[Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book I)]
[January 22, 1997]
[Pages 56-62]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]



Remarks to the First in the World Consortium in Northbrook
January 22, 1997

    Thank you very much. First of all, let me thank Mary Hamblet for her 
introduction and for that fine statement about the thrill of teaching 
and the changes of teaching. Would all the teachers in the audience 
please stand? Thank you very much. [Applause] I thank you all very, very 
much.
    Thank you, Dr. Kimmelman, for your leadership in the First in the 
World Consortium. I thank all the other superintendents and 
administrators who are here. Thank you, Congressman Porter, for your 
leadership for education and, I might add, for your leadership for safe 
streets in the United States, in the Congress. I appreciate that very 
much.
    Thank you, Secretary Riley. Everything Dr. Kimmelman said about you 
was true, even if you did have to write his speech for him. [Laughter] I 
like it that the Secretary of Education is prouder of being a 
grandfather than anything else in his life. I think that's a good signal 
for America's future.
    We're glad to be joined today also by Mayor Daley and Congressman 
Blagojevich. Welcome. Cook County Assessor Tom Hines; your State 
senator, Cathy Parker. Welcome. Thank you for being here. Village 
presidents Nancy Firfer and Mark Damisch, thank you also for coming. I 
thank the Glenbrook Concert Orchestra for the music. Thank you all.
    I am honored to be here with all of you, humbled and encouraged by 
your passionate commitment to education. I came today to talk about your 
remarkable success, hoping it will reverberate all across America and 
people will want to know what has been done here and how, and to talk 
about why and how this must be done all across America.
    As we come to the end of this century and set about the business of 
preparing America for the next century, as I said in my Inaugural 
Address, it is especially important that we be able to say we have kept 
the American dream of opportunity alive for all of our children. I think

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all of us know in our heart of hearts that that will be a slogan and a 
dream only, unless we give to all of our children and expect from all of 
our children world-class educational opportunities and world-class 
learning.
    What I want to do in the next 2 weeks leading up to my State of the 
Union Address to the Congress and to the American people, is to lay out 
some concrete things we can do in Washington to help to achieve those 
objectives. We do live in a time of enormous possibility. I was just--
you know, it's--the last couple of days is the first free time I've had 
in a while--[laughter]--and I was trying to create some more space in 
our living quarters in the White House, and I was moving some reference 
books around that our daughter sometimes uses and her father and mother 
sometime use. But I was--there was one on the Age of Reason and one on 
the Age of Enlightenment. And I really do think there's a good chance 
that the 21st century will be called something like the Age of 
Possibility or the Age of Promise, when people write about it 100 years 
from now, because it really will be possible for more people across the 
world to live out their dreams and live up to their God-given abilities 
than ever before in human history. It will be possible. But ``possible'' 
or an ``Age of Promise,'' those are operative words. There are no 
guarantees here.
    And in order to realize that promise, we've got to make sure our 
people are prepared for it. There is a veritable revolution in the way 
we work and live because of science and technology. The world which was 
once divided by the cold war is now united by not only free markets and 
open trade but by common security challenges that threaten all open 
societies. Young people are continually entering jobs that weren't 
invented a couple of years ago. The young people in this great hall 
today will be doing jobs, many of them that have not been imagined by 
any of us here. And it's very important to understand that.
    I spent a day at the National Institute of Health not very long ago 
going through in some detail the status of the human genome project. And 
it is clear to me that before very long, when young parents like 
Secretary Riley's son and daughter-in-law come home with a baby from the 
hospital, there really will be a map of the baby's genetic code 
available to the parents. Some of it, of course, will occasionally be 
troubling and profoundly worrying. But by and large what it will do is 
to give us a way of maximizing the health and potential of all people 
from medical care to diet to exercise to understanding how they can best 
live their lives from the beginning. No one would ever have imagined 
this.
    Just in the last couple of years, we've seen the first successful 
treatment for stroke. It now seems possible that we might actually be 
able to repair some of the damage done by strokes. We have uncovered two 
genes that seem to be at the basis of either the cause of, or dramatic 
propensity to, breast cancer. We have seen nerve transplants to the 
spines of laboratory animals which has given movement to the lower limbs 
of laboratory animals that had their spines severed.
    The Internet was literally, as I said in the Inaugural Address, the 
mystical province of physicists 10 years ago. Today, it's an 
encyclopedia that 8- and 9-year-old kids teach their parents how to use. 
[Laughter]
    When I became President, 3 million Americans--thanks in large 
measure to technology--were working in their homes full time. At the end 
of my first term, 12 million Americans were. At the end of my second 
term, it is estimated that 30 million Americans will be. Not all good--
it will also pose some new challenges: How can we continue to maintain 
our community? How can people work together in teams productively if 
they either need to or have to do some of their work at home?
    But change is out there. At a time like this, it is critical that we 
not only know certain things but that we be able to learn for a 
lifetime. And we know that requires an enormous grounding, not only in 
the subjects we master but in the way we learn, which is why I was so 
glad in the introduction to hear Mary talk about different ways of 
teaching. Because the way teachers are teaching now engage the children 
in a learning process that they can then apply to any other subject that 
they have to face throughout their lives, so that they can become 
lifetime learners.
    Now, this is really not all that new. Education has been at the 
heart of America's progress for over 200 years. First of all, our 
Founding Fathers were highly literate people. Where would we be if 
Thomas Jefferson had known nothing about the great philosophers who went 
before him?

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    Right after the Civil War, as the country was spreading westward and 
occupying the whole continent, the Congress provided for the 
establishment of land-grant institutions, like the great State 
universities in Illinois, in my home State, all across the country. 
Abraham Lincoln really oversaw it during the Civil War, the idea, but 
the institutions themselves were actually created after the Civil War. 
It dramatically changed America, the idea that we could actually give 
people a college degree who lived in a place as far west as Illinois, 
which was on the edge of the frontier when Mr. Lincoln was elected 
President.
    Then, at the beginning of this century, we finally made public 
schools like this available to all of our children. People moved from 
farm to factory, from the country to the city, and it became essential 
that everyone at least have some basic education. After World War II, 
out of a sense of national obligation, we gave all of the veterans a 
chance to go to college, and it was one of the central elements in 
exploding the great middle class and creating the kind of middle class 
communities we have here in this consortium. It was a phenomenal thing.
    Now, the Government did not do that for anyone. All it said was, you 
served your country; here's a college degree if you can get it--if you 
can get it. And that's the beauty of education; you can't really give it 
to anyone. You can put it out there, and you can help people, but the 
students themselves have to seize it.
    Now, this has been an obsession of mine for a long time. I grew up 
in a State--when I was born in my home State, our per capita income was 
only a little over half the national average right after World War II. 
And I know that everything good that's happened there in an economic way 
has been in no small measure the result of our elevating the levels of 
education. In a much more personal sense, I am absolutely certain that I 
would not be standing here as President today if it had not been for my 
teachers. It is clear, and I'm certain.
    When I became Governor almost 20 years ago now, we began to do 
things to try to help advance the cause of education. My daughter just 
had one of her best friends up here to the Inauguration who is a student 
at a school of mathematics and science that I established as one of my 
last acts as Governor. Dr. Kimmelman mentioned the National Education 
Goals, which were promulgated by the Governors and President Bush in 
1989. I had the honor of being the Democratic Governor whose job it was 
to draft the goals.
    So I know a lot about those goals. And I thought they were very good 
then; I think they're better now, because the wealth of our country now 
no longer primarily depends upon our oil, our gold, our land, or our 
factories. It is now and will increasingly be measured in the minds and 
creativity of our people and our achievements in science and technology 
and also in the humanities, because we have to learn how to manage all 
this new power we're giving to ourselves.
    We have to, in short, commit ourselves for the first time now to 
have the best education in the world, not just for the few but for the 
many. We have the best higher education system in the world; there's no 
question about it. But we do not have the best system of education in 
the world from start to finish for all of our children, and we cannot be 
satisfied until that is exactly what we have in the United States of 
America. Now, the Congressman said this; the Secretary said this; Dr. 
Kimmelman said this. In America, we have a unique heritage. Our 
educational system is a local system governed by local school boards and 
the people they appoint; governed by laws enacted at the State level, 
not the national level. And the Federal Government's role in education 
basically is a fairly recent vintage. It goes back about 30 years or so.
    But essentially what the Federal Government has tried to do over 
time is to equalize opportunity in education by opening the doors of 
college to more people, by recognizing that some districts don't have 
the resources and some States don't have the resources to meet the needs 
of people, by dealing with the problems of populations who have needs 
that may be more expensive. And I think one of the great advances in 
education in my lifetime has been the provision of educational services 
through the school systems to students with disabilities, enabling them 
to achieve enormous things.
    And then, increasingly, over the last 10 to 12 years, the Education 
Department has tried to do more in research and in spurring reform. And 
since I have been in this office, we have moved in all those areas. 
We've dramatically increased the number of people in Head Start. We've 
improved and expanded college scholarships, college loans, and work-
study, adding

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200,000 more places there at the end of the last Congress--thank you, 
Congressman Porter--and the biggest increase in Pell grants in 20 years. 
We've done that. We've helped 70,000 young people work their way through 
college by serving their community in the AmeriCorps program.
    And we did pass two things that I thought were very important for 
grassroots reform. One was the so-called school to work program, which 
helps deal with young people who aren't going to 4-year colleges but do 
need further education. We know now that unless you have at least 2 
years of education after high school, young people this day and age are 
almost certain to be put in jobs where their incomes go down, not up.
    The other was the Goals 2000 program, which had a simple idea. We 
should have a system by which school districts and States can establish 
very high national standards but have more flexibility school by school, 
district by district, to decide how to meet those standards. That's what 
Goals 2000 was about. So it just simply says, we at the national level 
will give the States some money and then the States can give it to 
school districts. If they will figure out--if they will, A, set high 
standards for themselves and then, B, figure out how they want to meet 
those standards and be held accountable for them.
    And that's what this First in the World Consortium did. There is no 
better model for what we were trying to do in the entire United States 
of America than what you have done here. And you should be very proud of 
yourselves.
    Now, as we look to the next 4 years, there are some things that I'd 
like to do in that first category, that basket of things I mentioned. I 
do think there are more things we need to do in the area of equal 
opportunity and helping deal with resource problems.
    The most important thing we can do is to open the doors of college 
to all and to make sure that the first 2 years of college become as 
universal by the year 2000 as a high school diploma is today, and I 
think--that's clear that we know how to do that. We have proposed a 
$1,500 tax credit for people for the first 2 years of college, which is 
the cost of a typical community college tuition in America; a $10,000 a 
year tax deduction for the cost of any college tuition--I can see you 
adding it up now--[laughter]--and making it easier for more people to 
take out IRA's and then withdraw from them, tax-free, if the money is 
used to pay for a college education. I think all of those things will 
help.
    We've proposed to collapse all these Federal programs, about 70 of 
them that pay for various kinds of job training, and get rid of all of 
them, put the money in a fund, and send every unemployed or 
underemployed person who would be eligible for any of them a simple 
voucher, a skills grant that they could then take to the nearest 
community college or other educational institution to decide on their 
own what kind of training they need, which I think is a very important 
idea.
    We have funds in there to complete our work of connecting all of our 
schools to the information superhighway by the year 2000, which will 
make it possible for the first time in history for students in the 
poorest or in the most remote school districts to have access to the 
same information other children have in the same way at the same time. 
It can literally revolutionize educational opportunity in a way that I 
believe is very important.
    And finally, it's not a problem here, but I've spent a lot of time 
in our schools, and it's very hard to lift children up in schools that 
are falling down. The educational infrastructure of the country has 
deteriorated dramatically, number one. Number two, we have for the first 
time a group of young people coming in that are going to be bigger than 
the baby boom cohort. We have now the largest number of young people in 
our schools in history. I'm glad for that; it takes a big burden off us 
baby boomers that--[laughter]--the kids are taking over again. It also 
means great things for how we're going to pay for all of our retirement 
several years down the road. [Laughter] But in the near term, I have 
championed a proposal that has been spearheaded by Senator Carol 
Moseley-Braun that will spark a 20 percent increase in school 
construction and renovation that I think is very important, by having 
the Federal Government use limited monies to leverage down the interest 
rates when school districts make an extra effort to do things that have 
to be done in their schools. That is also important.
    And finally, for the districts that need it, I also have been a 
great champion of the charter school program, and that is all in our 
budget. The mayor and I are going down to Chicago in a few moments to 
talk to the school board about that.

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    Now, all of these things will help, but how are we going to get the 
standards? There are two things that we're going to do in the next 4 
years, I hope, that I believe will make all of the difference. Number 
one is we are going to hire 30,000 reading specialists to mobilize a 
million volunteers to teach every 8-year-old in the country to read 
independently by the third grade. Now, we can talk all about the 
standards in the world, but if the children literally cannot read--an 
astonishing percentage of our young people are not proficient in reading 
when they have to learn these things--then we can't achieve very much 
later on.
    It is true that our student population is the most diverse in 
history in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, national origin. But that 
can be a great asset for the United States. There is no other large 
democracy as diverse as ours. And in a global society, in a global 
economy, that's a huge, huge asset. But we have to have the language of 
common parlance in order to enable us all to function together. And we 
simply have to provide the resources and the people, and we're going to 
need a lot of volunteers to do this, but it will literally revolutionize 
education in America if we have universal literacy by the third grade. 
And that is the goal of this, and I hope all of you will support that.
    But the most important thing we can do is something that the Federal 
Government should not do directly, but something I'm convinced will not 
happen unless we get out here and beat the drum for it and work for it, 
and that is to have recognized high standards for math and science and 
other basic subjects that are national in scope, measured by national 
and international standards, adopted locally, implemented locally, but 
nationally recognized and nationally tested throughout the United 
States. Until we do that, we will never know whether we have achieved 
our goal of international excellence in education for every student in 
the United States. And I ask your support for that.
    This has never happened. People have talked about this. When we 
wrote the national education goals, we anticipated that we would have to 
develop a set of national standards, not Federal Government standards, 
national standards. The councils of mathematics teachers and science 
teachers have done a lot of work on this. A lot of work has been done on 
this.
    But nobody has yet been willing to say, or at least we haven't had 
enough people willing to say, whether they were Governors or State 
superintendents of education or local school boards, ``We're all going 
to accept these, and we want to have some tests we can give to our 
students which will measure not how smart they are, not what they might 
have happened to learn but whether they know the things that we say are 
essential for every student to know in math and in science in order to 
succeed and win in the world they're going to live in.'' That is what we 
must do as a nation, and we have delayed too long. We shouldn't delay 
anymore. By the time we start the new century, we ought to have these 
standards adopted, embraced, and evaluated in every school district in 
the United States, and I want you to lead the way, just as you are here.
    I have heard all the arguments in the world against this. But no one 
has yet made a compelling case to me for how calculus is different in 
Chicago from Little Rock, Arkansas, or Cody, Wyoming, or for that 
matter, Germany or Singapore or any other place in the world. That is 
what is the genius behind what you've done here with this First in the 
World education consortium.
    We already know we're not doing well enough as a nation. What our 
students in general learned in math in the eighth grade is learned in 
Japan in the seventh grade. Even more troubling to me, what each year 
students in Germany and Japan learn 10 to 20 math subjects in depth, our 
students are asked to cover 35 math subjects and therefore don't learn 
any of them in depth.
    Last year, educators around the world gave a half a million 
students, including 40,000 in the United States, the same test at the 
same time to give us a clear picture--our first clear picture--of what 
world-class education really means and how close we are to meeting it. 
We learned that our eighth graders are above the international average 
in science but below it in math. We know that every child in America, 
however--we can see that from the tests--we know that every child in 
America can meet these high standards if we have the courage and the 
vision simply to recognize the standards, to set them as the bar we're 
trying to jump over, to teach them, and to test whether children have 
learned them.
    I do not understand why we are so afraid to do this. Don't we 
believe in our children more than this? And I do not believe there

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is a rule that says if you happen to be poor, you can't learn these 
things. I don't believe that either. When we were writing these goals--I 
remember it was about 2:30 in the morning--we got to this thing, ``What 
are we going to say about math and science?'' And somebody said, ``We're 
going to be first in the world in math and science in the 21st 
century.'' And another person said, ``Well, that will never happen. Now, 
how can we set a goal we know we can't meet?'' So they looked at me and 
said, ``What do you think, Bill?'' And I said, ``Well, okay, suppose we 
just say our goal is to be third in the world.'' [Laughter] There was no 
more discussion. We wrote the goal. Our goal was to be first in the 
world.
    And this is not political rhetoric. Every single examination of the 
capacity of the human brain has shown that over 90 percent of the people 
in our country can learn way over 90 percent of what they need to know 
to do very, very well in the world we're going to live in. Sure, it will 
be harder for some than others. Some subjects are harder for some people 
than others. Not everybody will know everything on every exam, but we 
can do this. And we can no longer hide behind our love of local control 
of the schools and use that as an excuse not to hold ourselves to high 
standards. It has nothing to do with local control. There's no school 
board in America that controls the content of algebra.
    I just left a junior high school where I saw these young people 
making their own automobiles out of paper and rubber bands and paper 
clips. Stand up there. Where are the students in that class? Here they 
are. All of the students in the class I just visited, stand up. 
[Applause] So they built these light little cars with their paper 
wheels, and they wound up this propeller with a rubber band that was 
tied across the whole length of the car, and then it went ahead. And 
they said, ``This demonstrates one of Newton's laws of motion, which is 
that every action generates an equal and opposite reaction.'' And they 
also talked about how the wheels had to be round instead of flat, but 
they couldn't be too slick, because there would have been no friction, 
and then no motion would be possible.
    Now, that is--the rule for that is not different in California. 
[Laughter] It is still the same. And I told these young people when I 
saw them with their cars, I said, ``If I would have had a class like 
this when I was 13, I might be in a different line of work today.'' 
[Laughter] It was so exciting. But to pretend that somehow holding 
ourselves to these standards and agreeing that there has to be some 
uniform way of measuring them is giving up local control, is just an 
excuse to avoid being held accountable because we're afraid we can't 
make it. And it's selling our kids down the drain, and it's wrong. It is 
not right.
    So what happened when you did it? What does that report say? It 
says, in effect, that the eighth graders from the First in the World 
Consortium tied for first in the world in science and tied for second in 
the world in math. I think that's pretty good for their first time out.
    That happened because--look around this room. Can you imagine a 
school district or a set of school districts with more genuine local 
control than this one, with--more than these--more parental involvement, 
more committed teachers, more--you know, you've got local control. But 
you didn't use it as an excuse not to throw your hat in the ring. I 
think it's great that it came out this way. But if you had finished 
eighth and ninth, I would still be here to pat you on the back because 
you had the guts to do it.
    That's the important thing. That's the important thing. When we were 
coming out here on the airplane, the Congressman and Mayor Daley and 
Secretary Riley and Kevin O'Keefe of our staff, we were talking about, 
you know, what men talk about on airplanes, we were talking about 
basketball--[laughter]--and how Michael Jordan scored 51 points last 
night. And Kevin O'Keefe reminded me that there was somewhere a 
basketball coach who had removed Michael Jordan from the high school 
basketball team. Now, what's the point of that? [Laughter]
    You know, we laugh about it. The coach might have made the right 
decision, and the decision he made may have spurred him on to what he 
later did. But the point is, it's okay if you're not winning when you 
start. It's okay. I know more about--but Scottie Pippen, who is from my 
home State, was essentially the manager of a college basketball team 
when he was a freshman in a very small school--couldn't even make the 
team. By the time he was a senior in college, he was the best player in 
that division in the United States, and he was only beginning. When you 
play a game like that, you know how to measure people. I mean, there is 
a way you keep score there.

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    Again, we're not talking about young people's human worth. You don't 
diminish somebody's human worth, you enhance their human worth when you 
help them to develop their capacities. So I cannot say again, I am 
elated that you scored so well. I almost wish you hadn't done quite this 
well, so I would--because everybody else is going to say, ``Well, we 
wouldn't do that well.'' That's not the point. That is not the point. 
The point is to know the truth so you can do better. That is the point.
    Finally, let me say that there are things that we can do in the 
Department of Education. We can validate this testing mechanism. One of 
the problems I had--there are lots of standardized tests in America 
today, you know. Most kids are tested until the tests are coming out 
their ears. But what are the relevant tests? These tests shouldn't be IQ 
tests. These should be effort tests and effort directed in the right 
direction. The thing that's good about this test is, this test measures 
whether these young people know what it is important to know in 
mathematics and science at this point in their life, if they're going to 
be very successful at a later point in their lives and if their nations 
are going to be successful. That's the important thing.
    So we can help. We can help with the Goals 2000 program. We can help 
with the charter schools. We can help schools to join in this movement 
toward setting strong national standards and then to know that if they 
give the students examinations, that the tests are relevant to what it 
is they're saying the children should know in the standards. We can do 
that.
    The schools can push ahead. We could have every superintendent in 
the country prepared to give the speech that we heard this 
superintendent give today. We can do that. But what really will have to 
happen is that business leaders and parents and community leaders, 
religious leaders, people that are at the grassroots level are going to 
have to demand that this be done and are going to have to say, ``Do not 
be afraid. And if it doesn't come out okay the first time, don't 
worry.'' We're going to use that not as a stick to beat somebody to 
death with but as a spur to lift people up with. That's what we have to 
say.
    And so again I say: The young people in this room today are going to 
live in the greatest age of possibility, the greatest age of promise 
ever known. Our obligation as Americans is to give all of them the 
chance to make the most of their God-given abilities, to give all of 
them the chance to live out their dreams, to take whatever they have and 
make the most of it. And we will never get this job done unless we do 
what this First in the World Consortium has done. And if we do it, sure 
as the world, America will be number one.
    Thank you, and God bless you.

Note: The President spoke at 12:08 p.m. in the gymnasium at the 
Glenbrook North High School. In his remarks, he referred to Mary 
Hamblet, teacher, Wood Oaks Junior High School; Paul Kimmelman, 
consortium coordinator; Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago; Nancy Firfer, 
village president, Glenview; Mark Damisch, village president, 
Northbrook; and Chicago Bulls basketball players Michael Jordan and 
Scottie Pippen. A portion of these remarks could not be verified because 
the tape was incomplete.