Remarks on signing the Executive Order on Educational Excellence for Hispanic Americans

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Feb 28, 1994

Thank you very much, Secretary Pena, Secretary Cisneros, all the people here from the Department of Education, along with Secretary Riley, including Norma Cantu and Gene Garcia, who have been recognized. When I was listening to my longtime friend Dick Riley up here speaking, I was thinking that this group could have forgiven me perhaps for putting someone in my Cabinet who spoke English with such a heavy accent. [Laughter] You know, sometimes people from South Carolina are hard for even the rest of us southerners to understand. I remember once when Senator Fritz Hollings from South Carolina was running for President and he was in a roast, and Senator Kennedy from Massachusetts spoke at the roast. And he said that he was glad to be there in honor of the first non-English-speaking American ever to seek the Presidency. He'll probably resign this afternoon--[laughter].

We've had a wonderful day today, Dick Riley and I have, the kind of day we always wanted to have, fighting for better education in America. We were the Governors of our respective States together for a long time in the seventies and the eighties. We saw what education could do and what the lack of it could mean. And I want to thank him personally from the bottom of my heart for the extraordinary work that he has done as Secretary of Education.

This morning I started off the day by going jogging with about a dozen students from the Northern Virginia Community College, and it was interesting. Their average age, I'd say, was probably 26. One was a native of Peru; one a native of Iran, just became an American citizen; one a native of Sierra Leone; one a native of Scotland. And as a matter of fact, I think only 7 of the 12 were nativeborn to the United States.

Then I spoke to the American Council on Education and was on the platform with Juliet Garcia from the University of Texas at Brownsville and others today, and we had a terrific time. I want to thank her and all the rest of you who are here representing various organizations, including the Hispanic Education Coalition. I think I have you all down here: Laudelina Martinez, the president of the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities; those here from the National Council of La Raza; the National Puerto Rican Coalition; Aspira; also MALDEF; the Cuban American National Council; the National Association for Bilingual Education; the Association of Hispanic Federal Executives.

I'd also like to acknowledge the members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus who are here, including the chair, Congressman Jose Serrano; Congressman Bill Richardson from New Mexico--and we thank you, sir, for your extraordinary Burmese mission dealing with Aung San Suu Kyi; all America's proud of you for what you've done--Congressman Ed Pastor; Congressman Robert Menendez; Congressman Carlos Romero-Barcelo; Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart; Congresswoman Lucille Roybal; Congressman Robert Underwood; Congressman--is Solomon Ortiz here? I don't think so. I think that is everyone.

Those of you in this room, including many that I have not introduced, have been at the forefront in pressing for educational opportunity for Hispanic-Americans. It must have seemed sometimes a lonely cause. It is, today, an even more urgent cause than ever before. You are here today, in part, for me to say to you, you are not alone.

Our administration has embraced your cause and seeks to support it. We know that doors can be shut. We know that only about half of Hispanic-Americans complete high school; that between 1980 and 1991, Hispanic enrollment at institutions of higher education grew 84 percent but still lagged far behind the national average of enrollments. The percentage of Hispanics going to college is just about half of that from college students in other minority groups.

This is a complex problem. And finding solutions, therefore, can be deferred, as they often are with complex problems, or we can say, because the problems are difficult and complex, we should take even more aggressive action. I am determined that we must do the latter because we have to succeed. After all, in the next century, Hispanics will make up the largest minority group in our Nation. From this pool, we will draw many of our leaders, our educators, our work force, our future.

To ignore the barriers to educational opportunity only hampers our own future, as well as the future of Hispanic-Americans as individuals. If we fail the youngest and fastest growing segment of our population, we'll all fail. Therefore, we must do everything in our power to allow every American child to reach his or her full potential.

I believe and everyone in this administration believes that every child can learn and can achieve. We have set world-class goals in education, and we want to give our schools and communities the tools to achieve them. That is at the heart of our general initiatives on education, the Goals 2000 program, the school-to-work initiative, the reformation of the college loan program to lower the interest rates and string out the repayments so that all Americans can borrow money and then do work that they're proud to do, knowing that they will never be unduly burdened in paying back their loans. It's at the heart of the national service program. It's at the heart of the reemployment program, what we want to do in replacing the old unemployment system where people drew unemployment and waited for their old jobs to come back, when we know those jobs are not coming back. We now want a reempolyment system so that the moment someone is unemployed, that man or woman can begin immediately, while drawing the unemployment, to engage in retraining to plan for a new and better job.