    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: WILLIAM J. CLINTON (2000, Book I)]
    [May 3, 2000]
    [Pages 819-825]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at Audubon Elementary School in Owensboro, Kentucky
    May 3, 2000

        Thank you very much. Thank you. I am delighted to see you all here.
    I think we should give Karen Cecil another round
    of applause. She did a great job, didn't she? [Applause] Superintendent
    Silberman, you might ought to just put her
    on the road as an advertisement for the district.
        I'm delighted to be here with all of you. I want to thank Governor
    Patton and Judi Patton for, first of all, for many years of friendship and
    support, and for, Governor, your truly magnificent leadership in this
    State. I have served--I was a Governor for 12 years, and I have served
    with over 150 Governors. And since I've been President 8 years, I guess
    I've known about 100 or so more. So I have some experience in this. He's
    one of the best I've ever seen, and I thank him very much. Thank you.
        I thank your Lieutenant Governor, Steve Henry, for being here. And my longtime friend and also fellow
    former colleague, John Y. Brown, thank
    you, Governor, for coming. I'm glad to see you. And Senator Wendell
    Ford and Jean, I'm glad
    to see you. We miss you in Washington. I had to be funny Saturday night;
    they don't laugh enough since you came home. [Laughter] And we miss you.
        I want to thank Attorney General Chandler and Treasurer Miller and
    Speaker Richards for being here, and the other
    State legislators who are here. And Mayor Morris, thank you for welcoming me, along with the city
    council. And I thank the Board of Education for their good work. I want
    to thank the AmeriCorps volunteers who are here for the work they do in
    the America Reads program. And thank you, Superintendent
    Silberman, and thank you, Diane
    Embry, for the work you do.
        I've been in so many schools over the last 20 years, I can be in one
    for 5 minutes and know whether it's doing well or not. And there are a
    lot of rules, and you heard some of them today, but one of the things
    that Diane Embry did not say is that you nearly never have a good school
    unless you've got a great principal.

    [[Page 820]]

    And it's obvious that you've got a great principal here.
        And I'd like to thank the bands who played. And most of all, I'd
    like to thank Crystal Davidson for letting
    me come into her class and read with her students. We read a chapter
    from ``Charlotte's Web,'' a wonderful book. And Crystal said it was the
    students' favorite chapter. It's called ``The Miracle,'' and it's about
    how Charlotte the spider weaves a magic web that says, ``some pig.'' And
    everybody thinks that it's the pig that's special, not the spider, and
    as a consequence the pig is not sent off to make bacon. And it's a
    pretty good story for real life, I think. [Laughter] I may recommend it
    to the Congress when I get home. [Laughter]
        I am told that I'm the first President to come to Owensboro since
    Harry Truman. He always did have good judgment, Harry. But I have known
    about Owensboro for a long time, now. The Baptist minister that married
    Wendell and Jean Ford was
    my next-door neighbor in 1961. And his daughter graduated from high
    school with me and became one of my best friends and now is very active
    in the national adult literacy movement. So there's something in the
    atmosphere around here that promotes good education. I understand
    Lieutenant Governor Henry's mother was a 25-year veteran of the school
    system here in this county. So I'm delighted to be here.
        I am on the first stop of a 2-day tour to highlight for the American
    people the good things that are happening in education in America and
    the challenges that are before us. I want people all across this country
    to know that there are places where people, against considerable odds,
    are bringing educational excellence to all our children. I want people
    to know this because the great challenge before us is how to get the
    reforms that worked in Audubon Elementary School into every elementary
    school in America.
        And the first thing that you have to do if you want to achieve that
    goal is to know what was done and to believe it works. I came to
    Kentucky to show America how a whole State can identify and turn around
    its low-performing schools with high standards and accountability,
    parental involvement, and investments to help the schools and the
    students and the teachers meet the standards.
        After I leave you, I'm going on to Davenport, Iowa, to highlight the
    importance of having good school facilities. And this is a big issue,
    too. The average school building in America is over 40 years old; in
    many of our cities, the average school building is over 65 years old. We
    have school buildings in some of our cities that can't be wired for the
    Internet because the building just can't accommodate it. We have school
    buildings in New York City still being heated with coal-fired furnaces.
    We have elementary schools in America with 12 or 13 trailers out back
    because there are so many kids in the schools. So I'm going to Iowa to
    try to emphasize that.
        And then tomorrow I'm going to St. Paul, Minnesota, to visit the
    first public charter school in America, which was basically created to
    give more accountability with less bureaucratic paperwork, and I'm going
    to talk about that. And then I'm going to Columbus, Ohio, to talk about
    the importance of teachers and results in the classrooms.
        Dick Riley and I have been working on
    this for over 20 years, since we were young Governors together in 1979.
    We met in late 1978, when we went to Atlanta--they had a conference to
    show us how to be Governors. They recognized that there was a difference
    between winning the election and doing the job. [Laughter] And for over
    20 years we've been wrestling with the challenge of how to improve our
    schools and how especially to give people who live in communities where
    there are a lot of lower income people the same excellence in education
    that every American has a right to.
        And because he's from South Carolina
    and I'm from Arkansas, we feel a lot of affinity with Kentucky. I have
    been here--I came to Kentucky for the first time in 1979. I served with
    five Kentucky Governors, and I feel like, since Paul has been so close to us these last 7 years, I've served
    with six. And I wanted to come here because I believe so strongly that
    we can have the kind of educational excellence we need for every child
    in the country if people will take the basic things you have done here
    and do them.
        I believe that intelligence is equally distributed throughout the
    human race, and I think educational opportunity ought to be also equally
    distributed. And I do want to say just one thing about Dick
    Riley: I don't think there's any question
    that even my political opponents would admit that he is the finest
    Secretary of Education this country has ever had.

    [[Page 821]]

        Governor Patton talked about a decade of commitment to excellence
    since you passed your landmark reform bill in 1990. But he was on a committee called the Prichard Committee for
    Academic Excellence back in the 1980's, so he's been at this a long
    time, too. And I guess the first thing I would say to people all across
    America who are interested in this: This is not a day's work or a
    weekend's work or a month's work. You've got to make a long-term
    disciplined commitment to your children. And I thought one of the best
    things about what Karen Cecil said was how she charted the improvements
    in this school through the lives of her children. It was personally very
    moving to me, but it also made the larger point that if you really want
    excellence in education, you have to be prepared to pay the price of
    time and really work at it.
        Now, here's what Kentucky did--a lot of you know this, but I think
    it's worth repeating for the audience across the country interested in
    this. First, in 1990 you set high standards for what all Kentucky
    children should know. Second, you identified the schools where year
    after year students didn't learn enough to meet those standards. Third,
    you held the schools accountable for turning themselves around, with
    real consequences for the failure to do so, from dismissing principals
    and teachers to allowing parents to transfer children into higher
    performing public schools. And fourth, you provided the investment and
    other supports necessary, which your principal and your parent have
    identified here today, to turn the schools around, from more teacher
    training to high quality preschool, after-school, and summer school
    programs, to the latest educational technology. You have to do all of
    these things.
        The results have been truly extraordinary. You know, because we're
    all here today with our friends from the media who will put this story
    out around the country, I want every American who doubts that we can
    provide excellence in education to listen to these Kentucky numbers. In
    1996, Kentucky identified 175 schools needing major improvement. Two
    years later--in 2 years, 159 of those schools, 91 percent, had improved
    beyond the goals you set for them.
        Audubon Elementary, where we are today, is a particularly dramatic
    example. Now listen to this; this is what this school did. This school
    went from 12 percent of your students meeting or exceeding the State
    standards on writing tests to 57 percent, from 5 percent meeting or
    exceeding the State standards in reading to 70 percent--I saw that
    today--from zero students meeting or exceeding the State standards in
    science to 64 percent. This school is now the 18th-best performing
    elementary school in the State, despite the fact that two-thirds of your
    students qualify for free and reduced-price school lunches. That is
    truly amazing.
        In fact--this is also very interesting--you can say that--I know
    that people who don't agree with what we're trying to do will say,
    ``Well, so what? You know, they have Einstein for a principal there or
    something.'' [Laughter] And you may. But listen to this. In this entire
    State, 10 of the 20 best performing elementary schools in science--in
    science--are schools where half the students are eligible for free and
    reduced-price schools lunches. Don't tell me all children can't learn.
    They can learn if they have the opportunity and the system and the
    support.
        Income is not destiny. You have proved that all children can learn,
    and you have also proved that public schools can succeed. Therefore, in
    my judgment, the answer to excellence for all our children is not to
    take money away from our schools through vouchers but to combine money
    with high standards, accountability, and the tools teachers, children,
    and parents need to succeed. Because all children can learn, and because
    both the children and the Nation need for all children to learn in the
    21st century information economy, I think turning around low-performance
    schools is one of the great challenges this country faces in the 21st
    century.
        And I want to go off the script here for a couple minutes to tell
    you, you know, I'm not running for anything this year, so I can say
    this, I hope, with some credibility. In times of adversity, people tend
    to pull together and do what has to be done. You had a terrible tornado
    here in January. I know it was awful for you. We tried to give the
    support that we were supposed to give at the national level. But I'm
    sure you were amazed at the community response. I'm sure you were all
    inspired by it. At times of adversity, we find the best in ourselves.
        Sometimes we are most severely tested in good times, when it's easy
    for our attention to wander, for our concentration to break, for our
    vision to fade. Now, this country is in the best economic shape it's
    ever been in, and all the

    [[Page 822]]

    social indicators are moving in the right direction. And now is the time
    to ask ourselves, what's really out there for us to do? How are we going
    to meet the challenge of the aging of America when all the baby boomers
    retire? We don't want to bankrupt our kids and their ability to raise
    our grandkids. Therefore, we should lengthen the life of Social Security
    and make sure Medicare is all right; I think, add a prescription drug
    benefit.
        How are we going to continue to grow the economy at the end of the
    longest expansion in history? I think we have to sell more of our stuff
    overseas, but we also have to--as I said in Hazard, Kentucky, last
    summer--we've got to bring economic opportunity to the places that have
    been left behind. It's inflation-free economic growth.
        How are we going to lift our children out of poverty and give them
    all a world-class education? Those are three of the biggest challenges
    this country has.
        When we were worried about unemployment, when we were worried about
    crime never going down, when we were worried about welfare roles
    exploding, it was hard to think about these big long-term challenges.
    Well, things are in hand now. We're going in the right direction. This
    is the best chance anybody in this gym today will ever have in your
    lifetime to deal with these big challenges.
        And so I--that's another reason I'm here today. We can do this. We
    can give all our kids a world-class education. And if we're not going to
    do it now, when in the wide world will we ever get around to doing it?
    We cannot afford to break our concentration. Now is the time to say,
    thank you for this good time, to be grateful to God and to our neighbors
    and to all the good fortune we've had, and then do the right thing by
    our kids. This is the best time we'll ever have to do this, and so--
    [applause]. Thank you.
        I can also tell you, we don't have unlimited time to do it. We've
    got the biggest school population in our history. It's finally, the last
    2 years, been bigger than the baby boom generation. It is far more
    diverse. The school district just across the river from Washington, DC,
    in Alexandria, has kids from 180 different racial-ethnic groups,
    speaking 100 different first languages. And the country will grow more
    diverse.
        Now, in a global society, that's a good thing. Just like you want to
    have computers way out in the country, because they're connected to the
    world, right? This is a good thing, not a bad thing--but only if we have
    universal excellence in education.
        Now, the other thing I'd like to say is, when Dick and I started doing all this--and John Y. was elected the next year--back in the early 1980's and
    the late seventies, we were struggling to try to figure out what to do.
    Even when the ``Nation At Risk'' report was issued in 1983--and a lot of
    us responded to it; we tried basically to just do what they said. We
    didn't even have--many States didn't even have basic, adequate
    graduation requirements for high school.
        But we've now had 20 years of serious effort at educational reform.
    So we not only have good economic times, we have the knowledge that we
    didn't have even 10 years ago about how to replicate what you have done
    here. And that's another reason we do not have any excuse for not doing
    this. We know what works. And what you've done here will work in any
    community in the country.
        Will it have to be modified for the people that live there and the
    community conditions? Absolutely. But you know, I used to frequently
    visit an elementary school in Chicago, when the crime rate was really
    high, in the early nineties, in the neighborhood with the highest murder
    rate in Illinois. And the principal was an African-American woman from
    my home State, from the Mississippi Delta. And all the parents were in
    the school. They had a school dress code. They had no weapons in the
    school. They never had any violent incidents. They had a zero dropout
    rate, and they performed above the State average, just like you are. So
    we would see this from time to time. We would come across these jewels
    in the rough. But nobody could really figure out, for a long time, how
    to make this universal.
        We know, now, what the basic things you have done are and how to
    make them available in every school in the country. We do not have an
    excuse any longer not to do that. You have to set high standards. You
    have to have accountability. You have to train and pay decent teachers
    and principals. You've got to provide the technology, and you have to
    have the support staff. And you have to have the parental involvement
    and the community support. And kids have to have the extra help they
    need to meet the

    [[Page 823]]

    standards. You shouldn't declare children failures when the system
    doesn't work. So it's okay to hold the kids accountable, but you've got
    to give them the help they need to make it.
        Now, that works: Invest more, demand more. For 7 years in our
    administration, the Vice President and I and Secretary Riley and the
    others, we've worked to give States like Kentucky the tools you need to
    do the job. When we were cutting spending like crazy to turn deficits
    into surpluses, we still had nearly doubled the national investment in
    education and training. We required States to set academic standards,
    but Secretary Riley got rid of nearly two-
    thirds of the regulations on States and local school districts, to
    reduce the unnecessary paperwork and to focus on what was really
    critical.
        And we've also worked to help you reduce class size. I was thrilled
    that--you know, I didn't think of you as a Clinton teacher, but--
    [laughter]--I'll take it any day of the week. I think it's wonderful,
    and I'm honored that you're there.
        But when I was in Crystal's class
    today, and all those kids, every one of those children read to me--every
    one of them. Now, some of them had a little more trouble than others,
    partly because of the arcane nature of the book we read and the way they
    were talking about Desotos and Studebakers and Packards--[laughter]--and
    not Isuzus and Hondas and other things. But every one of those children
    was into reading and obviously had received individual attention.
    Because--I think there were 19 students in that class today, and you
    can't do that with 40 kids. So this is a big deal.
        So we're into our third year now of trying to fund 100,000 new
    teachers, to help to reduce the class sizes in the early grades so that
    the young people can learn to read. And I'm also glad that young people
    like Crystal Davidson want to be teachers
    and are dedicated to it, because we're going to have a lot teachers
    retiring in the next few years.
        We've also supported the America Reads program. We have these
    volunteers here from AmeriCorps. There are 1,000 colleges now in America
    where young people are working in the elementary schools of our country.
    In addition to that, you have RSVP programs, Retired Senior Volunteers,
    which I think is a sponsor of the program here in this county, and other
    groups, church groups, other people all across this country helping. And
    I think that's very important.
        I said I was going to the charter school in Minnesota. We had one
    when I became President; there are 1,700 today, and we think we'll have
    3,000 when school starts next year. We've really worked on this.
        The Vice President fought very hard to
    get something called the E-rate in the Telecommunications Act of 1996,
    which enables schools like this to hook the classrooms up to the
    Internet and to get a discount to do so. It's worth about $2 billion a
    year, so that the poorest schools in the country can afford, just as the
    wealthiest schools can, to hook up their classrooms to the Internet.
        When we started in '93, there were only 3 percent of our classrooms
    with Internet connections. Today, nearly 75 percent have. Only 16
    percent of the schools had even one connection; today, 95 percent do,
    including 90 percent in low income areas in America. So this is making a
    difference, and it's very important.
        Now, across the country math and reading scores are rising. Sixty-
    seven percent of all the high school graduates are now going to college;
    that's 10 percent more than in 1993. Part of that is because we tried to
    open the doors of college financially to all Americans with the creation
    of the HOPE scholarship, which is a $1,500 tax credit for the first 2
    years of college, which makes community college at least virtually free
    to most families, and another tax credit for junior and senior years and
    for graduate school. There are 5 million families taking advantage of it
    already; it's just been in since '98.
        And we've expanded the Pell grants; we've created education IRA's;
    we've cut the cost of the student loans through the Direct Student Loan
    Program by $8 billion. Students have saved $8 billion on the program and
    lower interest costs on student loans, in just 6 years. And I'm trying
    to get the Congress this year to allow the cost of college tuition to be
    tax-deductible up to $10,000 a year. And if we do that, we do that one
    last piece, we will really be able to say that we have opened the doors
    of college to every American family, and everybody will be able to go,
    and money should not be an obstacle. So we're trying to get this done.
        Okay, that's the good news. Now, what's the bad news? The bad news
    is that you're here, and we're celebrating, but there are still a whole
    lot of schools in America, hundreds of them,

    [[Page 824]]

    that fail to give children the education that you give the children here
    in Audubon. And in this economy, that is bad for them and bad for the
    rest of us, because we live in an economy in which it's not only what
    you know that counts, it's what you're capable of learning.
        The whole nature of work is being radically revolutionized by
    information technology. It's accounted for 30 percent of our economic
    growth in the last 8 years, even though people working directly in
    information technology are only 8 percent of the work force. But if you
    work in a bank, if you work in an insurance company--in my part of the
    country, if you drive a tractor--your life has been changed by the way
    computers work. And this means that it's not only necessary to be able
    to know certain things, you've got to have these learning skills that
    kids get in grade school to keep on learning for a lifetime. It is
    profoundly important.
        And we do need what the Vice President has called a revolution in education. But it's not a
    revolution to find something that doesn't exist. It's a revolution to
    take what works here and put it everywhere. That has always been the
    great challenge of American education. It's just that we weren't sure
    what it was we wanted to put everywhere. Today, we are.
        And again I tell you, there will never be a better time economically
    to do it, and we don't have any excuse not to do it, because we know
    what works. After 20 years, we know what works.
        Last year, Dick Riley and I sent
    Congress an educational accountability act that would fundamentally
    change the way we spend the $15 billion we give to our schools, not to
    take it away from our commitment to helping lower income communities and
    kids but to say, we're going to invest in what we know works, and we're
    going to stop investing in what we know doesn't work. It would
    essentially require States that take Federal money to do what you have
    done in Kentucky, to identify low-performing schools, to develop a
    strategy for turning them around, based on a set of standards and an
    accountability mechanism.
        It would require the ending of so-called social promotion but,
    again, not branding the children failures. It would require that only if
    you also had after-school, summer school, tutoring, the support services
    necessary for the children to succeed.
        And it would empower parents, by encouraging more parental
    involvement in schools and guaranteeing report cards to the parents on
    school performance, not just the students' performance, compared to
    other schools.
        It would provide funds to make sure that all teachers are trained in
    the subjects they teach--which is going to become a huge problem when
    all these math and science teachers retire in high school, getting
    people who are actually certified and trained to teach the courses
    they're supposed to be teaching--and provide more support for school
    districts for extra training.
        I've asked Congress to double our investment in the education
    accountability fund to help people turn around low-performing schools or
    shut them down. And I've asked Congress to double our investment in
    after-school and summer school programs.
        The Federal Government, when I became President, was spending
    nothing on these programs. Then we--I got an appropriation for $1
    million, and then $2 million, and then $40 million, and then $200
    million. Then it's $400 million this year--$450 million. And I'm trying
    to get $1 billion. If we get $1 billion, we can provide summer school in
    this country to every student and every poor, low-performing school in
    the United States of America. That is very, very important.
        So to make this strategy work, we've got to have the courage to do
    what Kentucky is doing, to identify the schools that aren't performing,
    not where the students are failing, where the schools are failing the
    students. The grownups have to take responsibility for this. Then we can
    help to turn them around. Today I am directing--that's a misnomer,
    because we agreed in advance, Secretary Riley--to begin to provide an annual report, national report on
    low-performing schools, to tell us for the first time how many of our
    Nation's public schools are failing, where they're located, what the
    States are doing to turn them around.
        Second, as we press Congress to pass our accountability legislation,
    we must ensure that the States do what they're supposed to do under
    existing laws. Therefore, I'm directing the Secretary to send teams to
    States to make sure they're meeting their responsibilities on low-
    performance schools, to work with States to apply the kind of successful
    strategies that have worked here, to identify Federal resources like

    [[Page 825]]

    these after-school grants which States can use to turn the schools
    around.
        I never cease to be amazed when I go places that there are people
    that literally don't know we have this money there for them. I'll bet
    you there are people that need this teacher money that haven't applied
    for it. And I nearly know there are people that need this after-school
    money that haven't applied for it, because we have grown this program
    very fast in response to a clear national need.
        These actions will help us to spread the lesson we have learned
    during these last 7 years. In education, investment without
    accountability can be a waste of money. But accountability without
    investment is a waste of effort. Neither will work without the other.
        Ten years ago, when things looked pretty grim for public schools,
    before a lot of these reforms got underway, the late head of the
    American Federation of Teachers, Al Shanker, who was a great friend of
    mine and a very vigorous advocate of high standards and accountability,
    said something to his fellow teachers that I thought was very moving. He
    said, we have to be willing to tell the American people the bad news
    about our public schools so that when the schools begin to turn around
    and we have good news to report, they will believe us.
        Well, today here in Kentucky and in other places across America,
    there is good news to report. The American people believe that. But they
    expect us to keep at it until the good news is the real news in every
    single school in this country.
        Thank you. Thank you for what you have done to help make that
    happen. Thank you very much.

     Note:  The President spoke at 12:10 p.m. in the gymnasium. In his
    remarks, he referred to Karen Cecil, parent, who introduced the
    President; Stuart Silberman, superintendent of schools, Daviess County;
    Gov. Paul E. Patton of Kentucky and his wife, Judi; Lt. Gov. Stephen L.
    Henry and former Gov. John Y. Brown, Jr., of Kentucky; State Attorney
    General A. B. Chandler III; State Treasurer Jonathan Miller; Kentucky
    House of Representatives Speaker Jody Richards; Mayor Waymond Morris of
    Owensboro; Diane Embry, principal, and Crystal Davidson, teacher,
    Audubon Elementary School; and former Senator Wendell Ford and his wife,
    Jean. The Executive order on actions to improve low-performing schools
    is listed in Appendix D at the end of this volume.