[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1993, Book I)]
[May 14, 1993]
[Pages 657-659]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



[[Page 657]]


Remarks Honoring Blue Ribbon Schools
May 14, 1993

    Thank you very much. Thank you, Secretary Riley. Thank you, ladies 
and gentlemen.
    I want to welcome you all to the White House today on this gorgeous 
day. I hope you've enjoyed yourselves. The Marine Band has been in 
especially fine form this morning. I woke up to them; I went jogging to 
them. I almost felt like a President this morning for sure when I was 
walking over to the Oval Office. They were playing a march that was 
written for the coronation of a British monarch, so I almost got myself 
confused. [Laughter]
    There are 228 schools here represented today, the winners of the 
Blue Ribbon Awards this year. And all of you are winners, representing 
what is best in American education in public and private schools and 
urban and suburban and rural schools. You all share some common features 
with all your differences: visionary leadership, a sense of shared 
purpose, a climate conducive to learning, impressive academic 
achievement brought on not only by gifted teachers but also by 
responsible and open student behavior, and real involvement of parents 
and often the broader community in the life of the school.
    I spent a lot of time thinking about these educational issues over 
the last 12 or so years. I spent more of my time as a Governor on 
education than on any other single issue except for the economy of my 
State. I spent hundreds of hours, I suppose, in schools in my State and 
around the country over the last 12 to 15 years and some time in one of 
the schools from Arkansas that's being honored today.
    A hundred years ago the key to a strong economy was our raw material 
base. Fifty years ago it was mass production. Now it is clearly the 
trained human mind. We live in a world where the average person will 
change work seven or eight times in a lifetime, when the volume of 
knowledge is doubling every few years. When people in Silicon Valley 
making new computers and new computer programs tell me their average 
product life is now down to 18 months, clearly the reasoning, creative, 
facile but also deep mind is key to the future of the United States. We 
also live in a time when hardly anybody can get and keep a decent job 
without more education that too many of our people lack today.
    If we could multiply the grade schools here represented on this lawn 
all across the country, we could really revolutionize education in 
America. I must tell you that the most challenging--[applause]--give 
yourselves a hand. That's a good idea. The most challenging thing I ever 
faced as Governor and the most continually frustrating was going into 
our schools and realizing that virtually every challenge in American 
education has been met successfully by somebody somewhere.
    There are people succeeding against all the odds and producing 
magnificent results in extremely difficult circumstances. There are 
schools producing world-class results by any rigorous measure. The 
problem with American education is that we have never found an effective 
way to help replicate success, partly because the magic of education is 
always what happens in the individual classroom between the teacher and 
the student, supported by the parents, strengthened by the culture of a 
school that is set overwhelmingly by a gifted principal. I know that.
    But there have to be ways to recognize the plain fact that 
notwithstanding the funding problems, notwithstanding the inequalities, 
notwithstanding all the problems of American education, you can find 
virtually every problem in our country solved by somebody somewhere in 
an astonishingly effective fashion if you look at enough schools. So the 
challenge for us here is to figure out how to replicate that. That is 
what Secretary Riley and I are trying to do with the ``Educate America 
Act,'' the Goals 2000 act that we presented to the United States 
Congress, a bill we believe will lead to the creation of world-class 
learning standards and also help to promote the idea that, clearly, all 
reforms must occur school by school.
    Goals 2000 will, in effect, enshrine the national education goals in 
the law of the land, raise expectations for all students, and help to 
enrich the content of our courses, the training of our teachers, and the 
quality of our textbooks and our technology. Finally, the bill will 
challenge our schools to show real results. We believe students and 
schools should have more

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flexibility in dealing with Federal programs and should be shooting 
toward real results and clear standards. Goals 2000 is the framework for 
that educational effort in this administration. It will facilitate 
fundamental reforms in our schools, and I must say that's probably why 
some people don't like it all that well, including some members of my 
own party in the Congress.
    But we can't raise standards and achievement either by leaving 
things the way they are or simply by piling on more particular 
governmental programs and mandates from Washington. After all, we're 
only providing about 7 percent of the total financing of public schools 
today, and while I hope to reverse that trend and over the next 5 years 
get the percentage back up to somewhere to where it was over the last 
several years, still the lion's share of the financing and the lion's 
share of the learning reforms must come from you and people like you. 
And that means we have to have a different approach in the way the 
National Government relates to our schools. I hope that the Congress 
will not dilute the package that I sent to them. I hope we can pass the 
bill in a way that will represent a real change in the way the National 
Government relates to the schools and a real increase in confidence in 
proven local leaders.
    I'd also like to say that the private sector in this country has 
shown an astonishing willingness to become more involved in education 
ever since the issuance of the ``Nation at Risk'' report 10 years ago. 
The New American Schools Development Corporation, on which Governor 
Baliles serves on the board and which Governor Riley and now Secretary 
Riley mentioned, has already raised millions of dollars from public 
spirited business leaders. It has path-breaking design teams which are 
providing us with valuable lessons about how school innovations all 
around America can help us to reach world-class standards. And it is 
trying to help to replicate what works, which I still believe is our 
most urgent task.
    Through these new designs they will be able to provide promising 
alternatives for schools and States as they work to reinvent their 
schools with the help of Goals 2000 and other reform efforts that this 
administration will make. I ask all of you to support this legislation 
and the work of the New American Schools Corporation. I ask you to 
support it in the larger context of what we must do as a nation.
    Think of what has happened to bring us to this point where we have 
come to 17 months in a row with unemployment rate at 7 percent or higher 
in every month, even though we are allegedly in an economic recovery. 
What has happened to bring us to a point where most American families 
are spending more hours on the job than they were 20 years ago with 
lower real incomes than they made 10 years ago, including some of the 
families represented in this audience? What has caused that? Our lack of 
ability to be continuously productive, our lack of ability to create 
more and more new jobs that will stand the test of the rigorous global 
economy. What we have to do in our administration and what I earnestly 
ask for your support in doing is to reverse the trends that have brought 
us to this past.
    Let us first of all bring down the Government deficit that has 
gotten our debt from $1 trillion to $4 trillion in the last 12 years 
simply by telling people at election time what they wanted to hear: I'll 
cut your taxes and write you a check. All the arithmetic teachers in 
this audience could have figured out that sooner or later that would get 
us in trouble. Nobody could have passed math in this town in any of your 
schools in the last 12 years who with a straight face said, ``I've got 
you a deal. I'll cut your taxes, and I'll send you a check.''
    So it fell to me to try to change that ratio. And the House of 
Representatives Committee on Ways and Means yesterday reported out a 
bill which does a lot of that. It restores both spending cuts and tax 
increases to a proper balance. It will bring the deficit down by $500 
billion over the next 5 years. It will provide important new incentives 
for small businesses and for larger businesses to continue to invest, to 
create jobs in our country. It provides a real tax break for working 
families with children with incomes of under $29,000 to offset the 
impact of the energy tax and reward work so there will never be an 
incentive for people with families not to work. Because if this tax bill 
passes, for the first time in our country's history, because of the 
changes in the Tax Code, we'll be able to say that if you work 40 hours 
a week and you've got a child in the house, you will not live in 
poverty. These are important things. And over 70 percent of the money 
comes from people with incomes above $100,000.
    The budget package also over the next 5 years will increase our 
commitment to Head Start, to apprenticeship training, with partnerships

[[Page 659]]

with our schools and our post-high school programs, and opens the doors 
of college education to everyone through a radical reform in the student 
loan program and national service. It focuses on, in other words, 
increasing investment, bringing down the deficit, and bringing us 
together as a country again. This Goals 2000 legislation is an important 
part of that. It is our effort to do our job here as well as you do your 
job back home. If we did our job here as well as you've done yours, then 
America could celebrate and give itself a blue ribbon in just a few 
years.
    Thank you very much, and God bless you all.

Note: The President spoke at 9:51 a.m. on the South Lawn at the White 
House.