Remarks at Brooke Grove Elementary School in Olney, Maryland

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Sept 13, 1999

And finally, we ought to figure out what we need to do to invest in the things that are critical to these children's future, in the environment, in research, in health care, in defense, and most important, in education. And when we do that, then I think we ought to give the rest of it back to you in a tax cut. But we ought to, first of all, think about the long-term welfare of the country - save Social Security and Medicare, get the country out of debt, invest what we have to do in education and other things, then give the rest in a tax cut. Don't put the cart before the horse and then figure out what in the wide world we're going to do.

Let me give you an idea of the differences, because that's what we did and we proposed a substantial tax cut for middle class Americans. We still have the money in our balanced budget to expand Head Start, to help State and local schools build or modernize 6,000 schools. You don't have that problem here, but a third of our schools are in terrible shape.

I was in a 75-year-old school in Virginia yesterday where they cannot hook the classrooms up to the Internet because the circuits go out every time they put the pressure on the system. And that's important. To help communities expand or start after-school programs and summer schools programs; to help have higher accountability and standards for schools but provide extra help to turn around schools that aren't doing it; and to finish the job of putting the 100,000 teachers in the classroom in ways that also enable us to help improve teacher quality and skills and new technologies.

Now, last month, Secretary Riley announced funds to help improve our teacher force. Today we're releasing another $33 million to create teacher quality partnerships in 22 States, to help recruit, train, and license new teachers and support them once they re in the classroom. We have to work on teacher quality, but you can't have a quality teacher unless you have a teacher in the first place.

Here is the arithmetic problem. If their budget passes with a tax cut, it will require us to reduce our investment in education, in Head Start, early reading, and other programs by about 50 percent over the next 10 years. And over and above their tax cut, even this year they have put themselves in a position where they are going to have to cut education now. Either they have to dip into the Social Security surplus, something they said they wouldn't do, or cut next year's education budget by nearly 20 percent.

Now, this is basic arithmetic, the kind of things you learn in Brooke Grove. It's basic arithmetic that if schools have record enrollments for 4 years in a row and a third of the schools are in need of repair, you need more teachers and better schools. It's basic arithmetic when 2 million teachers are about to retire, and all the evidence says smaller classes produce higher learning, that you need more teachers, especially in the early grades. It is basic arithmetic, in other words, that if we want the kind of America for our children that they deserve in the new century, we must invest more, not less, in education.