well-educated was very different over 
200 years ago when this country was founded, our Founding Fathers 
thought it was of pivotal importance. In 1787, they declared that all 
new territories set aside land for public schools, establishing the 
principle that public education, though a State and local 
responsibility, must always be a national priority.
    In 1862, President Lincoln signed the legislation creating the land 
grant college system. In 1944, the GI bill gave millions of returning 
veterans tickets to what became the first mass middle class in the 
history of the world. In 1958, the launch of Sputnik led to Federal 
funds to improve science and math education in our country. In 1965, 
Federal support for education expanded further to bring minorities and 
the poor, long shut out of the classroom, inside to the full benefits of 
public education. At each of these turning points in our history, our 
country strengthened public education to match the challenges of the 
times.
    Now in our time, as others have said, we face another challenge, the 
emergence of a global economy that is fast-paced, technologically 
sophisticated, driven by information and, at the same time, the 
emergence in our country of a breathtakingly diverse group of young 
people, diverse by race and ethnic background, by religion, by culture, 
by income, by circumstance.
    We now have an economy in which the workplace is no longer just for 
men but also for women; the work day is no longer bound by the hours of 
9 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and the workplace is increasingly at home. When I 
became President 6 years ago, only 3 million Americans were earning 
their living at home. When I ran for reelection, the number was 12. 
Today there are about 20 million Americans earning their primary income 
out of their homes. This is a stunning statistic.
    To meet the challenges of this new economy with our new society, we 
have to rely on our old values, but we have to make sure that we 
manifest them in modern ways. That means our public schools must change. 
They must teach our children while reflecting the way we work and live 
now and will work and live in the 21st century.
    In the last 6 years we have worked hard on this, with the help of 
all of you in this room and those whom you represent throughout the 
United States. Forty-eight of our 50 States have now adopted tougher 
academic standards which we called for when the Goals 2000 program 
passed back in 1994. Thousands of schools have become safer, better 
learning environments, cracking down on gangs and guns, violence and 
discipline, adopting school uniforms and other systems designed to 
create a better, more equal learning environment.
    The percentage of students who report being threatened or injured at 
school nationwide is down. We've begun to organize an army of tutors to 
help elementary school children learn to read and middle school and high 
school students to prepare for college. And I'm very proud of all the 
young people all across America who are working in these tutoring and 
mentoring programs.
    We've dramatically increased our investment in early childhood 
learning through the Head Start program. We're making real progress in 
connecting every classroom and library to the Internet by the year 2000. 
And as Secretary Riley said, the e-rate for which the Vice President 
fought so hard means that we've not only hooked up those classrooms, but 
they can actually afford to log on.
    Last fall, we fought for and won from Congress a downpayment on 
100,000 new highly trained teachers to reduce class sizes in the early 
grades, and we made a beginning on our proposal to offer to pay off the 
college costs of young people who will go into our most underserved 
areas and teach for a few years when they graduate from school. I hope 
the new Congress will keep up the payments

[[Page 16]]

so we can keep the teachers going. And I hope they will work with me to 
build or modernize 5,000 schools.
    The charter school movement, which I have championed since 1992, is 
growing. When I took the oath of office as President, there was one 
charter school in the whole United States, a public school organized by 
parents or teachers within the school system but free of a lot of the 
bureaucratic limitations that are on so many schools. In 1996, there 
were 700. There are now about 1,000. We are well on our way to our goal 
of having 3,000 by the year 2000.
    All these efforts and others are beginning to show up in SAT scores, 
which are up; math scores, which have risen in nearly all grades 
nationwide; even on a lot of the international tests, when we didn't do 
so well for years and years, our younger people are tending to do better 
and better.
    We should be pleased and thankful, but we should not be fooled into 
complacency. Why? First, reading scores have hardly budged and many of 
our foreign competitors are improving their schools faster than we are. 
Secondly, while our children do very well on these international test 
scores in elementary school and reasonably well in middle school, by the 
time they're in high school they're rankings have dropped dramatically.
    We know we have more to do. We know that a majority of our schools 
have not kept pace with the new family patterns and work patterns which 
dominate America. We know that more and more parents are being drawn 
into the work force. On any given day, as many as 15 million school 
children are left to fend for themselves at home, idle in front of the 
television or out on the streets, vulnerable to gangs, drugs and crime. 
On any given day when school lets out, juvenile crime goes up, and also 
the number of children themselves victimized by crime. On any given day 
when school lets out, tens of millions of working parents look nervously 
at the clock, hoping and praying their children will be okay.
    It is no secret that I believe that the best way for our Nation to 
meet these challenges is to expand the number and improve the quality of 
our after-school programs. With quality after-school, parents and 
educators will be given the tools they need to succeed; students learn 
their lesson in the schoolhouse, not on the street; youth crime and 
victimization plummet. Quality after-school programs both enhance 
opportunity and bolster responsibility. In so doing, they strengthen our 
communities; they honor our values; they benefit our nation.
    That's why I've supported grants for these kinds of quality programs 
through the 21st Century Community Learning Center Initiative, first 
introduced by Senator Jeffords from Vermont, championed by Senator 
Kennedy and Senator Boxer, Congresswoman Lowey from New York and others.
    Two years ago, this program received $1 million from Congress. Then 
it grew the year before last to $40 million, and then last year, to $200 
million, in the budget I signed, serving a quarter of a million 
children. Yet, the demand for quality after-school programs, the 
bipartisan support it has gained, and its potential to transform public 
education in America and the futures of our children far, far outweigh 
the investment we have made to date.
    Therefore, today I am pleased to announce that in the new budget I 
will present to Congress this year, we will triple our investment in 
academically enriched after-school programs to give over 1 million 
children across America somewhere to go.
    Now, you heard Lissette talking about the Chicago system. It's one I 
particularly favor. And last year I asked the Congress to set aside some 
funds that we could give to other school systems to help to adopt the 
comprehensive approach they have there. That is, no social promotion; 
more parent involvement in the schools; high standards but don't flunk 
anybody because the system is failing the kids; don't say the kids are 
failing; give them the after-school programs; give them the summer 
school programs; give them the tools they need to succeed. So we are 
going to give priority to communities that end social promotion in the 
right way.
    She talked about that eighth grade test. Hillary and I, when we were 
working together in Arkansas on education, made our State the first 
State in the country to have an eighth grade exit exam. But I never saw 
it as a way of identifying children who were failing. I thought it would 
identify the schools

[[Page 17]]

that were failing and give the children a chance to succeed. And that's 
what they believe in in Chicago, and what we should believe in 
everywhere.
    So I'm looking forward to working with all the Senators and House 
Members who care so much about this, both to improve after-school 
programs and to end social promotion but to do it in the right way. We 
have to do everything in our power--after school, smaller classes, 
better teachers, modernized facilities, Internet hookups, summer 
programs--to help our kids succeed. We have to have high standards not 
only for students but for the preparation of our teachers and for the 
performance of our schools. And I'll have more to say about that later.
    Scarce dollars should not be spent on failed policies. If we've 
learned anything, Hillary and Dick Riley and I, after 20 years and more 
of working at this, listening to teachers and parents, going into 
schools, it is what Congressman Ford said: We do believe all children 
can learn. And that gives a much greater urgency to this work.
    Look, this is not really just about making the American economy 
strong or even making sure that when we baby boomers retire we'll be 
supported by two workers that made Bs or better instead of a 1.7. 
[Laughter] It makes a good point. But that's not really what this is 
about. Everybody just gets one chance. Everyone just has one life. This 
is about giving people a chance to make the most of that one life. This 
is about the sure knowledge we have that the rest of us will just be 
fine; everything is going to work out all right if we give our children 
the chance to make the most of their lives.
    I watched Harold Ford up here giving that speech, and I thought, 
there's a 28-year-old young guy with his whole life ahead of him. And I 
knew that he had a family that told him he had to show up in the 
morning, that his work was school, that he was expected to learn. And I 
want that for every child.
    You know, I go to a lot of schools. Today when I speak to children--
I was out in Maryland or Virginia not long before last November, and I 
was talking to this group of kids, this wonderful group of kids. And 
they said, ``You know, all the parents are going to come, and we just 
only wish we had time to translate your remarks into Spanish and into 
Arabic, because there are so many parents who can't understand you.'' 
That's the America of tomorrow.
    In a global society where we're trying to get other people to put 
aside their hatreds, to lay down the burdens of the past, to embrace one 
another, to reach across the lines that divide them, that's a great 
resource. But the challenge of giving all of the children from whatever 
backgrounds they come from the chance to make the most of that one life 
is more formidable than ever. Because of these after-school programs, a 
million kids will have a better chance. That's really what this is all 
about, a million more stories like those two beautiful pictures that 
Lissette showed us today. And that's what we should always, always 
remember.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 3:28 p.m. in the East Room at the White 
Hose. In his remarks, he referred to Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founder, 
Special Olympics; and Lissette Martinez, parent-mentor, Frederick 
Funston Elementary School, Chicago, IL, and her husband, Leonard.