[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.