[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 35, Number 43 (Monday, November 1, 1999)]
[Pages 2168-2177]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at an Awards Ceremony for Blue Ribbon Schools

October 28, 1999

    Thank you. Good morning. Congratulations. I want to begin by 
thanking Ruth Summerlin for her introduction and for the power of her 
example which includes not only turning her school around but asking for 
a little more help. Did you notice the way she slipped that in there? 
[Laughter] That was pretty impressive.
    I want to thank Secretary Riley for his wonderful leadership. All 
the things he said about me, he might have said about himself. He is 
clearly not only the longest serving but the ablest, the most dedicated, 
and most effective Secretary of Education we have ever had.
    When the new millennium rolls around in January, we will have 
completed 21 years of working together, as friends and colleagues,

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since we were young Governors in the South trying to start our education 
reform programs, more than two decades ago. And every year has been a 
joy, and I'm very grateful for what he's done in this administration.
    I want to acknowledge the presence in the audience of Vincent 
Ferrandino, the executive director of the National Association of 
Elementary School Principals. And I also want to thank Bill Ivey, as the 
Secretary did, the chair of the NEA, and say just a brief word about--
before I get into a couple of other announcements--about what Ruth said 
about bringing the arts back into the schools. I would urge all of you 
to see this new movie that's out, that I had screened at the White 
House, starring Meryl Streep, called ``Music of the Heart,'' about the 
East Harlem violin program.
    But I have been mortified at the collapse of the availability of 
music and the arts in the schools all over America because of all kinds 
of issues that you understand better than I do. But I've been active in 
VH1's effort to get people to donate instruments and other support for 
music programs back in the schools. The NEA has worked very hard to 
support arts programs in the schools.
    There is not only concrete evidence that such programs improve 
student learning in others areas because of the way they make the brain 
work; there's also a lot of evidence that many people with equal 
learning capacities learn in different ways, in ways that sometimes are 
nonlinear. And I think it is a terrible mistake to deprive these 
children of access to music and the arts if we can avoid it at all. So I 
urge you to look at the movie. And for those of you who agree, this 
movie may give you a lot of boost, because I'll be surprised if it's not 
also a commercial success. It's a terrific film.
    Now, I'd also like to say a word about some new economic news before 
I get into talking about education. When I came here as President, 
almost 7 years ago, our administration--Vice President Gore and I--we 
said we would try to turn America around. And a lot of people have 
forgotten it. There was a lot of economic distress then, an enormous 
amount of social division--we'd had that big riot in Los Angeles--a lot 
of alienation, and a sense of political drift. And so we said, ``Give us 
a chance, and we will have economic policies that promote opportunity 
for all, social policies that promote responsibility from all, and a 
community of all Americans. We'll try to pull this country together and 
move it forward.''
    A big part of our economic policy was investing in our people, from 
early childhood up, also expanding our ability to sell American 
products, and finally, getting this deficit down and getting rid of it, 
which was keeping interest rates high and stagnating the economy all 
over America.
    We just got the news today that in the third quarter of this year--
that is the quarter ending on the last day of September--our economy 
grew at an amazing rate of 4.8 percent, after growing 4.3 percent last 
year, 4.1 percent in 1996, and all of this with the lowest inflation 
rate in decades, while we were actually cutting the size of the Federal 
Government.
    So in the years since I've been President, the economy has grown 3.8 
percent. If you take out the shrinking of the Federal Government and the 
shrinking of the deficit, it's grown over the last 7 years by well over 
4 percent and with no inflation. It's virtually, as far as I know, 
unprecedented in our time.
    It has given us over 19 million new jobs; along with the welfare 
reform law, it's given us the lowest welfare rolls in 30 years; the 
lowest poverty rates in 20 years. And in the new housing numbers 
released today, more Americans now own their own homes, over two-thirds 
of us, for the first time in the history of the United States.
    The percentage of Hispanic- and African-American homeowners has also 
broken new records, as Hispanic- and African-American unemployment has 
dropped to record lows since we've been keeping separate statistics, 
nearly 30 years ago.
    This new report shows, once again, that if we have strong fiscal 
discipline, strong investment, and a strong commitment to education and 
the new economy, we can get an investment boom and maximize the benefits 
of the information and technology revolutions now going on all over the 
world.
    If we keep this going, in February, without having had a war, we 
will have the longest economic expansion in history. It's now the

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longest peacetime expansion in history. Wars guarantee you an economic 
expansion. In February, it will be the longest economic expansion of any 
kind in history, without a major conflict. And we can be very grateful 
for that. It's a tribute to the American people and their innovation.
    Yesterday I pointed out that we had the first back-to-back budget 
surpluses in 42 years--42 years since the Government was in the black 2 
years in a row. And that has saved us about $1.7 trillion in debt over 
what it was projected to be when I took office. And those savings are 
worth, to the average American family, $2,000 in lower mortgage rates; 
$200 in lower car payment rates; $200 in lower college loan rates.
    This is the good news. But we now have a chance that no generation, 
at least in my lifetime, has had to shape the future of our dreams for 
our children in the absence of an overarching threat from without and in 
the absence of an overarching crisis within our borders. And I say that 
because the last time the economy was remotely this good was when I was 
a young man finishing high school in the early 1960's. But we had to 
deal with the civil rights challenge. It was an honor and a 
responsibility, but it had to be done. And then we had to deal with all 
the controversy about the war in Vietnam, our role in it, the cost of 
it, and we never got around to finishing our assault on poverty and 
doing a lot of other things.
    But a lot of great things happened then, including Medicare and 
Medicaid and the first substantial Federal aid to education, because of 
the potential. But never in my lifetime have we had the chance we now 
have to shape the future of our dreams for our children.
    And since all of you deal with children all the time, I think you 
know the wisdom of something a wise, old sage told me 20 years ago in 
politics when I got elected Governor at 32. I was too young to know what 
I was doing, I think, at the time. [Laughter] But he said, ``Let me tell 
you something, Bill. In this life, you're always most vulnerable when 
you think you're invulnerable.'' And if you think about it, what I want 
you to understand is, countries are no different than businesses or 
schools or families or individuals. When things are rocking along really 
good, because we're human, it's easy to get distracted. When there is a 
threat, it's easy to be focused.
    I told somebody the other day--I got a big laugh--I said, ``You 
know, I get so angry at all these conflicts around the world and these 
expressions of hatred here at home based on race or religion or sexual 
orientation. If we were being attacked by space aliens, like in that 
movie, `Independence Day,' we'd all be looking for a foxhole to get in 
together and a gun to pick up together.'' The absence of a threat 
sometimes causes us to lose our sense of focus, our center, our 
concentration.
    But the truth is that this is the greatest opportunity that we've 
had in my lifetime. And so we have to look to the great challenges of 
the future, because we know that they're out there. There's going to be 
twice as many of us over 65 in 30 years, only two people working for 
every one person drawing Social Security. So for younger people, it's 
imperative that we reform Social Security and Medicare, so that the baby 
boom generation, when we retire, doesn't bankrupt our children and their 
ability to raise our grandchildren.
    We know the recovery of our economy has left a lot of people and 
places behind, probably in a lot of communities represented here. We now 
have a chance to embrace those places and the working poor of our 
country in a way we never have. And we better do it now, when the 
economy's good.
    We know that we have a chance to get not only--now we're paying down 
the debt. We paid the debt down $140 billion in the last 2 years. The 
most we ever did. We can actually get rid of it in 15 years. Can you 
imagine, in 1992, if I'd run for office and said, ``Folks, we've got 
this $300 billion deficit. Vote for me. I'll give you back-to-back 
surpluses. I'll pay $140 billion on the debt, and I'll show you how to 
get us out of debt for the first time since 1835?'' People would have 
said, ``You know, he seems like a nice young man, but we'd better send 
him home to Arkansas. He's a little touched in the head.'' [Laughter]

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    But we can do that now. And we ought to do it, because we ought to 
keep the interest rates down, we ought to keep the economy going, we 
ought to keep things moving. And I'm smart enough to know when this 
happens, the State taxes roll in, and the State coffers are in good 
shape, and they have more money to give to schools. And that's 
important, to keep the economy going to help the schools. It's 
important.
    But one challenge above all we have to look at, and that is the fact 
that we now have the largest and most diverse group of students in our 
history and more diversity everywhere. And my home State of Arkansas, 
which, in the 1980 census was second only to West Virginia in having the 
highest percentage of people living in the State that were born in the 
State, this year was second in the country in the percentage growth of 
the Hispanic population. There's a Catholic church in the northwest part 
of my State in an area where there were no minorities 20 years ago, 
literally, none when I started out in politics, that now has to have 
mass in Spanish every single Sunday.
    Across the river here, there's a Baptist minister from Arkansas who 
is the cousin of my minister at home, who moved up here to find that the 
biggest congregation he had besides the regular one at 11 o'clock every 
Sunday morning was a separate Korean congregation. And he now has these 
massive language classes in his church. These things--America is 
changing, and all of you are dealing with this.
    Now, our Founders understood all this. If you go back to the dawn of 
the Republic, Thomas Jefferson said, ``an enlightened citizenry is 
indispensable to the proper functioning of a republic.'' And keep in 
mind, what does the Declaration of Independence say? We're establishing 
a democratic republic because it's the best way for people to pursue 
life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Then Jefferson said, 
because an enlightened citizen is indispensable for the proper 
functioning of a republic, he went on to say, ``therefore, educate and 
inform the whole mass of people.''
    So they knew then what is even more true today because of the nature 
of the economy and society in which we live. Every one of you 
representing every one of these 266 blue ribbon schools is, therefore, 
living out the faith of the Founders of this country, that all of our 
children can learn and that all of them must learn. And for that, we are 
all in your debt. There are schools here from every region and every 
neighborhood. In each of your schools there are many differences, but in 
each school, students are learning at a high level.
    We have already made some real progress in the last few years, and I 
think it's worth pointing out. The very idea of standards, which was 
championed in our Goals 2000 legislation and embodied in 1989 in the 
National Education Goals, is now taking root across the country. But it 
takes a good while to turn the education system around. In 1996, as late 
as 1996, there were only 14 States with measurable performances for 
students, measurable standards for students' performance--1996. Today, 
there are 50. That may be one reason why reading and math scores are up 
nationwide, including in some of our most disadvantaged poor areas, 
urban, small town, and rural.
    More and more schools are reducing class size with the help of the 
initiative begun last fall the bipartisan support of Congress to put 
30,000 of our goal of 100,000 new, highly trained teachers in the 
classroom. Greenwood Elementary in Newport News, a blue ribbon winner, 
hired new teachers this fall, bringing class sizes down in the first and 
second grades, from 27 children per teacher to 20. And you just heard 
Ruth say that they had used the class size funds to have teachers in her 
school.
    Many other blue ribbon schools are using the Vice President's E-rate 
program to connect their classrooms and libraries to the Internet. I 
just want to talk about that a minute. A few years ago the Vice 
President and I went out to California for the first of our NetDays, and 
we hooked up--we wired a school so that all the classrooms could be 
hooked up to the Internet, as part of our goal of trying to get 
everybody hooked up by the end of next year. And we were wiring this 
school, and I looked at him, and I said, ``Well, how are these places 
going to afford to use the Internet?'' It's sort of an Alphonse and

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Gaston routine we do; the fact that I'm technologically challenged has 
become legendary in our administration. [Laughter]
    And he said, ``Well, we've got to give them a discount.'' And so we 
came up with this idea in the Telecommunications Act of giving the 
Federal Communications Commission the ability to give a discount for 
schools and hospitals and libraries. And there was the awfulest 
squalling about it you ever heard around here for a long time. And our 
political opponents started calling it Gore tax--[laughter]--you know, 
on the takeoff, because he likes to run around in GORETEX, I guess. But 
anyway--[laughter]--but we were attacked for it. We were opposed in it, 
but we hung in there. And it was the right thing to do, and that E-rate 
has literally empowered--some of our poorer schools get a 90 percent 
subsidy for the E-rate. And it has been a wonderful thing, because one 
of the things we cannot do in this country is allow a digital divide to 
develop. It already exists. We're determined to close it.
    Our objective is to see Internet access in America become as 
universal as telephone access. And if we can do that we will open up all 
kinds of educational and economic opportunities to people and places 
left behind. I also believe if we can have the same sort of penetration 
around the world in poor countries of cell phones and the Internet as 
quickly as possible, a lot of countries with whom we deal and whom we'd 
like to help could skip 30 years of economic development and make a 
great leap into the new century.
    So I want to thank you, all of you who supported us with the E-rate 
program, because it's making a big difference. For example, to mention 
one of the schools here, with the help of the E-rate, seventh graders at 
Whitebead School in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, are communicating directly 
with scientists conducting research in Africa. I didn't do that when I 
was in the seventh grade. [Laughter] Students are writing papers based 
on that research. The E-rate gives every seventh grader in America at 
least the chance to do that as we get the schools wired and hooked up.
    And Secretary Riley would never forgive me if I didn't mention this, 
just parenthetically. Some of our schools are too old to be wired and 
too decrepit. And they need to be modernized and rewired in all kinds of 
ways. One of our proposals here that is not particularly costly would 
allow us to help local school districts build or modernize 6,000 
schools. And if you're for that, I hope you'll help us pass it.
    In Philadelphia, the average school building is 65 years old; New 
York City, 40 percent of the schools are over 70 years old--40 percent. 
All kinds--there's a large number of schools that are schools that are 
still heated by coal furnaces. And then I've been to--I was in a little 
town in Florida the other day where they had a dozen trailers behind the 
school building--a dozen--just one little school. So this is a big 
issue, and I hope that we can continue to work on it.
    But to begin with the good news. You should all be very proud, not 
only of what you have done but of what you represent. In the last 16 
years since the issuance of the ``Nation At Risk'' report in 1983, there 
has been a sea change in attitudes and commitments on the part of 
American educators and their supporters, among parents and business 
leaders and community leaders, and a genuine commitment to excellence in 
education from all kinds of schools in all kinds of places.
    And it's been a difficult process because some schools have adequate 
funding and some don't, and because, at least for the public schools, 
they get their money from three different places, which means that you 
have to hire more people in the administrative arm of the schools to 
keep up with and be accountable to. And there are all kinds of issues 
here.
    But we are getting it, and you prove that all of our kids can learn 
and that we can turn America's education system toward the 21st century, 
and that is the good news. But it is terribly important that we all 
recognize that we still have work to do and that this will always be a 
moving target. No one believes, yet, that we are giving every child in 
America a world-class education in K through 12. Everybody knows we have 
the best system of higher education in the world. Therefore, we cannot 
quit until we know that we have done the same with K through 12.
    And I think that this is the attitude we ought to have. Keep in 
mind, you don't know

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when we'll have an economic time like this again. You don't know when 
we'll be living through a time when we feel secure from outside threat 
again for this long a period of time. And I think when you go home, you 
need to try to give people some historical sense of this. And in your 
communities, you need to get people imbued with a passionate commitment 
about this and every other challenge.
    I'll give you another example. We've got the lowest crime rate in 30 
years now.
Now, that's wonderful--[inaudible]--everyone who thinks it's low enough, 
please raise your hand. [Laughter] You see what I mean? So why should we 
quit until America's the safest big country in the world? If we want to 
be the freest big country, why not? Why shouldn't we be the safest big 
country in the world? Why shouldn't we keep working to keep guns out of 
the hands of criminals and children? Why shouldn't we keep working to 
make our--we should do it.
    The point I want to make--again, I know I'm preaching to the choir, 
here, but this is important--is that this is a time for intense focus 
and commitment, and we are most in danger of being distracted and 
drifting around because things seem to be going so well. But make no 
mistake about it, we will pay an enormous price in opportunities 
foregone and future problems in our lap if we don't use this magic 
moment to build the future of our dreams. And it's especially true in 
education.
    And I am worried that what we see in Congress today in this debate 
on education is an example of the kind of mental lapse or focus on 
short-term politics that we can see in other areas, not only in the 
Congress and in Washington but in the country, because it's so easy to 
indulge yourself in whatever's in front of your nose when things are 
rocking along and you're doing well. But it's a huge mistake.
    Now, in Washington the good news is--assuming we work through this 
attempt to have an across-the-board cut, which includes education, that 
I'm against, but assuming we do that, the big issue in Washington now is 
more on how we spend money. I mean, I've been fighting for 4 or 5 years 
on whether to spend adequate amounts of money; now, we're fighting about 
how to spend it.
    For example, last year we reached an agreement with Congress to 
begin hiring 100,000 new, highly trained teachers to lower class sizes 
in the early grades for obvious reasons. The size of our schools is 
exploding. And the research is clear that smaller classes and quality 
teachers bring higher achievements. Last year congressional Republicans 
not only agreed to it, they went home and campaigned on it and bragged 
about the fact that the proposal I made reflected Republican principles, 
because there was no bureaucracy in it. We just gave the money to the 
schools, and they hired the teachers. We disbursed the money; schools 
have gone out; they've hired new teachers.
    Now suddenly, the same people who, just before the election last 
year, thought this was the greatest thing since sliced bread, have not 
only refused to add any more teachers, they have abandoned the 
commitment to the ones we've already hired and proposed, basically, to 
just send the blank check to the districts, and if they don't keep the 
teachers, fine.
    So you have to understand, one of the key things in my mind about 
what this education debate is about is whether we're going to keep what 
we've done and continue to add to our goal of putting 100,000 teachers 
in the classroom. [Applause] It's very important. This debate is eerily 
reminiscent of the debate I had in 1994 in the Congress about putting 
100,000 police on the street. And it wasn't rocket science: Violent 
crime tripled between 1964 and 1994, and the size of our police forces 
went up 10 percent. A third-grade arithmetic student could figure out 
the ratio had gotten worse, and that was part of the problem. And part 
of the reason we've got the lowest crime rate in 30 years is we put 
those 100,000 police out there, ahead of schedule and under budget.
    So if it was true in law enforcement, it will be even more true in 
education. It's a very important issue. I thank you for your applause, 
but I want you to stay with us on this. This is not a partisan issue 
anywhere but Washington. And frankly, I still can't figure out how it 
got to be a partisan issue since

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just a year ago we were all being canonized by the same people for doing 
this.
    Now the budget debate is also about accountability, about getting 
real results for the education dollars. When all of us are held 
accountable for meeting higher standards and all the actors in education 
are given the resources they need to meet those standards from smaller 
schools to after-school programs, we have progress. And we have seen 
whole schools can be turned around in a relatively short period of time. 
Ruth explained how her school was selected by the State of South 
Carolina, given more resources, and turned itself around. This is not an 
isolated case.
    Two years ago, North Carolina drew up a list of the State's 15 worst 
performing schools, sent assistance teams to each school, and focused on 
them. A year later, 14 of the 15 schools had been taken off the bad 
performance list.
    Last year, I was in Cabrini-Green in Chicago, one of the biggest 
housing projects in the country, one of the most difficult areas in the 
country, and one of the poorest areas in any big city in the country, to 
visit an elementary school which has had unbelievably poor performance. 
In 2 years, under the new system they have there, they doubled their 
math scores and tripled their reading scores. That's pretty good in 2 
years. And even though they started from a low base, they're moving in 
the right direction. If you double your performance every 2 years, you 
can go from a very low base to 100 percent in no time. So it's very 
important.
    Our budget has dedicated $200 million to set aside funds to help 
States and school districts all over America put together teams that 
would identify and help to turn around or shut down the lowest 
performing schools. It's not a lot of money, but it's a very big deal 
because not every State is doing this. And I have a very strong 
conviction that--you know, I believe that social promotion should be 
ended. But I don't think you should identify schools or students as 
failures and then tell the kids there is something wrong with them when 
the system is failing them. So I think we have to have systems in every 
State in the country to turn around these schools, because they can all 
be turned around.
    I don't understand why the Congress has refused to put a dime into 
this $200-million proposal to turn around low-performing schools. I know 
there is not going to be a press conference where the Republican leaders 
stand up and say, ``We are unalterably opposed to accountability,'' or, 
``We're fine on accountability, but we want to punish the students 
instead of make the schools better.'' Maybe they think people just wake 
up in the morning knowing how to do this. But if everyone knew how to do 
it, it would be done now in every State in the country, in every school 
district.
    So again, I ask for your help here. I presume in this room there are 
people who are Republicans and Democrats, people who disagree on all 
different kinds of issues. But if we've got something that we know 
works, then--to go back to the Framers; they said all of the States were 
supposed to be the laboratories of democracy. But in a laboratory, when 
you find a scientific discovery, you publish the results as soon as 
possible. Then everybody takes it on board, and they build on that 
scientific discovery and go on to the next one.
    In education, when somebody does something that's a true 
breakthrough, sometimes it takes 3 years to get 15 miles down the road. 
[Laughter] You know this is true, don't you? You know this is true. This 
is true. I've been working this for 20 years. I can say it's one of our 
continuing difficulties here. So that's what we're trying to do.
    Now, I don't believe that the leaders in Congress can explain why 
they thought the 100,000 teachers was a good idea last year and this 
year they're against it. I don't believe they can explain why we have a 
measure here that we know has succeeded in turning around failing 
schools in more than one State--that, I might add, the Republican 
Governors have come out and endorsed--that they won't fund.
    They also are opposed to our proposal to help build or modernize 
6,000 schools. Now, they also are opposed to funding our troops-to-
teachers program, which has been very successful but very limited, 
trying to get retired military people to go into the schools

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in the areas where there's a teacher shortage. Very important where we 
need more male teachers, particularly for role models. It's a very 
important issue here.
    Although, I might say, because the military has opened up more 
opportunities for women, more and more women are staying as career 
officers and coming out, too, and enlisted people. But this is a really 
successful program. And I asked them to make it much bigger because 
we've got to hire 2 million new teachers, as Dick Riley has been telling 
me for years, as so many retire. So we've got a large number of teachers 
retiring, more and more kids coming into the schools; we've got to hire 
more teachers.
    But again, for reasons I do not understand, there was no funding for 
our troops-to-teachers program to get more of these good people who are 
leaving the military, many of them quite young, in their forties, to go 
into the schools and give 20 more good years or more to the education of 
our children.
    So the labor and education appropriations bill that the Congress is 
about to consider shortchanges education. You should also know that now 
they're proposing to make across-the-board cuts in everything from the 
FBI to national defense to the environment to education. Now, if that 
bill passes, I will veto it, because I think we need more teachers, more 
accountability, and more investment in education.
    I do not believe that the proper response to America's education 
challenge is fewer teachers, no accountability, and across-the-board 
cuts in education. I want to hire 100,000 more teachers, 50,000 more 
police. I want to protect the environment. I want us to invest in 
education strategies that work.
    Look, we've got the first back-to-back surpluses in 42 years. The 
debate you're hearing over the budget is because, for the first time in 
decades, it is now possible for us to separate the budget that comes 
from--the surplus that comes from your Social Security taxes from the 
surplus that comes from other things. All these years before last year, 
all these years, for 20 years, you've been seeing what the deficit was. 
If you took away the surplus we got from people paying more into Social 
Security than they were taking out, which was a way of preparing for the 
baby boomers, the deficit would have been much bigger.
    So for the first time--you need to know that's why we're having 
this--you must think this is crazy, why--they've got a surplus, and 
they're cutting stuff. What is going on here? What you need to know is 
that leaders of both parties agreed at the beginning of this year that 
they would not spend the Social Security surplus anymore and only spend 
money coming out of the non-Social Security surplus.
    Now, the good news is that that helps us pay down the debt. It 
doesn't do anything for Social Security, however, unless you take the 
interest savings from paying down the debt and put it into the Social 
Security Trust Fund, as I have recommended, so we can take it out to 
2050 and take care of all the baby boom retirement, take a big burden 
off all your minds. That's another issue that I want to do.
    But--so, the reason we're having this budget fight is that our 
prosperity and this surplus made it possible for the first time in two 
decades to segregate out the Social Security surplus. We've been 
spending the Social Security surplus up here since who shot John. 
[Laughter] And economically, there's no difference in the two. It's just 
a good thing to set it aside, because it helps us to pay the debt down. 
And then it will make it easier, I hope, for Congress next year, if not 
this year, to agree with me to take the interest savings from paying the 
debt down and put it into Social Security, which so far, they haven't 
done--which leaves a much smaller amount of money to fund things. And 
this Congress has already spent $18 billion more than that, and they 
tried to say they weren't spending the Social Security surplus, trying 
to blame us with wanting to, which is a miracle how they got that done. 
[Laughter]
    But you need to know, and when you go back home, I can imagine the 
American people must be totally bum-fusseled--keep announcing surpluses, 
and we keep having budget fights. That's what's going on here. They 
committed to start right now not spending the Social Security surplus. 
So I said, ``Okay, if you want to do that and you want to spend all this 
money on defense and we're

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going to adequately fund education, the environment, and health care, 
then here's what we ought to do. Here's some corporate loopholes we 
ought to close. We ought to make the polluters pay for their toxic waste 
dumps. And I think we ought to have an increase in the cigarette tax, 
and that's good health policy anywhere.'' That's what I said.
    They said, ``Na, we don't want to do any of that.'' So they did 
things like say the census was an emergency. We've seen it coming for 10 
years; most emergencies are something of a surprise. [Laughter] They 
said that--I mean, this is a strange world up here. [Laughter] I want 
you to know what's going on here. They also said that a lot of the 
ordinary expenses of the Pentagon--I mean, people go to work over there 
every day--they've said that these are emergencies, even though the cold 
war's over. Just showing up for work is an emergency. [Laughter] I mean, 
this is--because if they can--you know, they take this stuff off the 
books, and then that helps them play these budget games.
    And then when I say, ``But you're not spending enough on education, 
and we've got to fund the Middle East peace process, and we've got to 
fund our efforts to take down and destroy nuclear weapons in Russia, 
make the world a safer place, and we've got to fund our responsibilities 
to the United Nations,'' then they go out and say, ``Oh, Bill Clinton 
wants to spend the surplus for foreign aid,'' run all these little ads 
and stuff. It's a strange world up here.
    And what I'm saying is--you all laughed when I said this before, I 
referenced that movie, ``Independence Day,'' but, you know, if we were 
being attacked by space aliens, we wouldn't be playing these kind of 
games. These kind of games are only possible because the economy is 
strong and the American people are self-confident, and people believe, 
therefore, that this is a moment when they can do frivolous things that 
they otherwise would never consider doing to try to get short-term 
political advantage. But it's a huge mistake, because our children are 
still out there and they are bigger and more diverse than ever before as 
a group and they have these massive challenges. And all of you have 
proved that we can give them a world-class education. So we don't have 
any excuse anymore. You show up in town, and you say, ``Look, all 
children can learn. Look what we did. We don't have any excuse.''
    So I will say again, this should not be a partisan issue. We can 
find a way through this budget business. It's about accounting and 
taking modest, difficult measures. But we cannot sacrifice our 
responsibility to meet these big, long-term challenges, because we have 
never had a chance like this in our lifetime. Everybody in this audience 
that's anywhere remotely my age, you just think about it. Think about 
it.
    We spent the 1930's trying to survive the Depression. We spent the 
1940's trying to survive World War II and get ready for the cold war. We 
spent the 1950's and the 1960's trying to survive the cold war, dealing 
with the civil rights crisis and then dealing with Vietnam, and it drug 
into 1975. And then we had the oil price shocks and all of our economic 
problems that went all the way into the 1980's. The Berlin Wall fell 10 
years ago. We spent the early part of this decade turning the economy 
and the social problems around of this country and getting us in a 
position where we could literally explode. That's where we are now.
    You represent proof positive that we can give every American child 
the education that he or she deserves, not only to thrive in the new 
century but to ensure the success of the United States. And your 
dedication to tomorrow and the fact that every day you have to get up 
and think about not only today's lessons plan but what these little 
children are going to turn out like--that is the attitude we need here 
in Washington, across party lines.
    So I ask you all--you have shown us the way--do what you can to 
effect the attitudes here. Do what you can to be heard here, and say, 
``Let's take this way beyond partisan politics. There's plenty to argue 
about down the road, but our children deserve our best. And our best 
should be driven by what our local principals and our local educators 
say, what the education research says, what we know works.''
    You have proved to us what works. All I'm trying to do is to figure 
out how to spread it more quickly and give people who are in

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real economic binds the opportunity to access things that others 
regularly take for granted.
    We could be going into America's greatest years. I believe we are. 
But we dare not squander this magic moment.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 10:23 a.m. in the International Ballroom 
Center at the Washington Hilton Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to 
Ruth Summerlin, principal, Beaufort Elementary School, Beaufort, SC. A 
portion of these remarks could not be verified because the tape was 
incomplete.