[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 5 (Monday, February 8, 1999)]
[Pages 161-166]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the National Association of School Boards

February 1, 1999

    Thank you very much. First of all, Barbara Wheeler, thank you for 
your remarks. You covered everything I was going to say. [Laughter] You 
talked about the Capitol Steps. [Laughter] I think they're funny, too, 
but--[laughter]--you must surely know, having heard them, that it is not 
the school boards association that is the Rodney Dangerfield in this 
town. [Laughter]
    Let me say I'm delighted to be on this platform with Anne Bryant and 
your other leaders behind me and to be here with all of you. I see 
Delegate Member of Congress Robert Underwood from Guam here. I'm 
delighted to see him. I was in Guam with him recently. If you haven't 
been, I recommend it.
    And I want to thank you for the wonderful, wonderful welcome you 
gave to Secretary Riley. We have been working on education together 
since we first met, over 20 years ago, and he is not only the longest 
serving, I think, clearly, the finest Secretary of Education this 
country ever had.
    We've had a very good day at the White House today, and I thought I 
would tell you about something we did at the beginning of the day that 
does not directly, but surely will indirectly impact on you and what you 
do. This morning I presented my budget for this coming year, and there 
are a lot of good things in it for education. But the point I want to 
make is that we were illustrating today that with last year's surplus 
and the surplus we project this year, that if the Congress will do what 
I recommend and set aside over 75 percent of this surplus for 15 years, 
so that we can secure the retirement of the baby boomers with Social 
Security and Medicare--since we won't need the money while it's being 
set aside for about, in the case of Medicare, 11 years, in the case of 
Social Security, more, we will, while we're saving it, be paying down 
the national debt.
    Now, when I took office, the national debt was 50 percent of our 
annual income, and it was projected to grow to 80 percent. When I took 
office, we were spending over 14 cents on the dollar of every tax dollar 
just servicing the debt. It's now down to 44 percent of our annual 
income. The debt--we're spending a little over 13 cents on the dollar. 
But if we set it aside for 15 years, we will take the debt down to 7 
percent of our annual income, a third of what it was in 1981 when we 
started this deficit binge, the lowest it's been since 1917 before we 
got into World War I. And it will only cost 2 cents of every tax dollar 
you pay to pay interest on the debt.
    That will, as compared with now, free up another 11 cents on the tax 
dollar every year from then on, that we could be investing in our 
children and in education and in the future. It's an amazing statistic. 
It will also keep interest rates low and will free up trillions of 
dollars to invest in the economy. And all of you know, running local 
school boards, that if the economy is strong, then you'll have your tax 
revenues coming in at the local and State level.
    So this is a compact among the generations. It's not simply a way to 
save Social Security and Medicare, although that, too, is good for 
younger people because it means that when we baby boomers retire, our 
kids won't have to give money to us that they could be investing in 
their grandchildren--in our grandchildren.
    But it was a very good day. And it is a part of what I am trying to 
get our country to focus on, which is that we have opportunities now 
that people who came before us, over the last several decades, could 
only have

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dreamed of. And we have to decide how we're going to use those 
opportunities.
    I think our most profound obligation is to say that at a time like 
this with the economy running well, with the lowest peacetime 
unemployment rate since 1957, with all the economic indicators strong, 
but with trouble overseas which could affect our economy, we have got to 
take this opportunity to deal with the long-term challenges our country 
faces, finally, not only to have America working again but to really 
build that bridge to the 21st century I've been talking about for so 
long.
    And all of you know that education has to be a critical part of 
that. You know better than I all the problems that your president just 
mentioned. You know better than I that we have the largest group of 
school children we've ever had and that it is more diverse in every way 
than it has ever been. The future of our whole country rests so much on 
how well we educate our children, and you have been chosen in your 
communities to carry that torch into a new century. It is a great honor 
and a heavy responsibility, and I thank you for assuming it.
    I believe that here in Washington, our duty is to help to give you 
the tools you need to meet the challenge. And we've worked hard for 6 
years, with all the economic challenges we faced at first, to do that 
duty.
    In the last 6 years, while we have reduced the size of the Federal 
Government to it's lowest point since President Kennedy was in office 
and eliminated hundreds of programs in order to balance the budget, at 
the same time we have almost doubled our investment in education and 
training. We've helped States who adopted tougher standards. We've 
helped school districts to deal with the challenges of drugs and gangs 
and violence and guns. We've cut regulations in our Federal programs 
affecting elementary and secondary education by two-thirds, thanks to 
Secretary Riley's efforts. We've granted dozens of waivers to States and 
school districts to give them the flexibility they need to try new 
approaches. We've begun to organize an army of tutors, including young 
people in the America Reads program from a thousand colleges to help in 
schools to make sure our young people can read at elementary school, and 
a new group of mentors in the GEAR UP program to mentor middle school 
and high school students to prepare them for college and to make sure 
they know they can go.
    We have increased our investment in early childhood, including Head 
Start, as Barbara said. We are making dramatic progress in connecting 
all our classrooms and libraries to the Internet by early in the next 
century. And this year the new E-rate, the education rate, comes on-
line, and that should save about a billion dollars in the cost of 
hookups, something for which we've fought very hard.
    Also, something--I think it's very important that all the high 
school seniors and juniors, and maybe even earlier, know that in many 
different ways, we have basically opened the doors of college. Millions 
of young people this year will get the HOPE scholarship tax credit, 
which is worth about $1,500 for the first 2 years of school. There are 
tax credits for junior and senior years of college, for graduate school. 
We've increased the size and reach of the Pell grant program, lowered 
the cost of student loans, added hundreds of thousands of work-study 
positions, and tried to basically put you in a position to say to the 
children in your school districts, ``Look, if you make the grades, if 
you don't have any money, you can still go to college. No matter what 
the cost is, you can still go.''
    Last year, we got the first big downpayment on our goal of helping 
you to hire 100,000 highly trained teachers to lower class sizes in the 
early grades. And that, plus what all of you have been doing, is really 
paying off. I mean, the SAT scores are up, the math scores are up almost 
everywhere in the country. We see in some of the most difficult learning 
environments dramatic turnarounds where the proper attention has been 
paid to schools.
    But if you look at the country as a whole, there are still some very 
challenging problems. Number one, reading scores haven't budged. Now, I 
think that's pretty explainable when you consider the increasing 
percentage of our children whose parents don't speak English at home. 
You couldn't expect aggregate reading scores to be going through the 
roof. That doesn't mean that we can give up on making sure those kids 
are fluent in

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English. It just means we have to work harder; we have to work smarter; 
we have to do better.
    Even more troubling to me is the fact that our relative standing on 
these test scores goes down as the kids go up in school. Our fourth 
graders were ranked in the top of the world last year in comparative 
math and science scores. And keep in mind, when we engage in this, we 
take a representative sample of kids--by income, by race, by region, 
every demographic category--and they're doing well. Our 8th graders are 
about the international average and our 12th graders rank near the 
bottom. That tells us that there are things we have to do if we expect 
to be globally competitive that we're not doing. And I believe we can do 
better.
    Probably most of you heard my State of the Union Address, in which I 
said that we, in my judgment, in the Federal Government, should change 
the way we invest Federal funds to emphasize what you have proved to us 
works and to stop investing in things that don't work. We will have an 
opportunity--and again, I believe, an obligation--to do that this year, 
because Congress must reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education 
Act. I intend to send them, later this year, an ``Education 
Accountability Act'' to require States and school districts receiving 
Federal help to take five steps that most of you are probably already 
taking, and that, I think, all of us would admit, have been shown to 
work.
    The components of this bill basically came to us from educators, 
from people like you, from principals especially, from teachers in some 
cases, and from our own on-site observation, not just mine and Secretary 
Riley's but all of us, of what we have seen working.
    We believe that every district should have a policy of no social 
promotion but not identifying the children as failures, and therefore, 
there should be after-school and summer school programs to support their 
continued learning. All over America, teachers' groups, not just the 
national organizations, but grassroots teachers' groups, have pleaded 
with us to say: If you're going to invest Federal money, say that every 
school district must have a reasonable discipline code and it must be 
enforced.
    We believe that parents should get report cards on their children's 
schools. We believe there should be a strategy in every school district 
to turn around or shut down schools that fail.
    I appreciated the comment you made about vouchers. You know, I have 
steadfastly opposed them. I believe when I was a Governor, I think we 
were the second State in the country after Minnesota to have a statewide 
public school choice bill pass the legislature, and I have steadfastly 
supported the charter school movement in America, and I still do. But we 
must have a strategy that deals with failing schools. If you want to win 
the argument with people who don't do what you do every day--on 
vouchers--you must have a strategy that deals with failing schools. And 
it's very important.
    I think we have to do more to ensure that all of our teachers are as 
well-trained as they possibly can be in the subjects they are teaching. 
Sometimes I think our teachers get a little bit of a bum rap with the 
schools exploding and all of you having to compete for bright people 
with other forms of work, not just teaching. It should hardly be 
surprising to people that we have, in many of our school districts, 
teachers teaching subjects which they don't have degrees in, which they 
may not even have college minors in. But we have to do something about 
it. We have to do more to try to help support teachers. And the 
teachers, through their organizations, are clamoring for more investment 
to help develop skills and learning, to raise their qualifications in 
these academic subjects.
    I'm going up to Boston tomorrow, and I'll be able to discuss some of 
this in greater detail. But what I wanted to say to you today is we need 
your help. We need your help. We need Congress to understand that--I do 
not believe the Federal Government should run the schools. I didn't wake 
up one morning and come up with these five ideas. I believe that you 
were showing us what works, and that is what we should invest in. And I 
think that, both as taxpayers and as school board members, knowing the 
challenges we face, you should expect us to invest this money based on 
what you believe will work and what you have seen will work.

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    Nothing we can do here involves picking this person or that person 
or the other person to teach, involves how you select your principals; 
involves how the climate of learning or the culture of the school is 
developed, school by school. We can't do any of that. But with limited 
Federal funds, which I have done my best to increase, and an enormous 
challenge out there, we ought to be investing in what works, and we 
ought to stop investing in what doesn't. And I ask for your help to 
persuade the Congress that that is in the interests of the local school 
districts of the United States. Essentially, we ought to try to take 
what is common sense to all of you and make it common practice in all of 
our schools.
    Today, as I said, I released my budget, and I wanted to talk a 
little bit about what it does. First of all, it calls upon Congress to 
invest $1.4 billion to hire new, better trained teachers to reduce class 
sizes in the early grades. This is a 17 percent increase over the budget 
I signed last fall, and it brings us another step closer to our goal of 
100,000 new teachers. We have to make sure that Congress continues this 
financial support.
    I might say, there were some people who didn't want to do that, but 
the arguments I heard about this were the same arguments I heard in 1994 
against my crime bill when local police officers said, ``Mr. President, 
the violent crime rate has tripled in the last 30 years, and the police 
forces have increased by 10 percent.'' It was not rocket science to 
think that if you had more police officers and they were walking the 
streets and working with neighborhood groups and others, that they could 
prevent crime from happening in the first place, catch criminals when 
they commit crimes, and drive the crime rate down. We now have the 
lowest violent crime rate in 30 years, the lowest overall crime rate in 
25 years.
    It is not rocket science to know that if you've got a teacher 
shortage now and a looming one in the future, that the Federal 
Government, if we have the resources, ought to be giving you the tools 
to hire more teachers. So I ask you to help us pass this through the 
Congress.
    The budget also calls for investing $35 million to provide 7,000 
college scholarships for bright young people who commit to teach in 
places where the need is greatest, in the poorest inner-city and rural 
schools. That's 5 times the investment that Congress made in these 
scholarships last year when we inaugurated the program. It increases by 
$25 million funding to train bilingual and English-as-second-language 
teachers. It contains $30 million to train middle school teachers to use 
technology in the classroom. It calls for $10 million to train 1,000 
Native Americans to teach in Indian reservations and other public 
schools with large Native American enrollments. It has $18 million to 
recruit and train retired military members to become teachers.
    We had an event on this at the White House last week, and we had 
this marvelous retired Army sergeant who is teaching in the Baltimore 
schools come and make a presentation. He's a special education teacher 
in the Baltimore schools. It was an overwhelming, emotional event.
    And I remember when I was in Korea recently I met a senior master 
sergeant there who gave me one of his little military coins. And I said, 
``How long have you been in the service?'' And he said, ``Twenty-nine 
years.'' And I said, ``How much longer are you going to stay?'' He said, 
``About a year.'' And I said, ``What are you going to do?'' He said, 
``I'm going home to Kentucky to be a teacher.'' So I hope you will 
continue to support this.
    The budget continues support for the master teacher program, to make 
sure our finest teachers get the recognition, the reward they deserve, 
and the opportunity to spread the skills they develop in going through 
the certification process with others in their schools. Our goal there 
is to try to get up to 100,000 board-certified master teachers in the 
country, enough to make sure that, with your help, we can have one in 
every school building in America. And I think that would be a very good 
thing, indeed.
    The budget increases by $26 million funding to mobilize tutors and 
trained teachers, to make sure all of our third graders can read 
adequately. It doubles funding for our efforts to provide middle school 
students with tutors, with mentors, to spark their interest and their 
capacity in going on to college.

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    We also, again, will try to pass the provision of the budget that 
would use tax breaks to enable us to build or modernize 5,000 schools. 
And that is very important, indeed. Again, I heard the argument last 
year: Well, this is really not something that the Federal Government 
ought to be doing. Well, the Federal Government puts a lot of money into 
State highways, and this is our road to the future.
    I, frankly, wish we were doing more. I don't know how many schools 
I've been in where there were as many kids back in the house trailers as 
there were in regular classrooms. I don't know how many I've been in 
where there were rooms closed off because the buildings were breaking 
down. We have schools buildings in some of our cities now that are so 
old they literally cannot be hooked up to the Internet without a whole 
rewiring. I think this is very important.
    But again, I say it's important that you understand that you've got 
to go out and talk to Members of Congress of both parties and say, 
``Listen, this is not some cockamamie idea that the President had some 
person with a Ph.D. think up in a windowless office in the White 
House''--[laughter]--``you know, you go out and stroll around the 
schools of America, and it will come screaming back at you: We need some 
help here.''
    So I ask for your help. And finally, let me say, our Federal after-
school programs began just 2 years ago with a million bucks. That's all 
I could get for it. And we went to $40 million. Then in the third year, 
in our last budget, that I signed just a couple of months ago, we went 
to 200 million. This budget calls for 600 million, and that's enough to 
keep one million children in school and off the streets, learning and 
safe, in after-school programs. I ask for your support for that.
    So this budget comes from Secretary Riley and me, two old--
increasingly old--[laughter]--Governors who believe deeply in education 
and its promise, who believe deeply in the leadership of people like you 
at the local level. We don't want to micromanage the schools. We don't 
want to take resources away from people who need it. But it is 
unconscionable to continue to support that which doesn't work and to 
fail to support that which does. So we ask for a partnership that will 
invest more in our public schools and to invest in ways that you, out on 
the frontlines of change, have demonstrated will work so that our 
children will learn more. That's all we ask.
    Again, I say, as I was thinking today when we started the day, Dick 
and I did, with the rest of the Cabinet and 31 Members of Congress and 
we were looking at this line with the debt going down and what was going 
to happen in the future--you just think about where America is and you 
think about people who were Presidents, Secretaries of Education, 
Members of Congress, Governors and school board members, 10 years ago, 
15 years ago, 20 years ago. There were people who would have killed to 
have had an opportunity like this. This is a high-class dilemma we've 
got here. [Laughter] You know? Why are we worried about the aging of 
America? Because before you know it, our average life expectancy will be 
over 80. That's a big problem. I like it better as the days go by--
[laughter]--and the same thing with the surplus.
    But history is full of examples of people who had golden 
opportunities and squandered them because there was an easier, more 
well-trodden path to take. And so I ask you--I don't think you know the 
influence you can have if you're determined to bring it to bear. This is 
a time for decisive action. Don't just go up to Congress and ask them to 
reauthorize the act the way it was and give you as much more money as 
you can get. You've got 53 million kids out there. They're from 200 or 
more different racial or ethnic groups, every religion in the world, 
every linguistic background in the world, and they are America's gold 
mine for tomorrow as the world becomes smaller and more and more 
interdependent.
    This is a gift. It is a high-class challenge. And we have the 
resources, and we have the knowledge to do what is right. We have to do 
it.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 4:55 p.m. at the Grand Hyatt Hotel. In his 
remarks, he referred to Barbara M. Wheeler, president, and Anne L. 
Bryant, executive director, National Association of School Boards. The 
President also mentioned the comedy troupe Capitol Steps.

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