[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.