    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (1999, Book II)]
    [September 30, 1999]
    [Pages 1640-1645]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at the National Education Summit in Palisades, New York
    September 30, 1999

        Thank you very much. Good afternoon, Governors, education leaders,
    business leaders. I am delighted to be here. I thank my good friend
    Governor Hunt for his remarks. This year
    marks the 20-year anniversary from the time you and Secretary
    Riley and I started working together on
    education.
        I want to thank Governor Thompson for
    his interest in this and so many other issues. Tommy Thompson is the
    first Governor who

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    told me that he thought that he could really move, literally, every
    able-bodied welfare recipient in Wisconsin to work. And I think they've
    had a 91 percent drop in the rolls. He nearly got it done.
    Congratulations; that's an amazing achievement.
        And I want to especially thank Lou Gerstner and all the business leaders here, because you kept the
    idea of the summit alive and understood the importance of consistent and
    systematic followup with the Governors, with the educators. I am very
    grateful to you for doing this. Most people like you do a project like
    this for a year or two, and then they forget it and go on to something
    else. And you haven't done it, and I'm very grateful.
        And for all of you who were here 3\1/2\ years ago, who stayed
    involved in this, I thank you.
        Governor Hunt--I was watching him on
    the monitor outside--talked about the issuance of the ``Nation At Risk''
    report 16 years ago, the meeting we had 15 years ago. The first National
    Education Summit was in Charlottesville 10 years ago this week. And some
    of us were there then. President Bush, his
    Education Department, education leaders from around the country, we were
    all together. And we came together to embrace the concept and specifics
    of national education goals.
        At the second summit, here in Palisades 3\1/2\ years ago, we
    supported the idea that every State should set standards. At this third
    summit I hope we will embrace with equal fervor the idea of
    accountability, for only by holding educators, schools, students, and
    ourselves accountable for meeting the standards we have set will we
    reach the goals we seek.
        We have made significant progress, particularly in the ideas
    governing the way we look at this. More and more we're leaving behind
    the old divisions between one side saying, ``We need more money,'' and
    the other side saying, ``We shouldn't invest any more money in our
    public schools, it's hopeless.'' By and large, there is a new consensus
    for greater investment and greater accountability, greater investment
    and higher standards and higher quality teachers to help students reach
    the standards; holding the schools accountable for the results. That's
    the agenda of Achieve, the agenda of our administration, clearly the
    right agenda for the United States.
        I think it is another mark of progress and something that many of
    you in this room can feel profoundly both proud of and grateful for,
    that 10 full years after Charlottesville and now more than 16 years
    after the issuance of the ``Nation at Risk'' report, there is still a
    passionate sense of national urgency about school reform and about
    lifting education standards. And there are people who get up every day
    full of energy about it, not cynical, not skeptical, not jaded, not
    tired, still eager to learn, people in Governors' offices, people in the
    schools of our country, business leaders, education leaders of all kind.
        This is quite an astonishing thing. You cannot think of a single
    other issue that has had this long a life at this level of intense
    commitment. And I think it is a tribute to the love of the American
    people for their children, a tribute to the understanding of the
    American people of the importance of education in the global economy,
    and a sense that we know that we have both the largest and the most
    diverse student population in our history.
        But if you just think about how people get tired of political
    issues, how everybody is supposed to want to read something new in the
    paper or seeing something new on the evening news, month-in and month-
    out, and you think about how long ago it was when Governor
    Caperton there decided to make all of his
    elementary students computer literate; how long Governor Engler has been in office; how long ago it was that Secretary
    Riley and Governor Hunt and I started fooling with all this--and the country is
    as hot to do the right thing, to improve the education of our children
    today as it was the day after the ``Nation At Risk'' report was issued.
    And that's a great source of comfort to me, and reassurance. And the
    business leaders, the educators, and the political leaders here in this
    room and like-minded people throughout this country deserve a lot of
    credit for that.
        When I came to Washington 6\1/2\ years ago, all of you know that the
    number one problem I had to deal with was the deficit, because we
    quadrupled the debt in 4 years, interest rates were high, the economy
    was stagnant. We had to cut hundreds of programs, and we were determined
    to try to do it in a way that would increase our investment, not
    decrease our investment in education at the national level, and to do it
    in a way that, spearheaded by Secretary Riley, to give you more flexibility, but also to

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    focus on the pressure points of reform that would likely give us the
    greatest returns.
        I am very grateful that we have seen our deficit of $290 billion
    turn into a surplus of $115 billion. This year we'll have the first
    back-to-back surpluses in 42 years. And today we learned we have the
    lowest rate of poverty in America in 20 years. I am very grateful for
    that. But I'm also grateful that during this period we were able to
    early double the Federal investment in education, to help you provide
    your children and your schools with more of the tools they need. We've
    increased early childhood investment through Head Start. We've opened
    the doors of college wide by basically modeling a national version of
    Georgia's HOPE scholarship and providing tax credits for beyond the
    first 2 years of high school.
        We have increased Pell grants and established education IRA's. We've
    begun to organize an army of tutors. We now have a thousand colleges and
    universities, I believe in every State in the country, involving
    themselves in America Reads, to try to make sure all 8-year-olds can
    read when they finish the third grade.
        We've made an enormous amount of progress, and a lot of you have
    been active on this, in hooking up every school and library in the
    country to the Internet and with the E-rate making sure that the poorest
    schools can afford to participate in the information superhighway.
        Last fall we fought for and won a big bipartisan consensus to make a
    downpayment of 30,000 teachers, on getting 100,000 more teachers out in
    the country to lower class sizes in the early grades. And we have
    supported a huge increase in the number of charter schools in America.
    When I became President in January of `93 there was only one charter
    school in the whole country, in the State of Minnesota. There are now
    1,300.
        We're in New York; the New York Legislature, I think, just
    authorized the establishment of the first charter schools here. In
    California, they just took the cap off the number of charter schools
    that they could have. We still have a lot of interest in magnet schools
    and other public school choice initiatives along with the other debates
    on this subject. But I think that we are well on our way to having 3,000
    charter schools in the United States by next year, which is the goal
    that I set for our administration when we started down this path 6 years
    ago.
        Now, in addition to what we've done, what's more important is what
    you've done and what the country's done. We have made truly remarkable
    progress in the standards movement, thanks in no small measure to the
    leadership of Governors and those of you who gathered here 3\1/2\ years
    ago. Our Goals 2000 legislation and the reforms in Title I we made have
    supported that. Today, almost every State has standards for what
    children should know in English, math, science, history, social studies.
    Next year, virtually every State will be testing students to see if
    they're meeting the standards.
        Now, that is all very good news. My friend Hugh Price, who is sitting back there to my left, leader of the Urban
    League, recently observed that people didn't talk much about standards
    and test scores 50 years ago because the output of the schools, whether
    it was good, bad or indifferent, more or less matched with the demands
    of a blue collar economy that needed strong backs more than well-
    developed minds. The problem now is that the economy has changed much
    faster than the schools.
        People used to say, ``You know, the schools just aren't what they
    used to be.'' The problem may be that too many of our schools are too
    much like they used to be, but the world the children move out into is
    not at all as it used to be. And that, of course, is what a lot of you
    are trying to help to change.
        Now, as we move into this period of not only having standards but
    having accountability--that is consequences for the failure to meet
    them--there will be people who will, first of all, be elated at the
    evidence of improvement, which you can see all over the country where
    such things have been done from California to Houston to Chicago to Dade
    County to many other places in the country. Then there will be those who
    will want to shrink back because they fear the adverse consequences of
    failure and many people really don't believe all kids can learn. I think
    it would be a mistake to give in to those fears.
        And one of the things that I would hope will come out of this
    summit, Lou, is that all of you, in
    encouraging accountability, which is, I know, something you believe in,
    ask people not to be afraid when there are consequences.
        I just saw the results in New York City, where the first group of
    children have gone--didn't score at the appropriate level. They went to
    summer school. Many that went to summer

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    school are being prompted, but a few that went to summer school aren't,
    and all the ones that refused to go aren't.
        And there may be some mistakes made. But as long as we send the
    message to these kids that ``We're doing this for you. This doesn't mean
    there's something wrong with you, but we'll be hurting you worse if we
    tell you you're learning something when you're not. We'll be basically
    participating in a fraud which, ultimately, will cost you more
    personally, psychically, and of course, eventually financially, than any
    pain that comes in the moment.''
        But in order to do this, this whole issue will have to be really
    taken out of and kept out of the closet. Governors will have to look
    dead in the eye of some child that was held back and say, ``That's okay;
    you can do it,'' and lift them up. We won't have to pretend that there
    will never be a moment of pain for anybody in any of this.
        And similarly, business people and Governors will have to know that
    we have done everything we absolutely can to give every kid we can the
    chance not to be taken down by the system. It's one of the things that I
    liked about Chicago, where the summer school now for the children that
    don't make the grade is now the sixth biggest school district in the
    entire United States of America--the Chicago summer school, the sixth
    biggest school district in America. Why? Because they don't want to
    brand the kids as failures when the system didn't do for them what it
    should have.
        And Secretary Riley and I have met with
    parents whose children have been through the system there, including
    parents of children who were held back and had to go to summer school. I
    have been into a poor neighborhood there where virtually all the kids
    had to go to summer school in a couple of the classes. And because they
    believed the system is honest and because they believe that the purpose
    of what is being done is not for some politician or educator to look
    tough or run up numbers in the polls or, say, have some easy
    sloganeering answer, but the purpose is to make sure these kids learn
    what they need to learn to have good lives, they support it. They
    support the standards. They support the mandatory summer school. They
    support what's being done in the after-school programs.
        And it will happen everywhere in America. But we all have to commit
    the truth about this. And we can't pretend there will never be any
    painful consequences. But where there are painful consequences, all the
    Governors can do a world of good by going into those schools and say,
    ``I'm doing this because I want you to have a good life. I'm doing this
    because it's not too late for you. This is just the beginning of your
    life. I'm doing this because your teachers and your principals and your
    parents and the business leaders in this community, we care about your
    future, and we're going to make this work.'' And I hope we can do that.
        Let me just say very quickly, I think we have to have these basic
    standards in every State, and we have to make it possible, as Achieve
    has recommended, not only know whether the standards are being met but
    to give the parents some comparative information about how children in
    other States and other nations are doing. I think we have to recommit
    ourselves to extra support.
        And Congress, when--I sent this education accountability act to
    Congress, saying that school districts accepting Federal money must
    ensure that teachers know the subject they're teaching, have reasonable
    discipline codes, empower parents with report cards, have a strategy--
    and I think this is very important--to turn around failing schools or
    close them down, and finally, a strategy to end social promotion that
    empowers children who aren't making the grade through the after-school
    programs, the summer school programs, and all the rest.
        Now, we're having a big argument in Washington on the budget today.
    I don't want to get into a partisan rerun of that, but let me just say
    this: We can have the kind of budget we need that will help you to do
    what you need to do without--and we can meet the budget targets without
    coming up short in education, whether it's for Head Start or more
    teachers or the initiative to help States build and modernize 6,000 new
    schools or the American Reads program or this GEAR UP program, all of
    which the Congress supported last year, by the way, to help mentor kids
    that are in trouble in junior high school, to try to get them into
    college by getting them over that rough patch. So I hope we can get that
    done.
        I also wanted to say, emphasize something that I think is very
    important, our budget would provide $200 million to help you turn around
    low-performing schools. I believe that it is not

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    enough to say, no social promotion, strict accountability, and even
    summer school and after-school programs for kids, unless there is a
    strategy to turn around the low-performing schools. And I know that in
    North Carolina and in several other places where this has been done--I
    mentioned them earlier, Houston, Dade County, Chicago, and there are
    other places--but there is evidence now--we don't have to question this
    either--there is a lot of evidence that these low-performing schools can
    be turned around.
        I went to an elementary school in Chicago, in the Robert Taylor
    housing project, where the reading scores had tripled and the math
    scores had doubled in 2 years. Were they on a low base? Yes. Were they
    where they ought to be? No. But does it prove you can turn things
    around, even in the most adverse circumstances? Absolutely. So I think
    that if we're going to have genuine accountability for standards, it is
    important that we have something to turn the schools around.
        And again, I say--a lot of people in Congress don't want to adopt
    this accountability standard for Federal funds because they say that we
    shouldn't impose that on you. But I think all of you know that the five
    elements in the Federal bill were basically ideas we got straight out of
    local school districts and States. They weren't something that Dick
    Riley cooked up. It was something that the
    Education Department developed based on the proven experience and
    results of local school districts and States.
        Finally, let me just give you something to feel good about again, at
    the end. In 1996, there were only 14 States with measurable standards.
    Today there are 50. That's the good news. Here's why you ought to focus
    on accountability. In 1996, there were only 11 States with systems that
    identify and sanction low-performing schools. Today there are only 16.
    This is the hard part.
        But again, I say, we've got to give the schools the tools they need
    to do the job. And the Federal Government has an important role to play.
    We don't provide an enormous amount of the total funds for schools, but
    that amount was slipping for a while, and we got it going back up now.
    And I feel very strongly, as the Secretary of Education, that with the
    largest student population in history and with all this educational
    evidence about the benefits of smaller classes and with the imperative
    of ending the practice of social promotion, finishing the work of
    100,000 teachers, helping you to build or remodel 6,000 schools so
    they'll be modern, and doing these other things are quite important.
        Now, let me just make one other point. I'm encouraged by the
    movement to standards in the 3\1/2\ years since you had your last summit
    here, and you should be, too. That's a rather astonishing move. And it
    shows what can happen if you meet in an environment where you've got
    business and education and the political leadership working together,
    and Republicans and Democrats leave the party labels at the door, and
    everybody just works on what's good for the kids.
        But this is the hard part. It's not an accident that we've gone from
    16 to 50 standards and 11 to 16 in genuine accountability. It's hard.
    But you also can take a lot of pride in the fact that you have evidence,
    even in big urban areas with a lot of trouble, where this has worked.
    And the consequences are good.
        Now, last February when the Governors were in the White House, I
    just noted that it took 100 years for laws mandating compulsory, free
    elementary education to spread from a few States to the whole Nation.
    When it comes to this accountability agenda, will we follow the model of
    the last 3\1/2\ years with standards and go from 16 to 50 in a hurry, or
    will we go back to the model of the earlier time? I think all of you
    know what we ought to do.
        And I will say again, I think the fact that we have the largest
    number of children in our public schools in history, I think the fact
    that they are more diverse than ever before in terms of their
    backgrounds and their languages is a godsend for us for the 21st century
    in a global society if, but only if, we prove not only that they can all
    learn but that we can teach them all. We know they can all learn from--
    you can do a brain scan and determine that. That's always been--that's
    the wrong question. The question is can we teach them all, and are we
    prepared to do it, and are we prepared to have constructive compassion
    for their present difficulties by having genuine accountability and also
    heartfelt support?
        The reason that there is still so much enthusiasm for all this
    after--10 years after the Charlottesville Summit, 16 years after the
    ``Nation at Risk,'' 20 or 30 years after all the Southerners figured out
    that it's the only way to lift our States out of the dirt is that
    everybody knows

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    that deep down inside it's still the most important public work.
        Thank you very much.

    Note: The President spoke at 3:40 p.m. in the Watson Room at the IBM
    Palisades Executive Conference Center. In his remarks, he referred to
    North Carolina Gov. James B. Hunt, Jr.; Wisconsin Gov. Tommy G.
    Thompson; Louis V. Gerstner, Jr., chairman and chief executive officer,
    IBM Corp.; former Gov. Gaston Caperton of West Virginia; Gov. John
    Engler of Michigan; and Hugh B. Price, president and chief executive
    officer, National Urban League, Inc.