Remarks at a Democratic business council dinner

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, March 23, 1998

Thank you, please be seated. Thank you Tom, Steve, Len, Terry. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you all for being here tonight, for your support for the Democratic Party, and especially for the Business Council.

The two things that I really like, that have kind of flowered in the last 5 years since I've been here for our party, are this Democratic Business Council and the Women's Leadership Forum. And Hillary is in Georgia tonight at a WLF meeting. We really believe in what they have done to broaden the base of the Democratic Party - not just the financial base but also the political base of the party - bringing people in and giving them a voice and giving them a chance to be heard and bringing in new areas of expertise that have made a real difference to us. And so I thank you for that.

I was sitting here tonight wondering what I ought to say. One of you gave me this little cup of coffee with my name on it - a little cup. If this is the case, we won't have any small coffees at the White House. [Laughter] I thought that was pretty funny. [Laughter] Another one of you in the line said that your 96-year-old grandmother said to tell the President that he and that young man are doing a good job. I said, "Who's the young man?" And she said, "Al Gore." [Laughter] That really hurt. [Laughter]

Today I did two things that embody what I hope the next 3 years will be about. Namely, taking advantage of these good times: first balanced budget in a generation and the lowest unemployment, the lowest crime rate in 24 years, the lowest welfare rolls in 27 years, highest homeownership in history, lowest inflation in 30 years - these good times, taking advantage of them and preparing for the long-term prosperity and success of the American people, and trying to advance the cause of peace and freedom and prosperity throughout the world.

I started the day by going out to a high school in suburban Maryland and meeting with two dozen other people, including the superintendent of schools in New York City, the mayor of Los Angeles, the Governors of West Virginia and Maryland, and any number of other experts who came together to sit and talk with me - educational experts - about a big part of one of our country's most profound challenges, and that is the low level of performance of our high school seniors on international math and science tests.

One example of the general problem, which is as follows: Everybody in this country and everybody in the world with an informed opinion would tell you that the United States is fortunate enough to have the best system of higher education in the world. No one with an informed opinion would assert that we have the best system of elementary and secondary education in the world. And yet we have a lot of wonderful people out there giving their careers to teaching. And we have example after example after example of schools that are succeeding against all the odds.

Now, this school that I visited in Maryland today had white and African-American and Hispanic and Indian and Pakistani students and Arab-American students. It was an amazing - a lot of Asian-American students - it was an amazing myriad of our country just up the road in Maryland. And they have quite high levels of performance in math and science. So I went there to talk about it. And two of the people on the panel were the teacher, a Japanese-American physics teacher; and a student, a Hispanic, a young woman who was a student there. And we talked about what we could do to improve math and science education. And I talked about our plans to hook up every classroom and library in every school in America to the Internet by the year 2000. When we started in '94 only 34 percent of the schools were hooked up; today 75 percent of the schools are hooked up. That's not every classroom in every school, but at least we've got some hookups to the Internet in 75 percent of the schools in America now. So we're moving.

We talked about the plan to certify 100,000 master teachers, to make absolutely sure that they are academically well qualified to the highest degree, and then to get those people paid more, so we can put one master teacher in every school building in America to try to change the culture of learning and the standards of learning. We talked about the need to give teachers who are in the work force the ability to go back and train, get higher levels of training.

This is the only country in the world where you have large numbers of people teaching math and science courses that they did not major in or minor in in college, simply because of the shortage that exists. And if we don't do something, it's likely to get worse. There are over 350,000 vacancies in information technology today in America, with an average starting salary of $48,000 a year. The average salary of all teachers, including the most senior, in America, in the wealthiest school district -the average salary is not close to $48,000 a year. So this is a formidable challenge.

But the good news is, I had two dozen really smart Americans from all walks of life there in this wonderful American school. And we were working on it and we believe we can do something about it. We know we have to have more courses offered; we know we have to train the teachers better; we know we have to find more funds for these shortage areas. But I also told the students, with whom I spoke later - and I actually didn't get booed when I said it - that I thought they should be required to take chemistry and physics and calculus and trigonometry, and that they would all need it - and that we had opened the doors to college to everyone with the balanced budget plan, with the HOPE scholarships, and all the other incentives, they needed to have to do this.