Remarks on presenting the Teacher of the Year Award

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, May 1, 1995

As I have said many times in many places, we face two great deficits in this country: a budget deficit that is the product of too many years of taking the easy way out and an education deficit that is the product of too many years of ignoring the obvious. We have worked hard to try to address both over the last 2 years, reducing our deficit by $600 billion over a 5-year period and increasing our commitment to education.

We must do more on both, but we dare not sacrifice one at the expense of the other. The answer to the budget deficit is not to reverse the gains we have made by expanding Head Start, by expanding opportunities for young people who don't go to college to move from school to work with good jobs and good futures, by expanding our commitment to childhood nutrition and the health of our children, by expanding our efforts to give people the chance to go to college through more affordable college loans and the AmeriCorps national service program. We cannot cure one deficit at the expense of the other.

And indeed, in some areas we should plainly be doing more. The Goals 2000 legislation for the first time set America on a course of national excellence in education, while giving teachers like the ones we celebrate here today more opportunities working with their principals to have flexibility from cumbersome Federal rules and regulations to do what they know best in educating their children. We should be putting more money into our schools with less rules and regulations, but higher standards, higher expectations, and honest measurement of educational progress.

We should be doing more of what we've been doing in the last 2 years, not less. And we can do it and bring the deficit down. We must attack both deficits at once and not sacrifice education on the altar of deficit reduction.

We must also realize that the work of America is a work that is not done by government alone or even primarily by government. As I used to say over and over again when I was a Governor and much closer to the schools of our country, nothing we do in government will matter at all unless there are people like the teachers who are being honored here today.

What we do in Washington only empowers people to do better by our children in every school in the country. What happens in the home and what happens in the school and how they relate to and reinforce one another will have the deciding influence on the quality of education in the United States and the future of this country as we move into this new and exciting age.

Many of you remember Jesse Stuart, who taught in a one-room schoolhouse in the rural south and wrote a wonderful book called "The Thread That Runs So True," in which he said, "A teacher lives on and on through his students. Good teaching is forever, and the teacher is immortal." Well, just like Jesse stuart, the 1995 National Teacher of the Year has taught in a one-room schoolhouse, but hers is in rural Alaska, where it's a little colder in the wintertime.

Elaine Griffin's work at the Kodiak Island schools of Akhioc and Chiniak over the past 20 years has significantly expanded the educational, social, and cultural environments for the students in her K-through-12 classroom. With her husband, Ned, she brings in members of the community to share their talents with the students. And as the students learn about their own history, they are also being taught to understand distant lands. Many of the students have participated in foreign exchange programs, and I must say that, Elaine and Ned have created their own cultural exchange with their three remarkable children, whom I just had the privilege of meeting in the Oval Office, whom I know that she will introduce in a moment.