[Congressional Record Volume 163, Number 34 (Monday, February 27, 2017)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1428-S1430]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                  Tribute to Dr. Constance E. Clayton

  Mr. CASEY. Madam President, I rise today, as I have every year that I 
have been in the Senate, which is quite a long time now--the last 10 
years, going into 11--to give some remarks in commemoration of Black 
History Month. The way I have done that, and the way our office has 
done it, is to recognize a special figure in my home State of 
Pennsylvania, an individual who we are very proud of. Today we honor 
Dr. Constance E. Clayton, a trailblazing figure whose career in 
education positively impacted the lives of countless children in 
Philadelphia, and whose work continues to pay dividends in the city 
public schools to this day. Throughout her long career as a teacher and 
administrator in the Philadelphia School District, Dr. Clayton never 
lost sight of her mission. In her words: ``The children come first.''
  A product of Philadelphia public schools, Dr. Clayton became the 
first African American and the first woman to serve as superintendent 
of the Philadelphia School District. This Black History Month, we 
celebrate Dr. Clayton's place in that history, but as we do, we should 
also ask ourselves if we are living up to her legacy and if we are 
putting the children first--all children everywhere first.
  I will be seeing Dr. Clayton today and so many of her friends. The 
rules don't allow me to acknowledge anyone else in the Chamber. So I 
will do that later. But I do want her to know how much we appreciate 
her giving us this much time to pay tribute to her and to her work.
  Connie Clayton's story is a great American story. Born to a plumber 
and social worker, she was raised by her mother and grandmother after 
her parents divorced when she was just 2 years old. She attended Paul 
Lawrence Dunbar Elementary School in Philadelphia.
  Her mind, like that of so many children, was awakened by a special 
teacher. In her case, it was her fourth grade teacher at Dunbar, whose 
name she still readily recalls--Ms. Alice Spotwood. She remembers that 
Ms. Spotwood was kind, and she made learning fun. She also remembers 
that Ms. Spotwood seemed interested in her individually, even as she 
was interested in every other child in that classroom. Ms. Spotwood 
made Connie feel special.
  Connie Clayton went on to attend Jay Cook Junior High School and 
Philadelphia High School for Girls, where she excelled academically. 
She thought she wanted to be a doctor, even taking 4 years of Latin at 
Girls High School on the theory that she would need to decipher dated 
medical jargon. Her enthusiasm waned when she realized that calling a 
body a corpus didn't make studying its contents any more appealing. She 
chose, instead, to focus on the mind, earning her bachelor's degree and 
her master of education degree from Temple University, before going on 
to her doctorate of education in educational leadership from the 
University of Pennsylvania, where she was a Rockefeller scholar.
  Dr. Constance E. Clayton recognized that education--her education--
was what empowered her to succeed. It started at Dunbar, where teachers 
like Ms. Spotwood first taught her to raise her sights and to reach out 
and to believe. So it is no coincidence that her first step in her 
professional life was to go back to Dunbar and return the favor. She 
took a role as a student teacher alongside many of the same people who 
taught her before she could imagine that the letters ``Ph.D'' would

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follow her name or that the title ``Superintendent'' would someday 
precede it.
  In 1955, Dr. Clayton got her first full-time teaching job at 
Philadelphia's Harrison Elementary School, where she taught fifth grade 
social studies. Grounded in that personal mission that children come 
first, Dr. Clayton's years as a teacher revealed a unique gift for 
understanding children, their specific challenges and their particular 
needs. This is no doubt why, in the years that followed, she earned a 
role in developing the social studies curriculum for the entire 
district and led an effort to develop and train teachers to implement a 
Black history curriculum throughout the school district.
  Dr. Clayton recalls understanding that for students at a 
predominantly Black school in Philadelphia, it is Black History Month 
every day, every month, and they need to see their lived experience 
reflected in the course material because they didn't see many white 
picket fences where they were growing up. To paraphrase Carter Woodson, 
often known as the father of Black history himself: Kids need to learn, 
not just about Black history but about Black people in American 
history. Dr. Clayton recalls the reward of watching kids excited to 
learn that they, too, could be a painter, an author, an astronaut or 
whatever they wanted, and of watching the limits of those children's 
imaginations dissolve before their eyes.

  Dr. Clayton didn't limit her own imagination either. In 1972, she was 
named executive director and associate superintendent of early 
childhood education programs for the Philadelphia School District.
  Early childhood education is an issue dear to my own heart, as the 
sponsor of legislation here in the Senate to ensure universal early 
education nationwide. We know that the stakes for this issue are high. 
Early learning increases future income. It reduces the chance of arrest 
or incarceration, and it also reduces reliance on social services. 
Under Dr. Clayton's leadership, the Philadelphia School District 
expanded and enhanced its early education program into a national 
model.
  Connie Clayton's passion for helping children and her competence did 
not go unnoticed. In 1982, she was chosen as superintendent of the 
Philadelphia School District, the first African American and the first 
woman to hold that role. She knew the expectation would be high, but 
her mother always told her: ``Delete the word `can't' from your 
vocabulary.'' So Connie hit the ground running hard, declaring in the 
press conference where she accepted the job that motto that would come 
to define her tenure: ``The children come first.''
  I have often said that there is a light inside of every child, and it 
is the obligation of adults, especially elected officials, to make sure 
that this light shines brightly to the full measure of its potential. 
We know that from day one as superintendent, Dr. Connie Clayton knew 
her job was to nurture this light. But as a product of segregated 
education herself, she understood that our system doesn't always allow 
every light to shine equally bright.
  High minority schools often receive less funding, often have less 
experienced teachers, and often offer fewer high-level math and science 
courses. We know still today that this is true. Black K-12 students are 
almost four times as likely as White students to receive an out-of-
school suspension and almost twice as likely to be expelled. Black 
students represent 16 percent of the public school population today but 
42 percent of the population of justice facility education programs.
  Connie Clayton refused to simply curse the darkness of these numbers. 
She worked to change them. She knew that an enlightened mind can 
empower students to overcome the traps laid by cynicism, indifference, 
and underfunding--to slip the bounds of low expectation, beat the odds, 
and then turn around and work to change them. A good education can take 
that light inside and make it flare.
  She might have asked, and we still are asking: What, then, is a good 
education? Can some combination of facts and numbers alone contain this 
transformative power of education?
  Well, W.E.B. Du Bois said: ``Education must not simply teach work--it 
must teach life.'' Dr. Clayton understood this in all of its 
implications, both clear and subtle. She knew it was clear that a good 
education starts with an open school.
  In the 5 years preceding Dr. Clayton's term as superintendent, there 
were five teacher strikes in Philadelphia that cost students 1,000 days 
in the classroom. But during her 11 years in office, there wasn't a 
single strike. She knew it was clear that a good education requires 
funding. When she came in, the Philadelphia School District was facing 
a crushing $90 million deficit. When she left, it was running a 
surplus, and she had created financial partnerships with area 
businesses, all without closing a single school.
  Dr. Clayton knew it was clear that a good education comes from a good 
curriculum. When she came in, she noticed the school district had 
stopped teaching algebra. When she left as superintendent, she fostered 
a partnership with local university professors to teach the subject of 
algebra to a voluntary class that grew from 9 kids the first year to 
over 1,900.
  She implemented a free breakfast program because she knew that 
students from certain parts of the district might not be able to get 
food in the morning. We know, as she knew well, that hungry kids cannot 
learn.
  She reinstated summer school because she knew that a few credits here 
or there can mean the difference between a diploma and a dropout, and 
in that difference lay the blueprints to divergent lives.
  She treated her schools like second homes for children because she 
remembered, from all of her years of teaching, how the vast majority of 
parents wanted more for their kids than they were able to provide and 
that they just needed some help in filling the gaps.
  She took just 1 week of vacation in 11 years as superintendent--that 
has to be some kind of national record--and just 1 day of vacation in 
her many years of teaching before that, because she felt not just a 
passion for her work but an urgency to see its results.
  Dr. Clayton had a sense of urgency about educating these children, in 
the same way it was urgent for the followers of Sojourner Truth in the 
19th century. It was urgent for the students in the Student Nonviolent 
Coordinating Committee, known as SNCC, in the 20th century. They had 
that urgency. It has been urgent for all the ordinary lives before, 
between, and since. It was urgent for little Hannah A. Lions, a girl 
studying in Philadelphia in the 1830s whose family saved her school 
copybook as ``proof that there were some educated [Black] people back 
when'' and donated this copybook to the recently opened National Museum 
of African American History and Culture here in Washington, where it 
sits on display.
  It was as urgent, of course, for Dr. Constance Clayton, when she 
attended segregated schools in the same city some 100 years after 
Hannah. That is because a good education is not just some combination 
of numbers and facts. It is enlightenment for a mind constrained, 
freedom for a soul repressed, and a passport to a future that 
transcends artificial limitations and unleashes potential.
  Dr. Clayton worked feverishly to put one of those passports in the 
pockets of each student who passed through the Philadelphia schools 
under her watch. Her passion and her vision earned her a reputation as 
a reformer whom the New York Times wrote led an ``educational 
renaissance'' in Philadelphia.
  She would do whatever it took to make schools better for her 
students. She pushed the district to meet the goals of the America 2000 
Program, an ambitious plan to significantly increase the achievements 
of urban school districts across the country. She instituted the 
Homeless Student Initiative, a successful program to provide continuity 
in education and a level of consistent support to the hundreds, perhaps 
thousands, of homeless children in the district enduring the daily 
hardships of life in shelters. Connie worked to desegregate schools and 
made sure the district was providing employment opportunities to 
minority candidates.
  Several years into her administration, the executive director of the 
Council of Great City Schools remarked of Dr. Clayton's tenure as 
superintendant: ``Looking at an array

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of programs carried out in Philadelphia, you will see almost every 
innovative reform that has been proposed in urban schools.'' So it is 
no surprise that Dr. Clayton received all manner of awards and honors. 
Let me mention a few: the Dr. Constance E. Clayton Chair in Urban 
Education at the Graduate School of Education at the University of 
Pennsylvania, which was named in her honor--the first endowed 
professorship in the United States to be named after an African-
American woman. She received the Distinguished Daughters of 
Pennsylvania Award and the Humanitarian Service Award from the 
Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, as well as the 2008 Star 
Community Commitment in Education Award from the Philadelphia Education 
Fund, just to name a few. She has received honorary doctorates from 17 
colleges and universities, not to mention being a visiting professor at 
Harvard Graduate School of Education. I could go on and on today.
  She currently serves as trustee of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 
chairing the African and Afro-American Collections and Exhibits 
Committee and is a life member of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, where 
she has served in multiple leadership roles.
  Connie Clayton's life has been a life of service. We know that in our 
State capitol--the building has the following inscription: ``All public 
service is a trust given in faith and accepted in honor.'' Dr. Clayton 
honored the trust of public service. She validated the faith that the 
parents of all those students placed in her to carry out that trust, 
and she always put schoolchildren first. So on behalf of those students 
and their parents and everyone else her work touched in the course of 
her long career, it is my distinct privilege to honor Dr. Constance E. 
Clayton in celebration of Black History Month on the Senate floor 
today. I want to convey our gratitude for her devotion to education 
and, of course, to the children of Philadelphia.
  I yield the floor.
  I suggest the absence of a quorum.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. The clerk will call the roll.
  The senior assistant legislative clerk proceeded to call the roll.
  Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, I ask unanimous consent that the order 
for the quorum call be rescinded.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER. Without objection, it is so ordered.
  Mr. CORNYN. Madam President, it has been since January 20 when 
President Trump was inaugurated that we have been trying to get his 
Cabinet choices confirmed here in the Senate. Unfortunately, it has 
been slow-walked to the point now that tonight we are going to be 
voting on the President's nominee to lead the Commerce Department, Mr. 
Wilbur Ross. I am grateful to Mr. Ross for wanting to serve the country 
in this way. I think President Trump has chosen wisely as to the 
Commerce Secretary.
  One of the things President Trump said Mr. Ross will do is enter into 
the negotiation process on NAFTA, the North American Free-Trade 
Agreement. In my part of the world, in Texas, NAFTA is viewed 
positively; it is not a dirty word.
  Some people have suggested that trade somehow has a negative impact 
on our economy, but I believe the evidence is to the contrary. As a 
matter of fact, just between Mexico and the United States--5 million 
jobs depend on binational trade between Mexico and the United States. I 
know from time to time we have differences of views with Mexico. I saw 
that Secretary Kelly and Secretary Tillerson were in Mexico City on 
Wednesday talking about some of those differences but reassuring our 
Mexican counterparts of our sincerity and good will in trying to work 
through those. But the fact is, we share a common border with Mexico. 
What happens in Mexico has an impact on the economy and public safety 
in the United States and vice versa.
  So I am actually grateful for the conversation I have had with the 
Secretary of Commerce nominee, Wilbur Ross and that he is interested in 
updating NAFTA, the North American Free-Trade Agreement, rather than 
throwing the baby out with the bath water. I think that is a positive 
approach and one that I certainly support.
  We have a lot more Cabinet posts that remain vacant in the executive 
branch because our friends across the aisle have decided that somehow 
serves their political interests. But it does not serve the public's 
interests and it does not serve the country's interests to have a 
brandnew administration without the ability of the President to pick 
and choose the people he wants to help him govern the country. It 
creates more problems, and it also prevents us from getting on with the 
other important business of the Congress and working together with this 
President to try to move the country forward in so many important ways.
  I am glad we will actually consider Congressman Zinke's nomination 
for the Department of Interior later this evening, but we are going to 
have to go through this arduous process, this procedural process of 
cloture and postcloture time-burning before we can actually vote on 
this qualified nominee. I have said before that by holding up these 
qualified nominees, they are not only preventing the executive branch 
from working for the benefit of the American people, but they are also 
keeping us from our other job. After we get out of the personnel 
business, we need to get about the business of legislating and 
producing results for the American people. So I hope that at some point 
and at some point soon, our Democratic friends will let us move on from 
the confirmation process and get down to work where we can make that 
progress.