CONGRESS has taken the most significant step of this century to provide widespread help to all of America's schoolchildren. I predict that this is just the beginning, the first giant stride toward full educational opportunity for all of our schoolchildren.

I am proud of what the Congress has done in the last 15 months since I have been President to help put education at the top of America's agenda.

We have underscored this priority with some of the most important, some of the most far-reaching legislation that has ever been enacted in our land. This school bill is a wide-reaching bill. It will offer new hope to tens of thousands of youngsters who need attention before they ever enroll in the first grade. It will help five million children of poor families overcome their greatest barrier to progress--poverty. It will put textbooks in now empty hands. It will establish new centers of learning throughout our entire land, and it will do all of this while leaving the control of education in the hands of local citizens.

I don't know of another single piece of legislation that will help so many for so little cost. For every one of the billion dollars that we spend on this program will come back tenfold as school dropouts change to school graduates. A youngster who finishes high school earns over $35,000 more during his lifetime than a school dropout earns. A college graduate earns over $100,000 more during his lifetime than a high school graduate. And beyond the benefit to the economy of more productive citizens is the simple fact that dropouts are the first casualties of our advancing technology.

Every year one million American children leave high school. They are the last to be hired and they are the first to be fired.

This bill tackles their problem head on. Your Congress and your President are moving vigorously to meet the educational needs of America, the educational needs of a people that are growing younger every year.

I am very proud of your House of Representatives and your United States Senate, and I know every American who looks to our future will join me in applauding the historic action that the Congress has just taken. Since 1870, almost a hundred years ago, we have been trying to do what we have just done--pass an elementary school bill for all the children of America.