Bill Clinton: “That child obviously doesn't understand that yet. [Laughter] But in time. Now, when you back up from there, the going…”

“That child obviously doesn't understand that yet. [Laughter] But in time. Now, when you back up from there, the going gets harder. And let me just give you one example. And I want you to ask yourselves as I go through this list what do you think caused this. Today our administration is announcing the results of the Third International Math and Science Study. And I talked about it last year and the year before. This is--the TIMSS test, it's called--the Third International Math and Science Study, are tests given in math and science to 4th, 8th, and 12th graders to a relatively large and representative sample--we believe representative sample--of students not only in our country, but throughout the world. Now, the past TIMSS tests showed that the fourth graders in America do very well; that in the eighth grade we begin to fall back to the middle. And we believe it's in no small measure because as kids go through school, children in other parts of the world begin to take harder courses than our kids do and undergo a more rigorous learning pattern. And a lot of the problems associated with the socioeconomic difficulties begin to manifest themselves. Today we learned that by the 12th grade, our children trail far behind in math and science. Of the 21 countries measured, our 12th graders outperformed only 2. So we start near the top, we fall to the middle, and we come out at the end. Now, let me say, first of all, there's some good news in this. The 4th graders represent the same socioeconomic diversity and indeed they are more diverse because of the changing patterns than the 12th graders. Therefore, there is something wrong with the system that we are using to teach them. I do not believe these kids cannot learn. I am tired of seeing children patronized because they happen to be poor or from different cultural backgrounds than the majority. That is not true. That is not true. And let me tell you, just a couple of days ago--I can't remember exactly what day, the days fly by up here--but a couple of days ago I went to Baltimore, and I visited something called Living Classroom. And I walked along the waterway there in downtown, and I watched some kids rebuilding wetlands. And literally on the inland harbor, they've got egrets now coming back to a wetland site. And I watched inner-city kids, many of whom had never focused on a harbor before, seen a waterway, measuring water quality, having very sophisticated conversations with me about the acidic content of the water and what caused it, and what the various sources of pollution in seawater are and what could be--what that might do to various kinds of fish and other life in the water. I watched inner-city kids working a fairly sophisticated computer program, monitoring a sailboat race, the Whitbread Race, and monitoring the American boat they were watching as it went around Cape Horn. So I don't believe all this business about how some kids are just so burdened down with their background they just can't learn all this modern stuff; that's just not true. But it is true that too many people are not learning. And so, I recommend that we take another look at this. Now, in '97 in the State of the Union Address, I outlined a 10-point plan to help education and ask that politics stop at the schoolhouse door, and then in 1998, just a few weeks ago, I talked again about what I thought we ought to do about education. And I would like to briefly review the list of things that I think are important. First of all, I still believe we have to start with the basics. We need smaller classes, better teaching, harder courses, higher standards. We have smaller classes, better teaching, harder courses, higher standards, greater accountability, and more reform. That's basically what I think we should be focused on. Even though we do pretty well in the fourth grade international tests, I think you know as well as I do there are still too many kids that don't get off to the start they need. And I appreciate what Nan said about the child care initiative. I ask for your support. We have substantially increased the number of kids in Head Start. We've increased our investment in Federal child care supports by 70 percent in the last 5 years. We have doubled the earned-income tax credit, and that's lifted more and more children out of poverty. But we have to do more. The budget that I have presented on child care would double the number of low-income children receiving Federal assistance subsidies to 2 million; it would give 3 million more working families an expanded child care credit. It would actually mean that a family of four with an income of $35,000 a year or less that had high child care costs would actually not pay any Federal income tax. It would improve the safety and quality of child care. It would also provide scholarships for good providers to help to train them. And it recognizes that we need to do more on the educational component of child care. As we learned at the White House conference on early learning and the brain, which the First Lady put together, an enormous amount of the development of the infrastructure of learning is done in the first 3 years. So I'm proposing an early learning fund that would help to reduce child-to-staff ratios and also help to educate parents more so that we could increase the learning component of the preschool years. I guess what I'd like to say is that I want to believe that if this plan passes, the lessons that are taught through the HIPPY program could be taught in homes all across America and all kinds of programs. That's what I want. One more thing I'd like to say about this, sort of about the out-of- school hours; another big part of our budget contains funds, through both the Educational Department and the Justice Department, to help schools stay open after hours. An enormous percentage of the kids who get in trouble, juveniles who commit serious offenses, do so after the school day is over, but before their parents get home. Literally, if there were no juvenile offenses between like 2 to 3 in the afternoon and 6 to 7 in the evening, the juvenile crime rate would be cut by way over 50 percent. So I think it's important to give these children something to say yes to. And these after-school programs that we propose would help about a half a million children to say yes to soccer and computers, and no to drugs and crime. And I think that's a very important thing. Now, let's talk about what I hope the Congress will do this year to help to deal with the K through 12 years and what we have to continue to build on that has been started already. First of all, we need a national commitment to reduce class size in the early grades. Our budget would enable local school districts to hire 100,000 more teachers and lower the class size to an average of 18 in the first, second, and third grades and also to modernize or rebuild 5,000 schools so there would be classrooms for that to occur in. I think that's important. Second, we would continue the America Reads program, which now has literally tens of thousands of college students and other volunteers now going into elementary schools every week to make sure that no child gets out of the third grade without being able to read independently. That is very important. Next, we would continue our movement toward national academic standards and voluntary national exams to measure how our children are doing according to high national standards. Last year we took the first steps toward a fourth grade reading and an eighth grade math test, and I hope that eventually we will have every State testing their children in these basics and measuring them by a common national standard, so that we can continue on up the ladder academically to deal with the courses and the measurement. Next, I think it is very important that we support better teacher development. One of the problems is in a lot of these later years--and you have to pay the teachers well, too--in a lot of these later years in these senior-level courses is you have a lot of schools who have to offer courses that are taught by people who did not have sufficient academic background in the math or science course at issue. And I think that is very, very important. One of the most important developments potentially over the long run in American education in the last few years and gets almost no publicity--it's called the National Board for Professional Teacher Certification. And it basically is a national board set up to certify master teachers in a way that specialists in medicine and other professionals get certified. But the teachers are basically picked not only because of their substantive knowledge but because of their teaching ability, and they are trained. And the idea is that we will try to have a core--and there's just a few hundred of them now--a core of these teachers all across America. In my budget there's enough money to identify, train, and certify 100,000 master teachers. If you put one of these people in every school building in America, I believe it can revolutionize the culture of learning, and the quality of teaching has got to be a big part of what we're trying to do. The next thing I'd like to do--I want to talk about two other things that I think would really help performance in the later grades. I think it's important that we encourage the school districts to end the process of social promotion, but to do it in a way that lifts kids up, not puts them down. That is, if you look at what Chicago is doing now--an example which is truly astonishing--I mean Chicago used to be known by the annual teachers' strike. We all saw a picture in the paper of the Chicago teachers' strike every year. They have adopted a policy that basically says--and it's school by school, supported by grassroots parents groups--if the children do not perform at grade level, they cannot go on. But they have mandatory summer school, which also, by the way, has done wonderful--wonders for juvenile problems. They have mandatory summer school. So nobody just gets held back for spite or because of carelessness or callousness. There's a serious, disciplined comprehensive effort to give all the kids a chance to learn at grade level. I think that's very important. The Secretary of Education got a directive from me this week to come up with, basically, a plan and a program to help every school district in the country adopt a similar approach, particularly those that have a significant problem. Now, in addition to that, we are trying to pass in Congress this year some funds that will help universities comprehensively adopt schools where there are large numbers of disadvantaged children, starting in the sixth grade. So we can go to sixth and seventh graders, and not only give them college students as models and mentors but say to them in the sixth or seventh grade, look, here's the deal: If you make your grades and you take these courses and you learn these things, we'll be able to tell them now, here is the amount of college aid you can get. You will be able to go to college; this is the aid you will get; and this is what the college that is working with you is prepared to do. Now, this has the chance, I think, to dramatically lift learning levels in inner-city schools and other isolated schools with large numbers of poor children. And it's based on a number of different programs that have been bandied around in America over the last 20 years, and especially the work of a Congressman from Philadelphia named Chaka Fattah. So I'm very excited about it. I hope you will support it. You just think, if every troubled school in America or every school with a lot of kids who are poor in America had a college adopting it, with kids in that school from the sixth grade on from the college, and at the same time actually contracting with the children and their parents, saying, this is the amount of college aid you're going to get if you do what you're supposed to do for the next 6 years, I believe you would see these scores begin to go up dramatically. And I hope that we can get a lot of support for that. Finally, let me say, we have to continue to support the reforms that are already underway, more school choice, more charter schools, and we have to finish the job of connecting every classroom and library to the Internet by the year 2000. That will enable more stories like the one I told you about Baltimore, because once you get everybody on the Internet, we can use technology to dramatically increase the quality and quantity and sophistication of material pouring into every school in America without regard to its resources and wealth. The Federal Communications Commission is helping us with an E-rate which will save the schools a couple of billion dollars a year in hookup costs and payment for time used. So that's very, very important. I say all these things to you again to point out that it is not inevitable that we have low scores on comparative exams, but it is a leading indicator. There's a coalition of schools in northern Illinois called the First in the World Coalition, and they take these 10 steps; they prepare for them; they work on them, and they do well with them. Now, most of the schools are in upper income neighborhoods. That's not why the kids do well. They do well because they prepare. They take hard courses, they work hard at it, and they believe they're going to do well. And if we do that for every school in America, if we can give them the hard courses taught by well-qualified teachers in an environment that's supportive, and convince them that they can do well, they will do very well. Our present levels of performance are unacceptable. They are not a good leading indicator. But we have lots of indicators that we can do what we need to do. So I want--I ask you again; you have to really think. You clapped when I said this before; you have to think about whether you believe this. Do you believe all children can learn? The HIPPY program shows that's right. The Israeli experience of the HIPPY program shows that's right. If you believe that, and if it's not happening, then there is something wrong with the systems. And it is our generation's responsibility to fix it. You cannot blame the schoolchildren. And if their parents don't have a lot of education and don't know what to do, you sure can't blame them. We have to--this is--this cannot be rocket science. There is no excuse for this. So again, I say, I am hoping and praying that we can continue to put aside partisan politics when it comes to education and continue to move forward on these things, because it's so important for our future. If you think about it, a lot of the challenges we're facing today are not so different than they were back in 1893 when this organization was founded. Think about it, right? [Laughter] We've got a new economy. And there was a new economy in 1893. And we've got to figure out how to make it work for everybody instead of just a few people. We are overwhelmed by a big influx of immigrants from different kinds of countries, and so were we in 1893, and we have to bring everybody into the American mainstream. We are about to enter a new century with a lot of confidence but a lot of challenges. We have to do what we've always had to do at such times as Americans. We have to make sure we deepen the meaning of our freedom, we widen the circle of opportunity, we strengthen the Union of our people. The Talmud says every blade of grass has its angel that bends over it and whispers, ``Grow, grow.'' Our children are blades of grass. You must be the angels. Thank you.”