    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book II)]
    [September 20, 1997]
    [Pages 1194-1197]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks in a Roundtable Discussion on Charter Schools at the San Carlos
    Charter Learning Center in San Carlos, California
    September 20, 1997

        The President. Thank you very much. First, thank all of you for
    coming here today and sharing your Saturday morning. I thank the
    superintendent for his really marvelous remarks. He talked about all the
    things that we have in common. I saw a living symbol of his dedication
    to education above all else and one thing that we have in common that he
    didn't mention. If you look closely at his tie, you will see it is a
    pattern of golf balls and tees. And on this beautiful Saturday morning,
    he's here with us. [Laughter]
        Let me thank your instructional coordinator, too, for being here,
    leaving her 11-day-old baby. I would like to see the 11-day-old baby,
    but I think it's--where's the baby? A wise mother leaves the baby
    outside. [Laughter]
        Hillary and I are delighted to be here. And I want to spend most of
    my time just at this panel today. But I thank all of you for coming
    because I believe in charter schools, and I believe they are an
    important part of helping us to lift our standards and renew our schools
    and achieve the kind of educational excellence that all of our children
    need as we move into the 21st century.
        I congratulate the San Carlos Learning Center for being the first of
    its kind in California, which obviously makes it among the very first in
    the United States.
        Let me just give you a little brief personal history here. When I
    was Governor of my State for 12 years, I spent a great deal of time
    working on school reform--and so did Hillary--spent lots of time in the
    schools, talking to teachers, talking to parents, talking to students,
    dealing with issues of curriculum development and teacher training and
    all those things. And when we were active in the 1980's, the State of
    Minnesota became the first State in the country

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    to pass a public school choice law, to give parents and their children
    more choice among the public schools their children attended. I think we
    were the second State to pass that law. And we used it quite a lot.
        Then, when I began to run for President in 1991, Minnesota became
    the first State in the country again to pass a charter school law,
    recognizing that sometimes it wasn't enough just to give the parents and
    the students choices but that we needed to give the educators and the
    parents and the students with whom they worked options to create schools
    that fit the mission needed by the children in the area, and that if you
    gave them options and held them accountable, we might be able to do
    something really spectacular. Then, 5 years ago today, I think,
    California became the second State in the country to adopt a charter
    school law, and then you became the first of those schools.
        In 1994, I passed legislation in Congress to help us support more
    charter schools. By the end of 1995, there were about 300 charter
    schools in the country. Today, there are 700 charter schools in the
    country. Many of them have been helped by the program we passed in
    Washington in 1994.
        The historic balanced budget agreement that we just passed into law
    includes the largest commitment to new investment in education since
    1965, among other things, expansion of Head Start programs, more funds
    to support computers in the schools--I'll say more about that in a
    moment--our America Reads initiative to help make sure every 8-year-old
    can read independently, and the biggest increased investment in helping
    people go to college since the GI bill passed 50 years ago: tax credits
    for the first 2 years of college, credits for the remainder of college,
    IRA's, Pell grants, work-study positions. All these together mean that
    for the first time ever we can really say, if you're responsible enough
    to work for it, no matter what your income or your difficulties, college
    is now a real option for you in America, for every single American. And
    I'm very proud of all of that.
        But one of the things that was in this balanced budget that didn't
    get a lot of notice is enough money for us to help to set up literally
    thousands more charter schools in America--because excellence in
    education is more than money. And from my point of view, having spent
    years and years and years working on this, we need two things. We need a
    set of national standards of academic excellence that will be
    internationally competitive in basic subjects, and then we need
    grassroots, school-based reform, because education is the magic that
    takes place in every classroom and indeed in every student's mind,
    involving every teacher, every student, and also, hopefully, support
    from home.
        So that's why these charter schools are so important to me. And
    that's why we've tried to help a lot more schools like San Carlos get
    started on the path that you've been on now for some years.
        For people who don't know exactly what they are, let me say that
    charter schools are public schools that make a simple agreement. In
    exchange for public funding, they get fewer regulations and less
    redtape, but they have to meet high expectations, and they keep their
    charter only so long as their customers are satisfied they're doing a
    good job.
        As I said, we've gone from--the day I took office, there was only
    one charter school in America--January of '93. Then, a couple years ago,
    we were up to 300. Now there are 700. And what started as a movement in
    Minnesota and California now encompasses 29 States; 27 more States have
    passed charter school laws.
        These funds in our budget, as I said, should allow us to set up
    several thousand more over the next 4 years. Today I am pleased to
    announce that we're going to release $40 million in grants to help
    charter schools open. Startup costs are often the biggest obstacle. And
    in States that can't afford to help, it's a terrible problem. I see a
    lot of people nodding their heads out there who have had experience with
    this.
        So we have curriculum development costs, teacher training costs, new
    technology costs--all these things can help. The $40 million we're
    releasing today, of which about $3.4 million will come to California,
    will help us to establish another 500 charter schools in 21 States. So
    we'll go from 700 to 500 in one pop here.
        And as I said, pretty soon--and if all the States will join in, we
    obviously can help all of them--we'll have well over 3,000, perhaps even
    over 4,000 by the year 2000, which is enough to have a seismic echo
    effect in all the public school systems of America. So that's what we're
    trying to do.
        Let me say that there are a couple of problems that we're going to
    face. Last week, the U.S. Senate, by a very narrow margin, supported

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    an amendment that would make these charter schools' funding that I just
    announced the last such announcement that would ever be made, because it
    would lump all the education funds together and arbitrarily distribute
    them to the State without regard to whether these programs were
    continued or not. And in the process, it would abolish very specific and
    highly successful education reform programs like the charter schools,
    where we work with local communities and school districts. It would
    abolish our highly successful effort to put computers in the
    classrooms--I'll tell you how much movement has happened on there in
    just 2 years--and to create safe and drug-free schools. I think that
    would be a mistake.
        The House of Representatives recently passed, although the Senate
    opposed them, an amendment that would prohibit us to pay for--not to
    develop but to pay for--a nonpolitical, private organization to develop
    voluntary national tests of excellence in mathematics and reading. I
    think that would be a mistake. This is the first time, last year, in
    history that our students in elementary schools scored above the
    international average in math and science. We're doing much better in
    America, but we don't test all of our kids. We just test a
    representative sample. I think we need to know how we're doing based on
    a common standard.
        So we have these problems in the Congress, and if either one of
    these provisions makes it into the final bill, I will have to veto it.
    So I hope that we can continue to work on moving forward in the right
    direction. And in that connection, I'd like to say a special word of
    appreciation to Congresswoman Anna Eshoo, who I think is one of the--
    absolutely--even I would say this if I were in Washington--she really is
    one of the finest, most forward-looking Members of the United States
    Congress, and she's made a big difference in our country today.
        Now, running these charter schools, as we are about to hear, is not
    easy. It's not self-evident how to do all this. It sounds great to say,
    ``We'll cut you free of redtape and bureaucracy. You have to perform at
    a higher level. You've got to get the parents involved.'' There are all
    kinds of practical problems, and we'll hear about some of them.
        The Secretary of Education, Dick Riley, is going to convene a
    national conference on charter schools in Washington this November to
    bring together teachers, administrators, parents, others who are
    interested in this to share best practices and look to the road ahead.
    But just think about where we can go with this. If we go--we've gone
    from one to 700, to 500 more, with a budget that calls for funds for
    3,000 more--just this year's budget alone, that will be funded starting
    October 1st, if we get the funds for it, will give us enough funds for
    another 700--or 900 to 1,000 schools.
        So this movement can sweep the country and can literally
    revolutionize both community control and standards of excellence in
    education if we do it right. That's what the panel is about.
        And before we start, let me just thank some of the business leaders
    who are here today for their commitment to educational excellence: Regis
    McKenna, David Ellington, Brook Byers, Terry Yang, Paul Lippe. And I'd
    like to say a special word of thanks to Larry Ellison who is up here on
    the platform. He's the chairman and CEO of Oracle Corporation.
        Two years ago this week, I met with Larry and a number of other
    high-tech executives to talk about another one of my passions, which is
    to connect every classroom and library in every school in America to the
    Internet by the year 2000. And that, like everything else, it turned out
    to be more complicated. It sounded great, but we not only had to connect
    them, we had to make sure we had the hardware, the software, and the
    trained teachers to do the job.
        So we got this group of business people who knew about all this, who
    are working very hard to try to make sure that we can do that, give all
    the support services to every school. We got the Federal Communications
    Commission to give what amounts to a $2\1/4\ billion a year subsidy to
    schools, to lower the rates they have to pay to hook onto the Internet.
    But to give you an example of what we can do when we work together,
    since we made that announcement 2 years ago, California has 65 percent
    of the schools connected, which is twice the percentage you had 2 years
    go, and 4 times as many classrooms connected as just 2 years ago. That
    shows you how quickly we can move.
        And Larry has not only sponsored the San Carlos Learning Center but
    yesterday he announced Oracle's promise to spend $100 million in a
    foundation to help schools across America who need support to get the
    kind of connection

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    to the future through telecommunications technology that we all want. So
    thank you, Larry, for doing that.
        So this is a good news day, but what I want to do now is to turn it
    over to the panel, and let's get into the facts of the charter school
    movement and see. Hopefully, by being here today, this will encourage
    the 21 States who do not have charter school legislation to adopt it; it
    will encourage the Congress to fully fund the charter schools program
    for the next 4 years; and it will help us to take what you have done
    here and spread it all across America in a way that will guarantee
    international standards of excellence in the education of all of our
    children.
        Thank you very much.

    [At this point, the roundtable discussion proceeded, after which the
    First Lady made closing remarks.]

        The President. First of all, let me say I agree with everything she
    said. [Laughter] I'd just like to make a couple of brief points to build
    on what Hillary said. I want to say, first of all, I have no hidden
    agenda here. I believe the only way public schools can survive as the
    instrument by which we educate our children and socialize them and bring
    them together across all the lines that divide us is if all of our
    schools eventually--and hopefully sooner rather than later--are run like
    these charter schools. That's what I believe. I am not running for
    office anymore. I have no political interest in this. I am thinking
    about what our country is going to be like 20, 30, 40, 50 years from
    now.
        And you know what Tom said about the industrial model, that's part
    of the problem. A lot of our schools are organized on an industrial
    model--a lot of our middle schools are almost--are organized for when
    families were like Ozzie and Harriet, instead of like they are today.
    There are a lot of organizational problems. It's also true that our
    schools get money from a lot of different places and have to suffer
    rules from a lot of different places, and a lot of people think if they
    give up their rulemaking, they won't matter anymore. And in some way,
    the most important person here is the superintendent because he's here
    supporting this instead of figuring out how he can control it. And I
    think that's important.
        And so Hillary and I have been working at this business for a long
    time now, seriously since 1983--really seriously. There has been a
    dramatic change in the attitudes of the teacher unions, which is
    positive. There have been dramatic advances in the attitude of
    administrators, which is positive.
        But I just want to say, we cannot--there are a lot of people who
    believe in the information age, with things changing as fast as they are
    and with standards needing to be as high as they are, that we ought to
    just basically send everybody money and let them do whatever they want
    to about education and forget about the public education network--let it
    sink or swim. The problem with that theory is that the short-term costs
    to people who got left behind would be staggering.
        But if we want to preserve excellence and the socially unifying
    impact of public schools over the next generation, I am telling you,
    every school in the country has got to become like this one. The power
    needs to be with the parents, with the children, with the teachers, with
    the principals. And those of us who are up the lines somewhere, up the
    food chain, what are we interested in? We're interested in what Kim
    said. We're interested in results. We don't need to make rules. We're
    interested in results, and we want to be able to measure them. We want
    to know our kids are going to be all right and our country is going to
    be all right.
        Let them make the rules in the schools. Let them figure it out. And
    then education will be something that will get bright young lawyers to
    leave their more lucrative law practices to do something that doesn't
    pay as much but makes them feel good when they go to bed every night and
    get up in the morning. That's what we want. And until every school is
    run like that, you and I should not rest.
        Thank you. God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 11:19 a.m. in the gymnasium. In his
    remarks, he referred to Don Shalvey, superintendent, San Carlos School
    District; Elise Darwish, instructional coordinator, San Carlos Charter
    Learning Center; Regis McKenna, president, Regis McKenna, Inc.; David
    Ellington, chief executive officer, Net Noir; Brook Byers, partner,
    Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield & Byers; Terry Yang, cofounder, Yahoo!; Paul
    Lippe, vice president, Synopsis; Tom Ruiz, teacher, International
    Studies Academy Charter School; and Kimberly Polese, president and chief
    executive officer, Marimba, Inc.