Education

Our Goals 2000 proposal will empower individual school districts to experiment with ideas like chartering their schools to be run by private corporations or having more public school choice, to do whatever they wish to do as long as we measure every school by one high standard:  Are our children learning what they need to know to compete and win in the global economy?

Goals 2000 links world-class standards to grassroots reforms and I hope Congress will pass it without delay.  Our school to work initiative will for the first time link school to the world of work, providing at least one year of apprenticeship beyond high school.  After all, most of the people we’re counting on to build our economic future won’t graduate from college.  It’s time to stop ignoring them and start empowering them.  We must literally transform our outdated unemployment system into a new reemployment system.  The old unemployment system just sort of kept you going while you waited for your old job to come back.  We’ve got to have a new system to move people into new and better jobs because most of those old jobs just don’t come back.  And we know that the only way to have real job security in the future, to get a good job with a growing income, is to have real skills and the ability to learn new ones.  So we’ve got to streamline today’s patchwork of training programs and make them a source of new skill for our people who lose their jobs.  Reemployment, not unemployment, must become the centerpiece of our economic renewal.  I urge you to pass it in this session of Congress.

Welfare

And just as we must transform our unemployment system, so must we also revolutionize our welfare system.  It doesn’t work; it defies our values as a nation.  If we value work, we can’t justify a system that makes welfare more attractive than work if people are worried about losing their health care.

If we value responsibility, we can’t ignore the $34 billion in child support absent parents out to be paying to millions of parents who are taking care of their children—.  If we value strong families, we can’t perpetuate a system that actually penalizes those who stay together.  Can you believe that a child who has a child gets more money from the government for leaving home than for staying home with a parent or a grandparent?  That’s not just bad policy, it’s wrong and we ought to change it.

I worked on this problem for years before I became president, with other governors and with members of Congress in both parties and with the previous administration of another party.  I worked on it with people who were on welfare, lots of them.  And I want to say something to everybody here who cares about this issue.  The people who most want to change this system are the people who are dependent on it.  They want to get off welfare; they want to go back to work; they want to do right by their kids.