Remarks on signing the Higher Education Amendments of 1998

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Oct 12, 1998

Secondly, this bill provides funds to enable partnerships to be established between universities and other groups and our middle schools so that they can have more programs, hopefully one for every school and every student in America, eventually like the one that benefited Harold. So I can't tell you how important I think this is. So now we can say, "We've opened the doors to college to all Americans, and we have a system by which, if we really implement it, we can make sure all the Americans know the doors are open."

The other day I was in Philadelphia, and Chaka got a bunch of young kids, middle school kids together, and we took them down town and drank a Coke with them. Every one of them wanted to go to college. And we talked about this program, and every one of them was, I think, impressed by the fact that the Congress of the United States actually cared about them, and I might add, probably a little surprised. Glad to know that somehow, somebody was trying to set up a system to really reach down into their lives, at one of the most challenging and difficult points in those lives, often under the most difficult circumstances under which they're living, and open the door to a different future.

I don't think anyone would question that when Harold talked about his friend who's now working as a scientist in Utah, that that young person is not only better off, the rest of us are better off as well. America is a better place as well.

I also want to say very briefly, I am personally grateful for the Congress in a bipartisan fashion responding to the problem of alcohol and drug abuse and the health threat it presents on our campuses - we all remember the tragic loss of five students last fall in Virginia - by changing the law to allow campuses to notify parents when children younger than 21 have alcohol and drug violations. We have no way of knowing, but we believe this will save lives. And I thank the Congress for giving us the chance to do that.

Let me also say something that I think it's important for me to say as President: I am proud not only of what is in this bill but of how this bill passed. This is the way America should work. This is the way Congress should work. Members of Congress, I assure you, brought their different convictions and their partisan views to the debate, and we had the debate. But in the end, we acted together. We put the progress of the country and the people of the country ahead of our partisan differences and reached a principled resolution of the matters in dispute. That's the way America is supposed to work, and that's the way the American people want us to work. And so I want to thank every one of you for making sure on this terribly important issue, that is exactly the way you worked. Thank you very much.

Finally let me just say, in the closing days of this congressional session I hope that there will be similar bipartisan action on the agenda for public school excellence that I offered 8 months ago, an agenda that demands high responsibility, and high standards; offers choice and opportunity; calls for voluntary national standards and voluntary exams to measure their performance, supervised by a completely bipartisan committee; and the end to social promotion but help for the school districts that end social promotion so that we don't brand children a failure when the system fails them, but instead give them access to the mentors, the after-school programs the summer school programs that they need; an effort to make our schools safer, more disciplined, more drug-free; a plan that would provide for 100,000 teachers, for smaller classes in the early grade; funds to modernize or build 5,000 schools at the time when we have the largest student population in history; a plan to connect all of our classrooms to the Internet by the year 2000.