Remarks on Departure for Oslo, Norway, and an Exchange With Reporters

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Nov 8, 1999

October 31, 1999

EgyptAir-Flight 990 Aircraft Tragedy

The President. Good afternoon. Before I leave for Oslo, I would like to make a few comments. First, I want to say, as I did earlier today, how deeply saddened I am over the disappearance of EgyptAir Flight 990 early this morning off the coast of Massachusetts.

We know there has been a loss of life. The Coast Guard, supported by the Navy, is conducting extensive search and rescue operations in the area. The effort will continue for as long as necessary. We are also working with Egyptian authorities, and I spoke earlier with President Mubarak of Egypt today to express my condolences and to assure him that we would be working together closely until this matter is resolved.

We do not know what caused this tragedy, but we will devote every necessary resource so that we can understand exactly what happened. At this moment, the thoughts and prayers of all our people should be with the families of the passengers and crew of Flight 990 from the United States and other places throughout the world.

In a few minutes, I will leave for Norway, where leaders will gather to honor the memory of one of the great heroes of this century, Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. We will honor him by not only remembering his life but by pursuing his vision of a peaceful Middle East.

I will meet with Prime Minister Barak and Chairman Arafat, who are moving forward on an ambitious agenda to reach a comprehensive peace agreement. There are tremendous challenges ahead. I will do everything I can to help, because peace in the Middle East is strongly in the interest of the American people. And we have been working on it on a bipartisan basis for several years now.

Now, before I leave, I also want to say just a few words about the budget debate here in Washington and how that debate may affect another matter of great interest to our people, the education of our children.

This is now the seventh budget season I have been through as President. Each and every time, the Vice President and I have insisted that Congress produce budgets that live within our means while living up to the values of the American people. There is no greater value than education, especially in this information age. So even as we have reduced the size of Government to its smallest size in 37 years, we have nearly doubled our investment in education and training.

We have turned deficits into surpluses. We have sparked an economic expansion because of it, that come February will be the longest in American history. But we have not stopped increasing our investment and targeting our investment to higher standards and higher quality education.

Last fall we took another very important step. We reached an agreement with Congress to help States and school districts begin to hire 100,000 new teachers, new high-quality teachers that were well trained, to reduce class size in the early grades. The need for this was obvious. School enrollments are exploding; they are already the largest in history. And record numbers of our teachers soon will be retiring. Moreover, the research is clear that students learn more in classes with smaller, quality teachers.

Today we've learned about a new report indicating that our class reduction initiative already is producing results. Moments ago, I was briefed by the gentleman here to my left, Mike Casserly, the executive director of the Council of Great City Schools, on the council's just completed survey of 40 of the Nation's largest school districts.

The survey shows that our class size reduction initiative has so far done precisely what we said it would. It has put more teachers in the classroom and increased training for those already there, with a minimum of redtape and bureaucracy. The report shows that these school districts have not only hired over 3,500 well trained teachers, but they have hired them for hard to fill positions that add the greatest impact, including teaching reading, math, and special education.

I'm not surprised by these results. Every time I've visited a school in recent months, teachers, principals, parents, administrators all have complimented, even raved about our class size reduction initiative.

This report confirms that this targeted effort to hire more teachers is what local schools need and want. Last fall the congressional Republicans agreed to support this proposal. Many of them went home in the election seasons and enthusiastically shared the credit for it, which they were then entitled to do. I know that some of them even ran ads touting this idea as they embraced it.

Now, suddenly, the Republican majority has changed its mind. And this week Congress will consider a labor and education budget bill that doesn't commit to hiring 100,000 new quality teachers. In fact, it reverses the targeted funding for the first installment of 30,000 that we passed last time. Nor does it put a dime into our effort to demand accountability for results by helping States and school districts to turn around or shut down their lowest performing schools.