Remarks at a Tribute to Governor James B. Hunt, Jr., of North Carolina

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 30, 2000

And over more than 20 years now, Jim and Carolyn have been friends to Hillary and me. We always love being with them. We follow the progress of our families and the ups and downs and changes in our lives. And I have seen now that--he is the only Governor I know that served in the seventies, the eighties, the nineties, and the 21st century. [Laughter]

But as a result--he was kind of like me--if you really love being Governor, you don't get tired of doing it, because it's the best job in the world in so many ways. And there's nobody in my adult lifetime in the United States who has served as a Governor who has done more for education, children's health, or the long-term economic interests of a State than Jim Hunt. He has the most sweeping, deep, consistent record of public service over the longest period of time of any Governor in the United States in my lifetime. And the people of North Carolina should be very, very proud of that. It's an astonishing record.

Along the way, he's led your State through difficult times, like those awful floods, and made sure that we here in Washington did our part to help you recover. You have not really been in politics until you have been lobbied by Jim Hunt for something. [Laughter] And if you don't want to say yes, it's just like going to the dentist and having him yank your teeth out without any kind of deadening on your gums. [Laughter] It just never ends, and his capacity to guilt-trip you kind of goes up by the day. [Laughter] So eventually you say yes, and then after a while, you learn to say yes the first time you're asked because there's no point in going through this. [Laughter]

He really did a great job for you on that. I've watched him with these preschool programs and these early childhood health initiatives and the efforts he's made to turn around his schools that were underperforming. And along the way, he's done a lot of things nationally, but one thing in particular I want to thank him for, because he introduced me to the idea of the master teacher and National Board of Professional Teaching Certification, the idea that we ought to have, eventually, in every school building in America, somebody who has proved not only that he or she knows the subject that they're teaching completely, which is a big challenge today because we've got a teacher shortage, but is also supremely gifted in the classroom and good at teaching children.

So Jim worked for years and years and years on this National Board for Professional Teaching Certification, and a few years ago he came to the White House, and we kicked it off. And we certified, within a short time, the first 500 teachers. Now we have about 5,000. By the time I leave office, we'll have almost 10,000. And thanks to his leadership, we have as part of our education budget the capacity to go to 100,000 master teachers over the next 3 or 4 years. And now we've got this huge backlog. This is a big deal. The teachers, the men and women who get national board certification, have to prove they know their subjects well, that they are extremely skilled in the classroom, that they understand how to relate to children and families.