Remarks at the employment initiative in Oakton, Virginia

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Feb 1, 1999

We also are going to try to expand more partnerships. You have proved here that it takes people working together to make something like this go. We have a new initiative called "Right-Track Partnerships," to help schools, businesses, and community organizations work together to reduce teen dropout rates and to help former dropouts come back, building on what we did last year, directed especially toward Hispanic young people, because the dropout there is far higher than for any group in America.

Let me just tell you, though, you all know that we need more than a high school education to do what you guys are doing; so even if you didn't have one once, with all the training programs, you've got to have more. In 1989, 10 years ago this coming fall, I met with all the other Governors and the them President of the United States, George Bush, to set some national education goals. One of our goals was that we would have an on time high school completion rate of 90 percent. That was one of our goals.

We knew that some people would drop out regardless, you know, that just would happen. In 1989 - well, 1998, last year, a wonderful thing happened. For the first time since we've been keeping these statistics, the last 20 or 30 years, the on time African-American high school graduation rate was almost identical to the on time high school graduation rate of white children. It was about - between 83 and 84 percent. That's the good news.

There's two pieces of bad news. Bad news piece number one is it's not 90 percent. And that's 16, 17 percent of the people we have to figure out how to get back to school and how to get education and training. And for Hispanic young people, many of whom have language barriers that cause them after the eighth grade not to be able to keep up, the dropout rate is still over 40 percent. So we must do more here.

And it's something I'd like to ask you all to think about. And here in Virginia, Northern Virginia, you've got a lot of young people from all over the world, as the school districts get increasingly diverse - these kids have fine minds, but it will be harder for them, and the longer they go on in school without a complete mastery of English and access to learning, the more the difficult courses will become more out of reach. And if they get bored, they'll drop out eventually. So I ask for your help and attention.

Finally, let me say that I'm very gratified by the broad-based support that this initiative seems to have attracted among the American people. I think it's because everybody knows that what you're doing is what we all need to do for the future. But I would ask you to remember this day, to talk to your friends and neighbors who you may never have mentioned this to, to find out whether all the people that work in their workplaces have access to these sort of training programs.

But remember, what we're trying to do in this balanced budget now is we've closed the budget deficit, now we've got to close the skills deficit. We cannot have the earnings gap in America, the income gap bigger because we didn't make the skills gap smaller. Now is the time to do it. We will never have a better time. And we will all - all - be richly rewarded when we have more stories like the ones I heard here from the Alliance today.