    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
    [May 29, 1996]
    [Pages 823-827]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks Honoring Blue Ribbon Schools
    May 29, 1996

        Thank you so much. Secretary Riley, thank you for the wonderful job
    that you do and your clear, strong voice for education. Mr. Vice
    President, thank you for the work you have done in advancing our
    technology initiative. I forgive you for mentioning all those Tennessee
    schools. [Laughter] We're always doing this. You know, there's a school
    from Arkansas here--from Bentonville, Arkansas. And I have spoken at the
    high school graduation there more than once. Now, have you spoken at all
    those Tennessee schools' graduation? [Laughter] We'll do this for 3 or 4
    more days until--[laughter].
        And I want to say to Jill Mahler how very much we appreciate not
    only the excellent work being done in your school--and I think I--they
    are so proud of her, I think I'd like to ask the representatives from
    Mainland High School in Daytona Beach to stand up here, and thank you
    very much. [Applause] Thank you.
        But it also reminds us that teaching and learning are a lot more
    than technology. And this

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    fine young lady is also the captain of her cross-country team and
    obviously very well-spoken. And we were honored to have her here on the
    stage with us today to remind us about what all these endeavors are
    truly all about.
        In Mainland High School, which is, as Jill said, a model technology
    school, the students can actually download images from satellites from
    the space shuttle, from weather satellites. I wish they had downloaded
    better weather for us today. [Laughter] But nonetheless, it's an
    exciting prospect to think about what young people are doing.
        Let me say to all of you here in the Blue Ribbon schools, from all
    across America, you are, as the Secretary said, a living textbook of the
    best lessons American education has to offer. I am filled with hope as I
    look around this tent; there's not a classroom problem anywhere in
    America that somebody somewhere hasn't solved. In the 21st century,
    America must have--must have--the best-educated citizens in the world.
    If we keep doing what you are doing, that is exactly what we will have.
        One of the things that has always perplexed me, having spent a great
    deal of time in public school classrooms in the 12 years I served as
    Governor of my State and since I've been President, going around the
    country, is that we don't do enough learning from each other. So
    Secretary Riley makes all the Blue Ribbon schools work when they come up
    here and learn from each other. But it is a model that I think if that
    were followed in every other State, every State in our country across
    this great land, we'd have even more rapid improvements in education.
        I also want to point out that today this ceremony is honoring not
    just a single student or even a single teacher but entire schools and
    the communities that sustain them. The Blue Ribbon Awards are rooted in
    the belief that schools work only if everyone does his or her part, if
    principals set high standards, if teachers teach well, if students work
    and learn, if parents and other community leaders stay involved and stay
    supportive.
        If you read through the list of the schools honored today, it is
    truly amazing what you have been able to accomplish by working together.
    In some schools, revolutionary science and math curriculums have been
    developed. In others, parents are volunteering in the classroom, and
    students are helping out in child care centers. In others, the whole
    community has joined together to kick gangs and drugs out of the
    schools, to wipe away graffiti, to restore safety to the classrooms and
    the learning environment.
        You are literally making learning a jump off the dusty shelves of
    libraries and into the imaginations of our children, our leaders of
    tomorrow. So to every single one of you, more than anything else, we
    wanted you to be here today on the lawn of the White House so that I
    could say on behalf of all the American people, we thank you, we are
    proud of you, and we hope that today you'll all be very proud of
    yourselves. Thank you very much.
        You know, I've had the chance, as I said, to be in a lot of
    different schools, elementary, middle, and high schools all across the
    country, public schools, parochial schools. I've seen science classes
    and English classes and history classes and economics classes. I've been
    in schools that were well over 100 years old in their physical
    facilities and schools that had been opened just a few days. I have seen
    in all the schools that really work, clearly, one uniform
    characteristic. It was the schools, every one of them, had high
    standards and high expectations. They actually believed that students
    could learn and that they would learn if given the right kind of
    standards, the right kind of support, the right kind of environment.
        I told the country's Governors at their education summit in March
    that we have to have those kinds of expectations for all of our
    students. And somehow we have to make sure that they have those
    expectations of themselves. We have to make every child in this country
    believe in himself or herself, believe they can learn difficult things.
    We have to hold them accountable, but we also need to reward them and
    pat them on the back when they do well.
        This is more important than it has been ever in our country's
    history, because at this peculiar moment we are moving at a rapid rate
    toward a new century and a new millennium. We are already into an
    entirely different sort of economy than that which most of us in this
    tent have lived most of our lives in. We are moving away from a national
    economy into a global economy and a global society. We are moving away
    from the industrial age to the information and technology age. We are
    moving into an era where most people will be working with their minds
    far more than their hands, and many of

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    them will be working in businesses and industries that have not even
    been invented yet.
        I am--I suppose it's not too strong to say--literally obsessed with
    making sure that our country will do well in the next century, that
    we'll continue to be the world's strongest force for peace and freedom,
    that we'll continue to be a beacon within our own land of the ideals
    that have made this country great, and that every person will have a
    chance to live out his or her dreams. I believe that we can do that.
        We spent a lot of time here working on things to get our economic
    house in order, cutting the deficit by more than half and opening trade
    to new countries and new products and new services and trying to get
    ahead of the technology curve and trying to generate more jobs from
    small businesses, where so many of the new jobs are being created. But
    nothing--nothing--is as important as preparing the American people and
    our young people for the 21st century world in which they will live. And
    that means they have to not only learn things today but be able to learn
    for a lifetime. And nothing--nothing--will replace that.
        As long as we have a well-educated citizenry, as long as we have
    people who can learn whatever they need to learn whenever they need to
    learn it and who understand that this is related to the work of
    citizenship, this country will do just fine. If you succeed, America
    succeeds. That is the ultimate lesson of today.
        You know, if you ask most citizens, ``Well, what do we really need
    to do in our schools,'' they might say, ``Well, we ought to get back to
    the basics.'' You've heard it a thousand times, I'm sure. And at one
    level it's quite true; that is, if you look at any human endeavor, it's
    very difficult to succeed unless you're quite good in the basic
    requirements of whatever the activity is.
        But what I'd like to say today is that there are at least some new
    basics, as well as the old basics. For the better part of the last 15
    years, the United States has been working hard to get back to doing a
    better job at the old basics. Half of all of our 4-year-olds are now in
    preschool. When the kids get to elementary school, they will find a much
    better title I program back on course, with a more focused, more
    rigorous curriculum that challenges our children to meet high standards.
    The number of young people taking core courses has jumped from just 13
    percent in 1982 to 52 percent in 1984, and math and science scores have
    risen by one full grade.
        So there's been a great emphasis on the basics, but more needs to be
    done. Unfortunately, the reading scores for our young children have
    stayed about flat. That may be because there's a higher and higher
    percentage of our students whose first language is not English, and we
    haven't factored that into account, and we need to do a better job of
    moving them through the bilingual programs into the mainstream. But
    nonetheless, by any standard, we haven't done as well as we should.
        I think every American child should be able to read independently by
    the third grade. I believe every American middle or high schooler should
    be able to spend an afternoon with Mark Twain or Willa Cather or
    Nathaniel Hawthorne. I believe every American looking for a job should
    be able to read and fill out an application. And we all know the kinds
    of things we need to do. Here's just one of them: This summer, Secretary
    Riley's Read-Write-Now Challenge will encourage one million young people
    to keep up their reading straight through summer vacation. That's the
    sort of thing that would enable us to close the book on low reading
    scores for good. And we all need to do more of that until we can close
    that book once and for all.
        We are also committed to educational excellence in other core
    academic courses, like physics and chemistry and biology and American
    history and geography. But we know even that is not enough in this day
    and time. We have to imagine what the world is like today, with its
    problems and its promise, and ask ourselves whether there ought not to
    be some new basics. I would like to mention just two that I think have
    to be incorporated into the fabric of every educational curriculum in
    America, citizenship and computer literacy, new basics that build up and
    strengthen our traditional educational effort, that give our young
    people the tools they need to succeed and to make a contribution to our
    country.
        If you think about basic literacy and citizenship, it may be
    something that we think we can take for granted. But clearly it's not,
    especially since we are becoming once again, just as we were 100 years
    ago, more and more a nation of immigrants. In our largest county today,
    Los Angeles County, there are children from 150 different racial and
    ethnic groups. And

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    all over America, in all school districts, you see a greater and greater
    need for people to understand exactly what it means not only to be a
    learner in school but a good citizen. At this time of tremendous change,
    much of it but not all of it is positive, and we need to do what we can
    to help our children stay true to a course in a world that often seems
    to spin off-course.
        I've done what I could. We've offered two White House conferences on
    character education. We've had grassroots character education programs
    that the Secretary of Education has funded and promoted. We've done what
    we could to clarify the confusion that existed about the role of
    religion and people's religious convictions in the schools. We have
    provided our schools with guidelines that tell them how they can protect
    the religious rights of their students without turning their schools
    into religion-free zones. We have worked with those schools who are
    trying experiments like school uniforms. We have done the things that we
    could do. But in the end, the magic of citizenship is a learned--a
    learned characteristic. And you have to help your students to do that. I
    know you do, or you wouldn't be successful in other ways. But every
    school should, without apology, teach its students to be responsible for
    themselves, to respect other people and be concerned about them, to love
    our country and be willing to do what it takes to contribute to our
    country.
        Schools can help parents teach children right from wrong through
    good rules, teach the value of hard work through homework, teach the
    importance of resolving conflicts peacefully by having zero tolerance
    for all forms of violence. We have to teach these young people to turn
    away from that.
        We have to teach our young people to define themselves in terms of
    what they are and what is good about them, not what is bad about someone
    else. We have to be able to do that. We can teach our young people to
    become voters and good neighbors and good citizens and good advocates
    and good servants. We have to be able to do that. I will say again,
    without that, the learning cannot occur.
        I look around at all these bright-eyed students behind me; right
    before I got up here I tried to look at every one of them and think, you
    know, I feel pretty good about my country's future. It would be hard not
    to feel good about your country's future looking at them. Every one of
    you can think about the work you do in your schools. But there's
    something wrong with an America where we have all these wonderful things
    going on, but violence among children under 18 is still going up.
    There's still too many of these kids out here raising themselves. There
    are too many of these kids that don't have support.
        And I know that too many of you have been asked to do too much in
    the past. And sometimes you are judged by someone else's failure--the
    people at home, the people in the church, the people in the community
    that might have done more--but you are sometimes the only thing that
    stands between these young people and the opportunity to have a good,
    wholesome, constructive life. And we have got to turn around these
    trends of violence and destructive conduct. The number of young people
    coming into our schools is going up again. Soon the schools will be full
    of people, so full that the years will be even larger--the classes will
    be even larger than they were in the peak baby-boom years. By the time
    that happens, we must have turned around this trend toward destructive
    behavior and violence among our young people. And we can only do it by
    teaching them to live in an affirmative way, as good responsible
    citizens.
        We need you on this. This is something that cannot be done unless it
    can be done by our teachers and our schools, with the support of caring
    parents and a community. And we're pulling for you. You have to
    understand that we must not let the largest group of schoolchildren in
    the history of the United States come into our classes without doing
    something about the violence and the other destructive behavior. We can
    build a generation of good citizens, and I'm determined to see us do it.
        The other thing I'd like to talk about very briefly is the issue the
    Vice President discussed, our technology literacy challenge, to bring
    information and technology to every classroom in this country by the
    year 2000. We got off to a good start. Many of you--many of you--are
    part of that. And when we had NetDay in California and hooked up 20
    percent of the classrooms in the State in one day, it started off a
    chain reaction of a lot of things like that happening in other places
    throughout the country. Much has already been done. But there is more
    that has to be done.
        One of the things that we know--I was just talking to the Governor
    of West Virginia, where

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    they have done a lot of work in bringing computers into the schools. He
    said he was very proud of the fact that they spent one-third of their
    money on teacher training--one-third, one full third--because no
    computer, no aid in learning is worth anything without the magic of
    learning between the teacher and the student.
        Today I am pleased to announce a remarkable initiative in our
    education community. Working with our administration, leading
    organizations in education, from the national PTA and the NEA to the AFT
    and the national school boards associations, have joined together to
    make sure America's teachers are as comfortable with computers as they
    are with chalkboards. They call themselves ``21st Century Teachers.''
    And to launch their effort they will do what they do best, teach. This
    fall these groups will mobilize 100,000 teachers to teach 500,000 other
    teachers how to teach using computers, software, and networks.
        When they are done, we will have a half a million more teachers who
    are computer and technology literate and an infinite number of new
    learning opportunities. The teachers will have new and exciting ways to
    teach traditional subjects. They'll be able to exchange lesson plans
    with other teachers, communicate more frequently with parents, help
    students unfamiliar with computers, and keep up with students who
    already are.
        Through this enormous effort, teachers will be doing what they have
    always done, dedicating themselves to a brighter future, joining
    together to say that computer and technology literacy is truly a new
    basic for our time, just as they continue to teach our other fundamental
    basics. They are helping to create opportunity, assuming responsibility,
    working together as a community.
        To every one of these groups and the 100,000 teachers who will be
    involved in this, I say thank you. The rest of America is deeply in your
    debt. This is a very great project.
        Now as we close this formal ceremony, let me say again to each and
    every one of you: I'm proud of you; I'm grateful to you. What you are
    doing is building America's future. Because of the nature of the
    economic and social changes going on in the world today, your work is
    more important to America's success than ever before.
        I ask you to leave here with one idea in mind. I ask you to do what
    you can back in your hometowns, back in your home districts, back in
    your home States to make sure that every single school in America works
    to be a Blue Ribbon school.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 1:54 p.m. on the South Lawn at the White
    House. In his remarks, he referred to Jill Mahler, a student at Mainland
    High School in Daytona Beach, FL.