Remarks on the initiative to provide a qualified teacher in every classroom

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Jan 25, 1999

January 21,1999

Well, Sergeant, I don't think I need to say anything else. [Laughter]

Let me thank all of you for coming today and welcome you here. This is the 21st year of a partnership in education that involves Hillary and me and Secretary Riley. We all started working together in 1979, and we've been at it a good while now. Few things that I have ever been a part of have given - sort of thrilled me more than just listening to Arthur Moore talk. And I'm sure all of you felt the same way.

I thank the Members of Congress who are here and all the other distinguished guests. I would like to recognize just three: first, we have here the President of the Navaho Nation, Kelsey Begaye; and Samuel Penney, the chairman of the Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee; and Arthur Moore's daughter, Andrea, is here, and she must have been awful proud of her father today, and I know he's proud of her. So we welcome all of them.

After the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in October of 1957, President Eisenhower asked the Congress to rise to the challenge of the times and proposed a new Federal program to help public school teachers improve their math and science instruction. He understood that teaching is an important part of our national security. And I think, therefore, that President Eisenhower - and General Eisenhower - would have been very pleased to see Arthur Moore as a soldier-turned-teacher.

Two days ago, in the State of the Union Address, I asked Congress to rise to the demands of this time, to pass an "Education Accountability Act" that would offer more investment, demand more accountability, and not as some have implied, have the Federal Government try to run more of our day-today activities in our public schools but simply have the Federal Government respond to what the teachers of this country and the principals and the educators have been telling us, and invest in what works. We now have an opportunity to do that. With the strength of our economy and with the size of our surplus, we have an opportunity. We also have an obligation.

Research confirms what most of us know from our own experience: What most determines whether students learn is not family background or even dollars spent per pupil but the talent, the ability, and the dedication of their teachers.

Every adult in this room, I know, can recall the names of teachers who deeply affected our own lives and helped us to get where we are today. I was thinking this morning about my high school band teacher. And you say, you wouldn't think that the band teacher would have a lot to do with a person becoming President, but he instilled not only in me a love of music but also a reminder that I could never manifest that love unless I worked like crazy, that I had to learn to work in a team. I couldn't play too loud just because I liked the part. [Laughter] And because we ran the statewide music festival every year, he taught me how to organize and how to manage people and time, all kinds of things that teachers teach children that stay with them for a lifetime.

There are an awful lot of teachers like that in America. But we have to face the fact that because our classrooms are bursting with 53 million children because, frankly, we still don't pay our teachers as much as we should in most places, a quarter - listen to this - a quarter of all secondary school teachers don't have college majors or even minors in the subjects they are teaching. And the deficit is greatest where the need is greatest.

Schools with the highest minority enrollment, for example, have less than a 50-50 chance - now, think about this - less than a 50-50 chance of having a math or science teacher with a license or degree in the field.

I don't know if you remember what I said in the State of the Union the other night about what the international test scores show, but basically our fourth graders rank near the top of all industrialized countries in performance in math and science. Our eighth graders drop to the middle; our 12th graders are near the bottom. No one can doubt, surely, that one reason is the absence of a pool of teachers who have been trained in the subjects they are teaching.

Now, we have a real opportunity to get more good teachers in general, more good education practice, and more properly, specifically trained teachers, in particular this year, because every 5 years, the Federal Government revisits the terms on which it invests $15 billion in our Nation's schools; 1999 is the 5th year. We have to do it again. It gives us a golden opportunity and a solemn responsibility to change the way we invest the money to invest in what works and to stop investing in what doesn't.

So I intend to send Congress a plan that will, among other things, require States receiving Federal funds to end social promotion but will also provide them the funds for summer school, after-school, and other support for children who need it - if you look at what I just said about the progression of the test, it is not the students who are failing; it is the system that is failing the students, and we need to respond accordingly - second, to adopt and enforce strict discipline codes, something teachers in the teachers' organizations have asked us to support more vigorously; third, to give parents report cards on their children's school; fourth, to turn around the worst-performing schools or close them, and we will provide funds to help States do that; and finally, to be accountable for the quality of their teachers, with new teachers passing performance exams, all teachers knowing the subjects they're teaching; and we will provide support for that.