[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 32, Number 13 (Monday, April 1, 1996)]
[Pages 573-581]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks to the National Governors' Association Education Summit in 
Palisades, New York

March 27, 1996

    Thank you very much, Governor Miller, Governor Thompson; Lou 
Gerstner. Thank you for hosting this terribly important event. To all of 
the Governors and distinguished guests, education leaders, and business 
leaders who are here, let me say that I am also delighted to be here 
with the Secretary of Education, Governor Dick Riley. I believe that he 
and Governor Hunt and Governor Branstad and I were actually there when 
the ``Nation At Risk'' report was issued, as well as when the education 
summit was held by President Bush. I want to thank Secretary Riley for 
the work that he has done with the States and with educators all across 
the country. And I know that every one of you has worked with him, but 
I'm glad to have him here, and he's been a wonderful partner for me and 
I think for you.
    This is an extraordinary meeting of America's business leaders and 
America's Governors. I know some have raised some questions about it, 
but let me just say on the front end I think it is a very appropriate 
and a good thing to do, and I applaud those who organized it and those 
who have attended.
    The Governors, after all, have primary, indeed constitutional 
responsibility for the conditions of our public schools. And the 
business leaders know well, perhaps better than any other single group 
in America, what the consequences of our failing to get the most out of 
our students and achieve real educational excellence will be for our 
Nation.
    So I am very pleased to see you here doing this, and I want to thank 
each and every one

[[Page 574]]

of you. I also think you have a better chance than perhaps anyone else, 
even in this season, to keep the question of education beyond 
partisanship and to deal with it as an American challenge that all the 
American people must meet and must meet together.
    All of you know very well that this is a time of a dramatic 
transformation in the United States. I'm not sure if any of us fully 
understands the true implications of the changes through which we are 
all living and the responsibilities that those changes impose upon us. 
It is clear to most people that the dimensions of economic change now 
are the greatest that they have been since we moved from farm to factory 
and from rural areas to cities and towns 100 years ago.
    In his book ``The Road From Here'' Bill Gates says that the digital 
chip is leading us to the greatest transformation in communications in 
500 years, since Gutenberg printed the first Bible in Europe. If that is 
true, it is obvious beyond anyone's ability to argue that the 
educational enterprise, which has always been central to the development 
of good citizens in America as well as to a strong economy, is now more 
important than ever before.
    That means that we need a candid assessment of what is right and 
what is wrong with our educational system and what we need to do. Your 
focus on standards, your focus on assessment, your focus on technology 
is all to the good. We know that many of our schools do a very good job, 
but some of them don't. We know that many of our teachers are great, but 
some don't measure up. We know many of our communities are seizing the 
opportunities of the present and the future, but too many aren't.
    And most important, we know that--after the emphasis on education 
which goes back at least until 1983 in the whole country and to my 
native region, to the South, to the late seventies when we began to try 
to catch up economically with the rest of the country--we know that 
while the schools and the students of this country are doing better than 
they were in 1984 and better than they were in 1983, when the ``Nation 
At Risk'' was issued and in 1989 when the education summit was held at 
Charlottesville, most of them still are not meeting the standards that 
are necessary and adequate to the challenges of today. So that is really 
what we have to begin with.
    Now America has some interesting challenges that I think are 
somewhat unique to our country in this global environment in which 
education is important, and we might as well just sort of put them out 
there on the front end, not that we can resolve them today.
    The first is that we have a far more diverse group of students in 
terms of income and race and ethnicity and background and indeed living 
conditions than almost any other great country in the world.
    Second, we have a system in which both authority and financing is 
more fractured than in other countries is typically the case.
    Third, we know that our schools are burdened by social problems not 
of their making, which make the jobs of principals and teachers more 
difficult.
    And fourth, and I think most important of all, our country still has 
an attitude problem about education that I think we should resolve, that 
is even prior to the standards and the assessment issue, and that is 
that too many people in the United States think that the primary 
determinant of success and learning is either IQ or family circumstances 
instead of effort. And I don't. And I don't think any of the research 
supports that.
    So one of the things that I hope you will say is, in a positive way, 
that you believe all kids can learn and in a stronger way that you 
believe that effort is more important than IQ or income, given the right 
kind of educational opportunities, the right kind of expectations. It's 
often been said that Americans from time to time suffer from a 
revolution of rising expectations. This is one area where we need a 
revolution of rising expectations. We ought to all simply and 
forthrightly say that we believe that school is children's work and 
play, that it can be great joy, but that effort matters.
    I see one of our business leaders here, this former State senator 
from Arkansas, Senator Joe Ford, whose father was the head of our 
educational program in Arkansas for a long time. We had a lot of people 
in one-room schoolhouses 40 and 50 and 60 years ago, reading simple 
readers, who believed that ef- 

[[Page 575]]

fort was more important than IQ or income. They didn't know what IQ was. 
And we have got to change that. And Governors, every Governor and every 
business leader in this country can make a difference.
    I'm no Einstein, and not everybody can do everything, but if you 
stack this up from one to the other, all the Americans together in order 
by IQ, you couldn't stick a straw between one person and the next. And 
you know it as well as I do. Most people can learn everything they need 
to know to be good citizens and successful participants in the American 
economy and in the global economy. And I believe that unless you can 
convince your constituents that that is the truth, that all of your 
efforts to raise standards and all of your efforts to have 
accountability through tests and other assessments will not be as 
successful as they ought to be. And I think frankly, a lot of people, 
even in education, need to be reminded of that from time to time.
    Now let's get back to the good news. Thirty or 40 years ago, maybe 
even 20 years ago, no one could ever have conceived of a meeting like 
this taking place. Governors played little role in education until just 
a couple of decades ago, and business didn't regard it as their 
responsibility. In the late seventies and the early eighties this whole 
wave began to sweep America. And one important, positive thing that 
ought never to be overlooked is that the business leadership of America 
and the Governors of this country have been literally obsessed with 
education for a long time now. And that's a very good thing, because one 
of the problems with America is that we tend to be in the grip of serial 
enthusiasms. It's the hula hoop today and something else tomorrow. Boy, 
that dates me, doesn't it? [Laughter]
    In this country the Governors have displayed a remarkable 
consistency of commitment to education, and at least since 1983, the 
business community has displayed that commitment. And I think it's fair 
to say that all of us have learned some things as we have gone along, 
which is what has brought you to this point, that there is a--you 
understand now, and I've heard Lou Gerstner talk about it in his, almost 
his mantra about standards--that we understand that the next big step 
has to be to have some meaningful and appropriately high standards and 
then hold people accountable for them.
    I think it's worth noting that the 1983 ``Nation At Risk'' report 
did do some good things. Almost every State in the country went back and 
revised its curriculum requirement. Many revised their class size 
requirements. Many did other things to upgrade teacher training or to 
increase college scholarships or to do a lot of other things.
    In 1989 I was privileged to be in Charlottesville working with 
Governor Branstad and with Governor Campbell, primarily, as we were 
trying to get all the Governors together to develop the statement at the 
education summit with President Bush. And that was the first time there 
had ever been a bipartisan national consensus on educational goals.
    The realization was in 1989 was that 6 years after a ``Nation At 
Risk,'' all these extra requirements were being put into education, but 
nobody had focused on what the end game was. What did we want America to 
look like? It's worth saying that we wanted every child to show up for 
school ready to learn, that we wanted to be proficient in certain core 
courses and were willing to assess our students to see if we were, that 
we wanted to prepare our people for the world of work, that we wanted to 
be extra good in math and science and to overcome our past deficiencies. 
All the things that were in those educational goals were worth saying.
    Another thing that the Charlottesville summit did that I think is 
really worth emphasizing is that it defined for the first time, from the 
Governors up, what the Federal role in education ought to be and what it 
should not be. I went back this morning, just on the way up, and I read 
the Charlottesville statement about what the Governors then unanimously 
voted that the Federal role should be and what it should not be.
    When I became President and I asked Dick Riley to become Secretary 
of Education, I said that our legislative agenda ought to be consistent, 
completely consistent with what the Governors had said at 
Charlottesville. So, for example, the Governors said at Charlottesville, 
the Federal Government has a bigger responsibility to help people show 
up for school prepared to learn.

[[Page 576]]

So we emphasized things like more funds for Head Start and more 
investment in trying to improve the immunization rates of kids and other 
health indicators; and more responsibility for access to higher 
education, so we tried to reform the student loan program and invest 
more money in Pell grants and national service and things like that; and 
then, more responsibility to give greater flexibility to the States in K 
through 12 and to try to promote reform without defining how any of this 
should be done.
    And so that's what Goals 2000 was about. We tried to have a system 
in which States and mostly local school districts could pursue world-
class standards based on their own plans for grassroots reform. And we 
overhauled the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, as we redid title 
I to do one thing that I think is very important: We took out of what 
was then in the law for Chapter 1, which was lower educational 
expectations for poor children. It was an outrage, and we took it out of 
the law. I don't believe that poor children should be expected to 
perform at lower levels than other children.
    And Dick Riley, since he has been Secretary of Education, has cut 
Federal regulations over States and local school districts by more than 
50 percent. It seems to me that that is consistent with exactly what the 
Governors said at Charlottesville they wanted done.
    Now the effort to have national standards, I think it's fair to say, 
has been less than successful. The history standards and the English 
standards effort did not succeed for reasons that have been well 
analyzed, although I'm not sure the debate was entirely worthless; I 
think the debate itself did some good.
    But there are recommended standards that have been widely embraced, 
coming out of the math teachers, that most people think are quite good, 
and the preliminary indications for science are encouraging. And I want 
to say again, it would be wrong to say that there's been no progress 
since 1983. The number of young people taking core courses has jumped 
from 13 percent in '82 to 52 percent in '94. The national math and 
science scores are up a grade since 1983, half of all the 4-year-olds 
now attend preschool, 86 percent of all our young people are completing 
high school. We're almost up to the 90 percent that was in the national 
education goals. That is progress.
    But what we have learned since Charlottesville and what you are here 
to hammer home to America is that the overall levels of learning are not 
enough and that there are still significant barriers in various schools 
to meeting higher standards.
    I accept your premise; we can only do better with tougher standards 
and better assessment, and you should set the standards. I believe that 
is absolutely right. And that will be the lasting legacy of this 
conference. I also believe, along with Mr. Gerstner and the others who 
are here, that it's very important not only for businesses to speak out 
for reform but for business leaders to be knowledgeable enough to know 
what reform to speak out for and what to emphasize and how to hammer 
home the case for higher standards, as well as how to help local school 
districts change some of the things that they are now doing so that they 
have a reasonable chance at meeting these standards.
    Let me just go through now what I think we should do in challenging 
the country on standards for students, as well as for teachers and 
schools. I suppose that I have spent more time in classrooms than any 
previous President, partly because I was a Governor for 12 years and 
partly because I still do it with some frequency. I believe the most 
important thing you can do is to have high expectations for students--to 
make them believe they can learn, to tell them they're going to have to 
learn really difficult, challenging things, to assess whether they're 
learning or not, and to hold them accountable as well as to reward them.
    Most children are very eager to learn. Those that aren't have 
probably been convinced they can't. We can do better with that. I 
believe that once you have high standards and high expectations, there 
is an unlimited number of things that can be done. But I also believe 
that there have to be consequences. I watched your panel last night, and 
I thought--the moment of levity on the panel was when Al Shanker was 
asked, when I was teaching school and I would give students homework, 
they said, ``Does it count?'' That's the thing I remember about the 
panel

[[Page 577]]

last night. All of you remember, too. You laughed, right? [Laughter] 
``Does it count?'' And the truth is that in the world we're living in 
today, ``does it count'' has to mean something, particularly in places 
where there haven't been any standards for a long time.
    So if the States are going to go back and raise standards so that 
you're not only trying to increase the enrollment in core courses, 
you're trying to make the core courses themselves mean more. I heard 
Governor Hunt last night say he'd be willing to settle for reading and 
writing and math and science, I think were the ones you said.
    Once you have to--if you're going to go back and define what's in 
those core courses and you're going to lift it up, you have to be 
willing, then, to hold the students accountable for whether they have 
achieved that or not. And again, another thing that Mr. Shanker said 
that I've always believed, we have always downgraded teaching to the 
test, but if you're going to know whether people learn what you expect 
them to know, then you have to test them on what you expect them to 
know.
    So I believe that if you want the standards movement to work, first 
you have to do the hard work in deciding what it is you expect children 
to learn. But then you have to have an assessment system, however you 
design it, in your own best judgment at the State level, that says, no 
more social promotions, no more free passes. If you want people to 
learn, learning has to mean something. That's what I believe. I don't 
believe you can succeed unless you are prepared to have an assessment 
system with consequences.
    In Arkansas in 1983 when we redid the educational standards, we had 
a very controversial requirement that young people pass the 8th grade 
tests to go on to high school. And not everybody passed it. And we let 
people take it more than once. I think it's fine to do that.
    But even today, after 13 years, I think there are only five States 
in the country today which require a promotion for either grade to grade 
or school to school for its young people, to require tests for that. I 
believe that if you have meaningful standards that you have confidence 
in, that you believe if they're met your children will know what they 
need to know, you shouldn't be afraid to find out if they're learning 
it, and you shouldn't be deterred by people saying this is cruel, this 
is unfair, or whatever they say.
    The worst thing you can do is send people all the way through school 
with a diploma they can't read. And you're not being unfair to people if 
you give them more than one chance and if at the same time you improve 
the teaching and the operation of the schools in which they are. If you 
believe these kids can learn, you have to give them a chance to 
demonstrate it. This is only a cruel, short-sighted thing to do if you 
are convinced that there are limitations on what the American children 
can do. And I just don't believe that.
    So that, I think, is the most important thing. I believe every 
State, if you're going to have meaningful standards, must require a test 
for children to move, let's say, from elementary to middle school or 
from middle school to high school or to have a full-meaning high school 
diploma. And I don't think they should measure just minimum competency. 
You should measure what you expect these standards to measure.
    You know, when we instituted any kind of test at home, I was always 
criticized by the fact that the test wasn't hard enough. But I think it 
takes time to transform a system, and you may decide it takes time to 
transform a system. But you will never know whether your standards are 
being met unless you have some sort of measurement and have some sort of 
accountability. And while I believe they should be set by the States and 
the testing mechanism should be approved by the States, we shouldn't kid 
ourselves. Being promoted ought to mean more or less the same thing in 
Pasadena, California, that it does in Palisades, New York. In a global 
society, it ought to mean more or less the same thing.
    I was always offended by the suggestion that the kids who grew up in 
the Mississippi Delta in Arkansas, which is the poorest place in 
America, shouldn't have access to the same learning opportunities that 
other people should and couldn't learn. I don't believe that.
    So I think the idea--I heard the way Governor Engler characterized 
it last night, I thought was pretty good. You want a non-Federal, 
national mechanism to sort of share

[[Page 578]]

this information so that you'll at least know how you're doing compared 
to one another. That's a good start. That's a good way to begin this. I 
also believe that we shouldn't ignore the progress that's been made by 
the goals panel, since Governor Romer was first leader of that going 
through Governor Engler, and by the National Assessment on Educational 
Progress. I know a lot of you talked about that last night. They've done 
a lot of good things, and we can learn a lot from them. We don't have to 
reinvent the wheel here.
    I also would like to go back and emphasize something I heard 
Governor Hunt say last night. I think we should begin with a concrete 
standard for reading and writing because the most troubling thing to me 
is that we've been through a decade in which math and science scores 
have risen and reading scores have stayed flat. Intel recently had to 
turn away hundreds of applicants because they lacked basic reading and 
writing skills.
    Now that will present you with an immediate problem because if you 
want to measure reading and writing, you will not be able just to have a 
multiple choice test which can be graded by a machine. You'll have to 
recognize that teachers do real work with kids when they teach them how 
to write, and you have to give them the time and support to do that. And 
then there has to be some way of evaluating that. I know that's harder 
and more expensive, but it really matters whether a child can read and 
write.
    And for all the excitement about the computers in the schools--and I 
am a big proponent of it--I would note that when we started with a 
computer program in our school, and I believe when Governor Caperton 
started in West Virginia, he started in the early grades for the precise 
purpose that technology should be used first to give children the proper 
grounding in basic skills. So I think that's quite important.
    Secretary Riley says that every child should be able to read 
independently by the end of the third grade. And parenthetically, that 
if that were the standard, I think we would be more successful in 
getting parents to read to their children every night, which would 
revolutionize the whole system of education anyway.
    The second thing I think we have to do is to face the fact that if 
we want to have these standards for children, standards and tests, we 
have to have a system that rewards and inspires and demands higher 
standards of teachers. They, after all, do this work. The rest of us 
talk about it, and they do it.
    So that means that first of all, you've got to get the most talented 
people in there. There's been a lot of talk about this for a decade now, 
but most States and school districts still need work on their 
certification rules. We should not bar qualified, even brilliant young 
people from becoming teachers. The Teach For America group in my home 
State did a wonderful job, and a lot of those young kids wind up staying 
and teaching, even though they can make 2 and 3 times as much money 
doing something else. Every State should, in my view, review that.
    I also believe any time you're trying to hold teachers to higher 
standards they should be rewarded when they perform. I know that in 
South Carolina and Kentucky, if schools markedly improve their 
performance, they get bonuses and the teachers get the benefit. That's 
not a bad thing; that's a good thing, and we should have more of that.
    I want to thank Governor Hunt for the work he's done on the National 
Board for Professional Teaching Standards. We had the first group of 
teachers who are board certified in the White House not very long ago. 
Every State should have a system, in my opinion, for encouraging these 
teachers to become board certified. The Federal Government doesn't have 
anything to do with that. Encourage these teachers to become board 
certified because they have to demonstrate not only knowledge but 
teaching skills. And when they achieve that level they should be 
rewarded. There should be extra rewards when they do that.
    We also need a system that doesn't look the other way if a teacher 
is burned out or not performing up to standard. There ought to be a fair 
process for removing teachers who aren't competent, but the process also 
has to be much faster and far less costly than it is. I read the other 
day that in New York it can cost as much as $200,000 to dismiss a 
teacher who is incompetent. In Glen Ellyn, Illinois, a school district 
spent $70,000 to dis- 

[[Page 579]]

miss a high school math teacher who couldn't do basic algebra and let 
the students sleep in class. That is wrong. We should do more to reward 
good teachers; we should have a system that is fair to teachers but 
moves much more expeditiously and much more cheaply in holding teachers 
accountable.
    So States and school systems and teachers unions need to be working 
together to make it tougher to get licensed and recertified, easier and 
less costly to get teachers who can't teach out of the classrooms, and 
clearly set rewards for teachers who are performing, especially if they 
become board certified or in some State-defined way prove themselves 
excellent.
    The third thing I think we have to do is to hold schools accountable 
for results. We have known now for a long time--we have no excuses for 
not doing--we have known for a long time that the most important player 
in this drama besides the teachers and the students are the school 
principals, the building principals. And yet, still, not every State has 
a system for holding the school districts accountable for having good 
principals in all these schools and then giving the principals the 
authority they need to do the job, getting out of their way and holding 
them accountable, both on the up side and the down side. To me, that is 
still the most important thing. Every school I go into, I can stay there 
about 30 minutes and tell you pretty much what the principal has done to 
establish a school culture, an atmosphere of learning, a system of 
accountability, a spirit of adventure. You can just feel it, and it's 
still the most important thing.
    Secondly, the business community can do a lot of work with the 
Governors to help these school districts reinvent their budgets, I 
think. There are still too many school districts spending way too much 
money on administration and too little money on education and 
instruction. And there needs to be some real effort put into that, that 
goes beyond rhetoric. I mean, I was given these statistics, which I 
assume are true because I had it vetted four different times--I hate to 
use numbers that I haven't--if it is true that New York City spends 
$8,000 a student on education, but only $44 goes to books and other 
classroom materials, that's a disgrace. That's wrong. And that's true in 
a lot of other school districts.
    We cannot ask the American people to spend more on education until 
we do a better job with the money we've got now. That's an area where I 
think the business community can make a major, major contribution. A lot 
of you have had to restructure your own operations; a lot of you have 
had to achieve far higher levels of productivity. If we can reduce the 
Federal Government by 200,000 people without undermining our essential 
mission, we can do a much better job in the school districts of the 
country.
    Let me also say I think that we ought to encourage every State to do 
what most States are now doing, which is to provide more options for 
parents. You know, the terms of the public school choice legislation and 
the charter schools--a lot of you have done a very good job with the 
charter schools. But I'm excited about the idea that educators and 
parents get to actually start schools, create and manage them, and stay 
open only if they do a good job within the public school system. Every 
charter school I visited was an exciting place. Today, 21 of you allow 
charter schools. There are over 250 schools which are open; 100 more are 
going to open next year. Freed up from regulation and top-down 
bureaucracy, focusing on meeting higher standards, the schools have to 
be able to meet these standards if you impose them.
    Secretary Riley has helped 11 States to start new schools, and in 
the balanced budget plan I submitted to Congress last week, there is $40 
million in seed money to help start 3,000 more charter schools over the 
next 5 years, which would be a tenfold increase. That may become the 
order of the day. So I believe we need standards and accountability for 
students, for teachers, and for schools.
    Let me just mention two other things briefly. I don't believe you 
can possibly minimize--and a lot of the Governors I know have been in 
these schools--you cannot minimize how irrelevant this discussion would 
seem to a teacher who doesn't feel safe walking the halls of his or her 
school or how utterly hopeless it seems to students who have to look 
over their shoulders when they're walking to and from school. So I 
believe that we have to work together to continue to

[[Page 580]]

make our schools safe and our students held to a reasonable standard of 
conduct, as well.
    You know, we had a teacher in Washington last week who was mugged in 
a hallway by a gang of intruders, not students, a gang of intruders who 
were doing drugs and didn't even belong on the school grounds. We have 
got to keep working on that. All the Federal Government can do is give 
resources and pass laws. That's another thing the business community can 
help with, district after district. This entire discussion we have had 
is completely academic unless there is a safe and a disciplined and a 
drug-free environment in these schools.
    We passed the Safe and Drug-Free Schools Act, the Gun-Free Schools 
Act. We supported random drug testing in schools. We have supported the 
character education movement. We've almost ended lawsuits over religious 
issues by the guidelines that Secretary Riley and the Attorney General 
issued, showing that our schools don't have to be religion-free zones. 
We have worked very hard to help our schools do their job here.
    The next thing I hope we can do, all of us, in this regard is to 
work to help our schools stay open longer. Our budget contains $14 
million for helping people set up these community schools to stay open 
longer hours. But remember that 3 in the afternoon to 6 in the evening 
are the peak hours for juvenile crime, and all that comes back into the 
schools. So I think that's another thing we really need to look at. A 
lot of these schools do not have the resources today to stay open longer 
hours, but they would if they could.
    And one of the primary targets I would have if I were a local leader 
trying to redo my district school budget is to reduce the amount spent 
on administration so that I could invest more money in keeping it open 
longer hours, especially for the latch-key kids and the other kids that 
are in trouble that don't have any other place to go. So that's 
something that I think is very important.
    Finally, let me just echo what Governor Miller said about the 
technology. We did have a barnraising in California, and we hooked up 
actually more than 20 percent of the classrooms to the Internet on a 
single day. But we need every classroom and every library in every 
school in America hooked up to the Internet as quickly as possible. We 
set a goal as the year 2000; we could actually get there more quickly. I 
propose that in the budget, a $2 billion fund to help the communities 
who don't have the money to meet the challenge, but every community, 
every State in America, at least, has a high-tech community that could 
help get this done.
    The Congress passed a very fine Telecommunications Act that I signed 
not very long ago which gives preferential treatment to people in 
isolated rural areas or inner-city areas for access to schools and 
hospitals. So the infrastructure, the framework is there.
    Anything you can do to help do that, I think is good if the 
educators use the technology in the proper way. And I'll just close with 
this example. I was in the Union City School District in New Jersey not 
very long ago. That school district was about to be closed under the 
State of New Jersey's school bankruptcy law, which I think, by the way, 
is very good, holding school districts accountable, and they can 
actually lose their ability to operate as an independent district in New 
Jersey and the State takes them over if they keep failing.
    There are a lot of first-generation immigrant children in that 
school. It was basically a poor school. Bell Atlantic went in and worked 
with others. They put computers in all the classrooms. They also put 
computer outlets in the homes of a lot of these parents. And you had--I 
talked to a man who came here from El Salvador 10 years ago who is now 
E-mailing his child's principal and teacher to figure out how the kid's 
doing.
    But the bottom line is the dropout rate is now below the State 
average, and the test scores are above the State average in an immigrant 
district of poor children, partly because of the technology and partly 
because the business community said, ``Hey, you kids are important,'' 
and partly because the place has a good principal and good teachers.
    But I do think that the business community--if you look at the 
technology as an instrument to achieve your higher standards and to 
infuse high expectations into the community and to give the kids the 
confidence they need that they can learn, then this technology issue is 
a very important one.

[[Page 581]]

    Well, that's what I hope we'll do. I think we ought to have the 
standards. You should set them. We'll support you however you want. But 
they won't work unless you're going to really see whether the standards 
are being met and unless there are consequences to those who meet and to 
those who do not. I think you have to reward the good teachers and get 
more good people in teaching and that we have to facilitate the removal 
of those who aren't performing.
    I think the schools need more authority and should be held more 
accountable. We've got to redo these central school budgets until we 
have squeezed down the overhead costs and put it back into education. 
And unless we have an environment in which there is safety and 
discipline, we won't succeed. And if we do have an environment in which 
the business community brings in more technology, we will succeed more 
quickly.
    I believe that this meeting will prove historic. And again, let me 
say, I thank the Governors and the business leaders who brought it 
about. In 1983 we said, ``We've got a problem in our schools. We need to 
take tougher courses. We need to have other reforms.'' In 1989 we said, 
``We need to know where we're going. We need goals.'' Here in 1996, 
you're saying you can have all of the goals in the world, but unless 
somebody really has meaningful standards and a system of measuring 
whether you meet those standards, you won't achieve your goals. That is 
the enduring gift you have given to America's schoolchildren and to 
America's future.
    The Governors have to lead the way, the business community has to 
stay involved. Don't let anybody deter you and say you shouldn't be 
doing it. You can go back home and reach out to all the other people in 
the community because, in the end, what the teachers and the principals 
and more importantly even what the parents and the children do is what 
really counts. But we can get there together. We have to start now with 
what you're trying to do. We have to have high standards and high 
accountability. If you can achieve that, you have given a great gift to 
the future of this country.
    Thank you very much.

Note: The President spoke at 12:25 p.m. in the Watson Room at the IBM 
Conference Center. In his remarks, he referred to Gov. Bob Miller of 
Nevada, NGA vice chairman; Gov. Tommy G. Thompson of Wisconsin, NGA 
chairman; Louis Gerstner, chief executive officer, IBM; Gov. James B. 
Hunt, Jr., of North Carolina; Gov. Terry E. Branstad of Iowa; Gov. 
Carroll W. Campbell of South Carolina; Gov. Tom Carper of Delaware; Gov. 
Gaston Caperton of West Virginia; Gov. John Engler of Michigan; Gov. Roy 
Romer of Colorado; and Albert Shanker, president, American Federation of 
Teachers.