[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.