    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1996, Book I)]
    [March 27, 1996]
    [Pages 511-518]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    [[Page 511]]

    Remarks to the National Governors' Association Education Summit in
    Palisades, New York
    March 27, 1996

        Thank you very much, Governor Miller, Governor Thompson; Lou
    Gerstner. Thank you for hosting this terribly important event. To all of
    the Governors and distinguished guests, education leaders, and business
    leaders who are here, let me say that I am also delighted to be here
    with the Secretary of Education, Governor Dick Riley. I believe that he
    and Governor Hunt and Governor Branstad and I were actually there when
    the ``Nation At Risk'' report was issued, as well as when the education
    summit was held by President Bush. I want to thank Secretary Riley for
    the work that he has done with the States and with educators all across
    the country. And I know that every one of you has worked with him, but
    I'm glad to have him here, and he's been a wonderful partner for me and
    I think for you.
        This is an extraordinary meeting of America's business leaders and
    America's Governors. I know some have raised some questions about it,
    but let me just say on the front end I think it is a very appropriate
    and a good thing to do, and I applaud those who organized it and those
    who have attended. The Governors, after all, have primary, indeed
    constitutional responsibility for the conditions of our public schools.
    And the business leaders know well, perhaps better than any other single
    group in America, what the consequences of our failing to get the most
    out of our students and achieve real educational excellence will be for
    our Nation.
        So I am very pleased to see you here doing this, and I want to thank
    each and every one of you. I also think you have a better chance than
    perhaps anyone else, even in this season, to keep the question of
    education beyond partisanship and to deal with it as an American
    challenge that all the American people must meet and must meet together.
        All of you know very well that this is a time of a dramatic
    transformation in the United States. I'm not sure if any of us fully
    understands the true implications of the changes through which we are
    all living and the responsibilities that those changes impose upon us.
    It is clear to most people that the dimensions of economic change now
    are the greatest that they have been since we moved from farm to factory
    and from rural areas to cities and towns 100 years ago.
        In his book ``The Road From Here,'' Bill Gates says that the digital
    chip is leading us to the greatest transformation in communications in
    500 years, since Gutenberg printed the first Bible in Europe. If that is
    true, it is obvious beyond anyone's ability to argue that the
    educational enterprise, which has always been central to the development
    of good citizens in America as well as to a strong economy, is now more
    important than ever before.
        That means that we need a candid assessment of what is right and
    what is wrong with our educational system and what we need to do. Your
    focus on standards, your focus on assessment, your focus on technology
    is all to the good. We know that many of our schools do a very good job,
    but some of them don't. We know that many of our teachers are great, but
    some don't measure up. We know many of our communities are seizing the
    opportunities of the present and the future, but too many aren't.
        And most important, we know that--after the emphasis on education
    which goes back at least until 1983 in the whole country and to my
    native region, to the South, to the late seventies when we began to try
    to catch up economically with the rest of the country--we know that
    while the schools and the students of this country are doing better than
    they were in 1984 and better than they were in 1983 when the ``Nation At
    Risk'' was issued and in 1989 when the education summit was held at
    Charlottesville, most of them still are not meeting the standards that
    are necessary and adequate to the challenges of today. So that is really
    what we have to begin with.
        Now America has some interesting challenges that I think are
    somewhat unique to our country in this global environment in which
    education is important, and we might as well just sort of put them out
    there on the front end, not that we can resolve them today.
        The first is that we have a far more diverse group of students in
    terms of income and race and ethnicity and background and, indeed,
    living

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    conditions than almost any other great country in the world.
        Second, we have a system in which both authority and financing is
    more fractured than in other countries is typically the case.
        Third, we know that our schools are burdened by social problems not
    of their making, which make the jobs of principals and teachers more
    difficult.
        And fourth, and I think most important of all, our country still has
    an attitude problem about education that I think we should resolve, even
    prior to the standards and the assessment issue, and that is that too
    many people in the United States think that the primary determinant of
    success in learning is either IQ or family circumstances instead of
    effort. And I don't. And I don't think any of the research supports
    that.
        So one of the things that I hope you will say is, in a positive way,
    that you believe all kids can learn and, in a stronger way, that you
    believe that effort is more important than IQ or income, given the right
    kind of educational opportunities, the right kind of expectations. It's
    often been said that Americans from time to time suffer from a
    revolution of rising expectations. This is one area where we need a
    revolution of rising expectations. We ought to all simply and
    forthrightly say that we believe that school is children's work and
    play, that it can be great joy, but that effort matters.
        I see one of our business leaders here, this former State senator
    from Arkansas, Senator Joe Ford, whose father was the head of our
    educational program in Arkansas for a long time. We had a lot of people
    in one-room schoolhouses 40 and 50 and 60 years ago, reading simple
    readers, who believed that effort was more important than IQ or income;
    they didn't know what IQ was. And we have got to change that. And
    Governors, every Governor and every business leader in this country can
    make a difference.
        I'm no Einstein, and not everybody can do everything, but if you
    stack this up from one to the other, all the Americans together in order
    by IQ, you couldn't stick a straw between one person and the next. And
    you know it as well as I do. Most people can learn everything they need
    to know to be good citizens and successful participants in the American
    economy and in the global economy. And I believe that unless you can
    convince your constituents that that is the truth, that all of your
    efforts to raise standards and all of your efforts to have
    accountability through tests and other assessments will not be as
    successful as they ought to be. And I think frankly, a lot of people,
    even in education, need to be reminded of that from time to time.
        Now let's get back to the good news. Thirty or 40 years ago, maybe
    even 20 years ago, no one could ever have conceived of a meeting like
    this taking place. Governors played little role in education until just
    a couple of decades ago, and business didn't regard it as their
    responsibility. In the late seventies and the early eighties, this whole
    wave began to sweep America. And one important, positive thing that
    ought never to be overlooked is that the business leadership of America
    and the Governors of this country have been literally obsessed with
    education for a long time now. And that's a very good thing, because one
    of the problems with America is that we tend to be in the grip of serial
    enthusiasms. It's the hula hoop today and something else tomorrow. Boy,
    that dates me, doesn't it? [Laughter]
        In this country the Governors have displayed a remarkable
    consistency of commitment to education, and at least since 1983, the
    business community has displayed that commitment. And I think it's fair
    to say that all of us have learned some things as we have gone along,
    which is what has brought you to this point, that there is a--you
    understand now, and I've heard Lou Gerstner talk about it in his, almost
    his mantra about standards--that we understand that the next big step
    has to be to have some meaningful and appropriately high standards and
    then hold people accountable for them.
        I think it's worth noting that the 1983 ``Nation At Risk'' report
    did do some good things. Almost every State in the country went back and
    revised its curriculum requirement. Many revised their class size
    requirements. Many did other things to upgrade teacher training or to
    increase college scholarships or to do a lot of other things.
        In 1989 I was privileged to be in Charlottesville working with
    Governor Branstad and with Governor Campbell, primarily, as we were
    trying to get all the Governors together to develop the statement at the
    education summit with President Bush. And that was the first time there
    had ever been a bipartisan national consensus on educational goals.
        The realization was in 1989 was that 6 years after a ``Nation At
    Risk,'' all these extra require-

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    ments were being put into education, but nobody had focused on what the
    end game was. What did we want America to look like? It's worth saying
    that we wanted every child to show up for school ready to learn, that we
    wanted to be proficient in certain core courses and were willing to
    assess our students to see if we were, that we wanted to prepare our
    people for the world of work, that we wanted to be extra good in math
    and science and to overcome our past deficiencies. All the things that
    were in those educational goals were worth saying.
        Another thing that the Charlottesville summit did that I think is
    really worth emphasizing is that it defined for the first time, from the
    Governors up, what the Federal role in education ought to be and what it
    should not be. I went back this morning, just on the way up, and I read
    the Charlottesville statement about what the Governors then unanimously
    voted that the Federal role should be and what it should not be.
        When I became President and I asked Dick Riley to become Secretary
    of Education, I said that our legislative agenda ought to be consistent,
    completely consistent, with what the Governors had said at
    Charlottesville. So, for example, the Governors said at Charlottesville,
    the Federal Government has a bigger responsibility to help people show
    up for school prepared to learn, so we emphasized things like more funds
    for Head Start and more investment in trying to improve the immunization
    rates of kids and other health indicators; and more responsibility for
    access to higher education, so we tried to reform the student loan
    program and invest more money in Pell grants and national service and
    things like that; and then, more responsibility to give greater
    flexibility to the States in K through 12 and to try to promote reform
    without defining how any of this should be done. And so that's what
    Goals 2000 was about; we tried to have a system in which States and
    mostly local school districts could pursue world-class standards based
    on their own plans for grassroots reform.
        And we overhauled the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, and we
    redid title I to do one thing that I think is very important: We took
    out of what was then in the law for chapter 1, which was lower
    educational expectations for poor children. It was an outrage, and we
    took it out of the law. I don't believe that poor children should be
    expected to perform at lower levels than other children.
        And Dick Riley, since he has been Secretary of Education, has cut
    Federal regulations over States and local school districts by more than
    50 percent. It seems to me that that is consistent with exactly what the
    Governors said at Charlottesville they wanted done.
        Now, the effort to have national standards, I think it's fair to
    say, has been less than successful. The history standards and the
    English standards effort did not succeed for reasons that have been well
    analyzed, although I'm not sure the debate was entirely worthless; I
    think the debate itself did some good. But there are recommended
    standards that have been widely embraced coming out of the math
    teachers, that most people think are quite good. And the preliminary
    indications for science are encouraging.
        And I want to say again, it would be wrong to say that there's been
    no progress since 1983. The number of young people taking core courses
    has jumped from 13 percent in '82 to 52 percent in '94. The national
    math and science scores are up a grade since 1983. Half of all the 4-
    year-olds now attend preschool. Eighty-six percent of all our young
    people are completing high school; we're almost up to the 90 percent
    that was in the national education goals. That is progress.
        But what we have learned since Charlottesville and what you are here
    to hammer home to America is that the overall levels of learning are not
    enough and that there are still significant barriers in various schools
    to meeting higher standards.
        I accept your premise: We can only do better with tougher standards
    and better assessment, and you should set the standards. I believe that
    is absolutely right, and that will be the lasting legacy of this
    conference. I also believe, along with Mr. Gerstner and the others who
    are here, that it's very important not only for businesses to speak out
    for reform but for business leaders to be knowledgeable enough to know
    what reform to speak out for and what to emphasize and how to hammer
    home the case for higher standards, as well as how to help local school
    districts change some of the things that they are now doing so that they
    have a reasonable chance at meeting these standards.
        Let me just go through now what I think we should do in challenging
    the country on standards for students, as well as for teachers

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    and schools. I suppose that I have spent more time in classrooms than
    any previous President, partly because I was a Governor for 12 years and
    partly because I still do it with some frequency. I believe the most
    important thing you can do is to have high expectations for students--to
    make them believe they can learn; to tell them they're going to have to
    learn really difficult, challenging things; to assess whether they're
    learning or not; and to hold them accountable, as well as to reward
    them. Most children are very eager to learn. Those that aren't have
    probably been convinced they can't. We can do better with that. I
    believe that once you have high standards and high expectations, there
    is an unlimited number of things that can be done.
        But I also believe that there have to be consequences. I watched
    your panel last night, and I thought it was--the moment of levity on the
    panel was when Al Shanker was asked, ``When I was teaching school and I
    would give students homework, they said, `Does it count?''' That's the
    thing I remember about the panel last night. All of you remember, too.
    You laughed, right? [Laughter] ``Does it count?'' And the truth is that
    in the world we're living in today, ``does it count'' has to mean
    something, particularly in places where there haven't been any standards
    for a long time.
        So if the States are going to go back and raise standards so that
    you're not only trying to increase the enrollment in core courses,
    you're trying to make the core courses themselves mean more--and I heard
    Governor Hunt last night say he'd be willing to settle for reading and
    writing and math and science, I think were the ones you said--if you're
    going to go back and define what's in those core courses and you're
    going to lift it up, you have to be willing, then, to hold the students
    accountable for whether they have achieved that or not. And again,
    another thing that Mr. Shanker said that I've always believed, we have
    always downgraded teaching to the test, but if you're going to know
    whether people learn what you expect them to know, then you have to test
    them on what you expect them to know.
        So I believe that if you want the standards movement to work, first
    you have to do the hard work in deciding what it is you expect children
    to learn. But then you have to have an assessment system, however you
    design it, in your own best judgment at the State level, that says, no
    more social promotions, no more free passes. If you want people to
    learn, learning has to mean something. That's what I believe. I don't
    believe you can succeed unless you are prepared to have an assessment
    system with consequences.
        In Arkansas in 1983 when we redid the educational standards, we had
    a very controversial requirement that young people pass the 8th grade
    tests to go on to high school. And not everybody passed it. And we let
    people take it more than once. I think it's fine to do that.
        But even today, after 13 years, I think there are only five States
    in the country today which require promotion for either grade to grade
    or school to school for its young people--to require tests for that. I
    believe that if you have meaningful standards that you have confidence
    in, that you believe if they're met your children will know what they
    need to know, you shouldn't be afraid to find out if they're learning
    it, and you shouldn't be deterred by people saying this is cruel, this
    is unfair, or whatever they say.
        The worst thing you can do is send people all the way through school
    with a diploma they can't read. And you're not being unfair to people if
    you give them more than one chance and if at the same time you improve
    the teaching and the operation of the schools in which they are. If you
    believe these kids can learn, you have to give them a chance to
    demonstrate it. This is only a cruel, short-sighted thing to do if you
    are convinced that there are limitations on what the American children
    can do. And I just don't believe that.
        So that, I think, is the most important thing. I believe every
    State, if you're going to have meaningful standards, must require a test
    for children to move, let's say, from elementary to middle school or
    from middle school to high school or to have a full-meaning high school
    diploma. And I don't think they should measure just minimum competency.
    You should measure what you expect these standards to measure.
        You know, when we instituted any kind of test at home, I was always
    criticized by the fact that the test wasn't hard enough. But I think it
    takes time to transform a system, and you may decide it takes time to
    transform a system. But you will never know whether your standards are
    being met unless you have some sort of measurement and have some sort of
    accountability. And while I believe they should be set by the States and
    the testing mechanism

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    should be approved by the States, we shouldn't kid ourselves. Being
    promoted ought to mean more or less the same thing in Pasadena,
    California, that it does in Palisades, New York. In a global society, it
    ought to mean more or less the same thing.
        I was always offended by the suggestion that the kids who grew up in
    the Mississippi Delta in Arkansas, which is the poorest place in
    America, shouldn't have access to the same learning opportunities that
    other people should and couldn't learn. I don't believe that.
        So I think the idea--I heard the way Governor Engler characterized
    it last night, I thought, was pretty good. You want a non-Federal
    national mechanism to sort of share this information so that you'll at
    least know how you're doing compared to one another. That's a good
    start. That's a good way to begin this. I also believe that we shouldn't
    ignore the progress that's been made by the goals panel since Governor
    Romer was first leader of that, going through Governor Engler, and by
    the National Assessment on Educational Progress. I know a lot of you
    talked about that last night. They've done a lot of good things, and we
    can learn a lot from them. We don't have to reinvent the wheel here.
        I also would like to go back and emphasize something I heard
    Governor Hunt say last night. I think we should begin with a concrete
    standard for reading and writing because the most troubling thing to me
    is that we've been through a decade in which math and science scores
    have risen and reading scores have stayed flat. Intel recently had to
    turn away hundreds of applicants because they lacked basic reading and
    writing skills.
        Now, that will present you with an immediate problem because if you
    want to measure reading and writing, you will not be able just to have a
    multiple choice test which can be graded by a machine. You'll have to
    recognize that teachers do real work with kids when they teach them how
    to write, and you have to give them the time and support to do that. And
    then there has to be some way of evaluating that. I know that's harder
    and more expensive, but it really matters whether a child can read and
    write.
        And for all the excitement about the computers in the schools--and I
    am a big proponent of it--I would note that when we started with a
    computer program in our school, and I believe when Governor Caperton
    started in West Virginia, he started in the early grades for the precise
    purpose that technology should be used first to give children the proper
    grounding in basic skills. So I think that's quite important.
        Secretary Riley says that every child should be able to read
    independently by the end of the third grade. And parenthetically, that
    if that were the standard, I think we would be more successful in
    getting parents to read to their children every night, which would
    revolutionize the whole system of education anyway.
        The second thing I think we have to do is to face the fact that if
    we want to have these standards for children, standards and tests, we
    have to have a system that rewards and inspires and demands higher
    standards of teachers. They, after all, do this work. The rest of us
    talk about it, and they do it.
        So that means that, first of all, you've got to get the most
    talented people in there. There's been a lot of talk about this for a
    decade now, but most States and school districts still need work on
    their certification rules. We should not bar qualified, even brilliant
    young people from becoming teachers. The Teach For America group in my
    home State did a wonderful job, and a lot of those young kids wind up
    staying and teaching, even though they can make 2 and 3 times as much
    money doing something else. Every State should, in my view, review that.
        I also believe any time you're trying to hold teachers to higher
    standards, they should be rewarded when they perform. I know that in
    South Carolina and Kentucky, if schools markedly improve their
    performance, they get bonuses and the teachers get the benefit. That's
    not a bad thing; that's a good thing, and we should have more of that.
        I want to thank Governor Hunt for the work he's done on the National
    Board for Professional Teaching Standards. We had the first group of
    teachers who are board certified in the White House not very long ago.
    Every State should have a system, in my opinion, for encouraging these
    teachers to become board certified; the Federal Government doesn't have
    anything to do with that. Encourage these teachers to become board
    certified because they have to demonstrate not only knowledge but
    teaching skills. And when they achieve that level, they should be
    rewarded. There should be extra rewards when they do that.
        We also need a system that doesn't look the other way if a teacher
    is burned out or not

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    performing up to standard. There ought to be a fair process for removing
    teachers who aren't competent, but the process also has to be much
    faster and far less costly than it is. I read the other day that in New
    York it can cost as much as $200,000 to dismiss a teacher who is
    incompetent. In Glen Ellyn, Illinois, a school district spent $70,000 to
    dismiss a high school math teacher who couldn't do basic algebra and let
    the students sleep in class. That is wrong. We should do more to reward
    good teachers; we should have a system that is fair to teachers but
    moves much more expeditiously and much more cheaply in holding teachers
    accountable.
        So States and school systems and teachers unions need to be working
    together to make it tougher to get licensed and recertified, easier and
    less costly to get teachers who can't teach out of the classrooms, and
    clearly set rewards for teachers who are performing, especially if they
    become board certified or in some State-defined way prove themselves
    excellent.
        The third thing I think we have to do is to hold schools accountable
    for results. We have known now for a long time--we have no excuses for
    not doing--we have known for a long time that the most important player
    in this drama besides the teachers and the students are the school
    principals, the building principals. And yet, still, not every State has
    a system for holding the school districts accountable for having good
    principals in all these schools and then giving the principals the
    authority they need to do the job, getting out of their way, and holding
    them accountable both on the up side and the down side. To me, that is
    still the most important thing. Every school I go into, I can stay there
    about 30 minutes and tell you pretty much what the principal has done to
    establish a school culture, an atmosphere of learning, a system of
    accountability, a spirit of adventure. You can just feel it, and it's
    still the most important thing.
        Secondly, the business community can do a lot of work with the
    Governors to help these school districts reinvent their budgets, I
    think. There are still too many school districts spending way too much
    money on administration and too little money on education and
    instruction. And there needs to be some real effort put into that, that
    goes beyond rhetoric. I mean, I was given these statistics, which I
    assume are true because I had it vetted four different times--I hate to
    use numbers that I haven't--if it is true that New York City spends
    $8,000 a student on education, but only $44 goes to books and other
    classroom materials, that's a disgrace. That's wrong. And that's true in
    a lot of other school districts.
        We cannot ask the American people to spend more on education until
    we do a better job with the money we've got now. That's an area where I
    think the business community can make a major, major contribution. A lot
    of you have had to restructure your own operations; a lot of you have
    had to achieve far higher levels of productivity. If we can reduce the
    Federal Government by 200,000 people without undermining our essential
    mission, we can do a much better job in the school districts of the
    country.
        Let me also say I think that we ought to encourage every State to do
    what most States are now doing, which is to provide more options for
    parents, you know, in terms of the public school choice legislation and
    the charter schools--a lot of you have done a very good job with the
    charter schools. But I'm excited about the idea that educators and
    parents get to actually start schools--create and manage them and stay
    open only if they do a good job--within the public school system. Every
    charter school I visited was an exciting place. Today, 21 of you allow
    charter schools--there are over 250 schools which are open; 100 more are
    going to open next year--freed up from regulation and top-down
    bureaucracy, focusing on meeting higher standards. The schools have to
    be able to meet these standards if you impose them.
        Secretary Riley has helped 11 States to start new schools, and in
    the balanced budget plan I submitted to Congress last week, there is $40
    million in seed money to help start 3,000 more charter schools over the
    next 5 years, which would be a tenfold increase. That may become the
    order of the day. So I believe we need standards and accountability for
    students, for teachers, and for schools.
        Let me just mention two other things briefly. I don't believe you
    can possibly minimize--and a lot of the Governors I know have been in
    these schools--you cannot minimize how irrelevant this discussion would
    seem to a teacher who doesn't feel safe walking the halls of his or her
    school or how utterly hopeless it seems to students who have to look
    over their shoulders when they're walking to and from school. So I
    believe that we have to work together to

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    continue to make our schools safe and our students held to a reasonable
    standard of conduct, as well.
        You know, we had a teacher in Washington last week who was mugged in
    a hallway by a gang of intruders, not students, a gang of intruders who
    were doing drugs and didn't even belong on the school grounds. We have
    got to keep working on that. All the Federal Government can do is give
    resources and pass laws. That's another thing the business community can
    help with, district after district. This entire discussion we have had
    is completely academic unless there is a safe and a disciplined and a
    drug-free environment in these schools.
        We passed the safe and drug-free schools act, the Gun-Free Schools
    Act. We supported random drug testing in schools. We have supported the
    character education movement. We've almost ended lawsuits over religious
    issues by the guidelines that Secretary Riley and the Attorney General
    issued, showing that our schools don't have to be religion-free zones.
    We have worked very hard to help our schools do their job here.
        The next thing I hope we can do, all of us, in this regard is to
    work to help our schools stay open longer. Our budget contains $14
    million for helping people set up these community schools to stay open
    longer hours. But remember that 3 in the afternoon to 6 in the evening
    are the peak hours for juvenile crime, and all that comes back into the
    schools. So I think that's another thing we really need to look at. A
    lot of these schools do not have the resources today to stay open longer
    hours, but they would if they could.
        And one of the primary targets I would have if I were a local leader
    trying to redo my district school budget is to reduce the amount spent
    on administration so that I could invest more money in keeping it open
    longer hours, especially for the latch-key kids and the other kids that
    are in trouble that don't have any other place to go. So that's
    something that I think is very important.
        Finally, let me just echo what Governor Miller said about the
    technology. We did have a barnraising in California, and we hooked up
    actually more than 20 percent of the classrooms to the Internet on a
    single day. But we need every classroom and every library in every
    school in America hooked up to the Internet as quickly as possible. We
    set a goal as the year 2000; we could actually get there more quickly. I
    propose that in the budget, a $2 billion fund to help the communities
    who don't have the money to meet the challenge, but every community,
    every State in America, at least, has a high-tech community that could
    help get this done. The Congress passed a very fine Telecommunications
    Act that I signed not very long ago which gives preferential treatment
    to people in isolated rural areas or inner-city areas for access to
    schools and hospitals. So the infrastructure, the framework is there.
        Anything you can do to help do that, I think, is good if the
    educators use the technology in the proper way. And I'll just close with
    this example. I was in the Union City School District in New Jersey not
    very long ago. That school district was about to be closed under the
    State of New Jersey's school bankruptcy law, which I think, by the way,
    is very good, holding school districts accountable, and they can
    actually lose their ability to operate as an independent district in New
    Jersey and the State takes them over if they keep failing.
        There are a lot of first-generation immigrant children in that
    school. It was basically a poor school. Bell Atlantic went in and worked
    with others. They put computers in all the classrooms. They also put
    computer outlets in the homes of a lot of these parents. And you had--I
    talked to a man who came here from El Salvador 10 years ago who is now
    E-mailing his child's principal and teacher to figure out how the kid's
    doing.
        But the bottom line is the dropout rate is now below the State
    average, and the test scores are above the State average in an immigrant
    district of poor children, partly because of the technology and partly
    because the business community said, ``Hey, you kids are important,''
    and partly because the place has a good principal and good teachers.
        But I do think that the business community--if you look at the
    technology as an instrument to achieve your higher standards and to
    infuse high expectations into the community and to give the kids the
    confidence they need that they can learn, then this technology issue is
    a very important one.
        Well, that's what I hope we'll do. I think we ought to have the
    standards. You should set them. We'll support you however you want. But
    they won't work unless you're going to really see whether the standards
    are being met and unless there are consequences to those who

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    meet and to those who do not. I think you have to reward the good
    teachers and get more good people in teaching, and that we have to
    facilitate the removal of those who aren't performing.
        I think the schools need more authority and should be held more
    accountable. We've got to redo these central school budgets until we
    have squeezed down the overhead costs and put it back into education.
    And unless we have an environment in which there is safety and
    discipline, we won't succeed. And if we do have an environment in which
    the business community brings in more technology, we will succeed more
    quickly.
        I believe that this meeting will prove historic. And again, let me
    say, I thank the Governors and the business leaders who brought it
    about. In 1983 we said, ``We've got a problem in our schools. We need to
    take tougher courses. We need to have other reforms.'' In 1989 we said,
    ``We need to know where we're going. We need goals.'' Here in 1996,
    you're saying you can have all of the goals in the world, but unless
    somebody really has meaningful standards and a system of measuring
    whether you meet those standards, you won't achieve your goals. That is
    the enduring gift you have given to America's schoolchildren and to
    America's future.
        The Governors have to lead the way. The business community has to
    stay involved. Don't let anybody deter you and say you shouldn't be
    doing it. You can go back home and reach out to all the other people in
    the community because, in the end, what the teachers and the principals
    and more importantly even what the parents and the children do is what
    really counts. But we can get there together. We have to start now with
    what you're trying to do. We have to have high standards and high
    accountability. If you can achieve that, you have given a great gift to
    the future of this country.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 12:25 p.m. in the Watson Room at the IBM
    Conference Center. In his remarks, he referred to Gov. Bob Miller of
    Nevada, NGA vice chairman; Gov. Tommy G. Thompson of Wisconsin, NGA
    chairman; Louis Gerstner, chief executive officer, IBM; Gov. James B.
    Hunt, Jr., of North Carolina; Gov. Terry E. Branstad of Iowa; Carroll W.
    Campbell, former South Carolina Governor; Albert Shanker, president,
    American Federation of Teachers; Gov. John Engler of Michigan; Gov. Roy
    Romer of Colorado; and Gov. Gaston Caperton of West Virginia.