    [Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 33, Number 4 (Monday, January 27, 1997)]
    [Pages 74-80]
    [Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

    <R04>
    Remarks to the First In The World Consortium in Northbrook

    January 22, 1997

        Thank you very much. First of all, let me thank Mary Hamblet for her
    introduction and for that fine statement about the thrill of teaching
    and the changes of teaching. Would all the teachers in the audience
    please stand? Thank you very much. [Applause] I thank you all very, very
    much.
        Thank you, Dr. Kimmelman, for your leadership and the First In The
    World Consortium. I thank all the other superintendents and
    administrators who are here. Thank you, Congressman Porter, for your
    leadership for education and, I might add, for your leadership for safe
    streets in the United States, in the Congress. I appreciate that very
    much.
        Thank you, Secretary Riley. Everything Dr. Kimmelman said about you
    was true, even if you did have to write his speech for him. [Laughter] I
    like it that the Secretary of Education is prouder of being a
    grandfather than anything else in his life. I think that's a good signal
    for America's future.
        We're glad to be joined today also by Mayor Daley and Congressman
    Blagojevich. Welcome. Cook County Assessor Tom Hines; your State
    senator, Cathy Parker. Welcome. Thank you for being here. Village
    presidents Nancy Firfer and Mark Damisch, thank you also for coming. I
    thank the Glenbrook Concert Orchestra for the music. Thank you all.
        I am honored to be here with all of you, humbled and encouraged by
    your passionate commitment to education. I came today to talk about your
    remarkable success, hoping it will reverberate all across America and
    people will want to know what has been done here and how, and to talk
    about why and how this must be done all across America.
        As we come to the end of this century and set about the business of
    preparing America for the next century, as I said in my Inaugural
    Address, it is especially important that we be able to say we have kept
    the American dream of opportunity alive for all of our children. I think
    all of us know in our heart of hearts that that will be a slogan and a
    dream only, unless we give to all of our children and expect from all of
    our children world-class educational opportunities and world-class
    learning.
        What I want to do in the next 2 weeks leading up to my State of the
    Union Address to the Congress and to the American people, is to lay out
    some concrete things we can do in Washington to help to achieve those
    objectives. We do live in a time of enormous possibility. I was just--
    you know, it's--the last couple of days is the first free time I've had
    in a while--[laughter]--and I was trying to create some more space in
    our living quarters in the White House, and I was moving some reference
    books around that our daughter sometimes uses and her father and mother
    sometime use. But I was--there was one on the Age of Reason and one on
    the Age of Enlightenment. And I really do think there's a good chance
    that the 21st century will be called something like the Age of
    Possibility or the Age of Promise, when people write about it a hundred
    years from now, because it really will be possible for more people
    across the world to live out their dreams and live up to their God-given
    abilities than ever before in human history. It will be possible. But
    ``possible'' or an ``Age of Promise,'' those are operative words. There
    are no guarantees here.
        And in order to realize that promise, we've got to make sure our
    people are prepared for it. There is a veritable revolution in the way
    we work and live because of science and technology. The world which was
    once divided by the cold war is now united by not only free markets and
    open trade but by common security challenges that threaten all open
    societies. Young people are continually entering jobs that weren't
    invented a couple of years ago. The young people in this great hall
    today will be doing jobs, many of them that have not been imagined by
    any of us here. And it's very important to understand that.
        I spent a day at the National Institute of Health, not very long
    ago, going through in some detail the status of the human genome

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    project. And it is clear to me that before very long, when young parents
    like Secretary Riley's son and daughter-in-law come home with a baby
    from the hospital, and there really will be a map of the baby's genetic
    code available to the parents. Some of it, of course, will occasionally
    be troubling and profoundly worrying. But by and large what it will do
    is to give us a way of maximizing the health and potential of all people
    from medical care to diet to exercise to understanding how they can best
    live their lives from the beginning. No one would ever have imagined
    this.
        Just in the last couple of years, we've seen the first successful
    treatment for stroke. It now seems possible that we might actually be
    able to repair some of the damage done by strokes. We have uncovered two
    genes that seem to be at the basis of either the cause of, or dramatic
    propensity to, breast cancer. We have seen nerve transplants to the
    spines of laboratory animals which has given movement to the lower limbs
    of laboratory animals that had their spines severed.
        The Internet was literally, as I said in the Inaugural Address, the
    mystical province of physicists 10 years ago. Today it's an encyclopedia
    that 8- and 9-year-old kids teach their parents how to use. [Laughter]
        When I became President, 3 million Americans--thanks in large
    measure to technology--were working in their homes full-time. At the end
    of my first term, 12 million Americans were. At the end of my second
    term, it is estimated that 30 million Americans will be. Not all good--
    it will also pose some new challenges: How can we continue to maintain
    our community? How can people work together in teams productively if
    they either need to or have to do some of their work at home?
        But change is out there. At a time like this, it is critical that we
    not only know certain things but that we be able to learn for a
    lifetime. And we know that requires an enormous grounding, not only in
    the subjects we master but in the way we learn, which is why I was so
    glad in the introduction to hear Mary talk about different ways of
    teaching. Because the way teachers are teaching now engage the children
    in a learning process that they can then apply to any other subject that
    they have to face throughout their lives, so that they can become
    lifetime learners.
        Now, this is really not all that new. Education has been at the
    heart of America's progress for over 200 years. First of all, our
    Founding Fathers were highly literate people. Where would we be if
    Thomas Jefferson had known nothing about the great philosophers who went
    before him?
        Right after the Civil War, as the country was spreading westward and
    occupying the whole continent, the Congress provided for the
    establishment of land-grant institutions, like the great State
    universities in Illinois, in my home State, all across the country.
    Abraham Lincoln really oversaw it during the Civil War, the idea, but
    the institutions themselves were actually created after the Civil War.
    It dramatically changed America, the idea that we could actually give
    people a college degree who lived in a place as far west as Illinois,
    which was on the edge of the frontier when Mr. Lincoln was elected
    President.
        Then, at the beginning of this century, we finally made public
    schools like this available to all of our children. People moved from
    farm to factory, from the country to the city, and it became essential
    that everyone at least have some basic education. After World War II,
    out of a sense of national obligation, we gave all of the veterans a
    chance to go to college, and it was one of the central elements in
    exploding the great middle class and creating the kind of middle class
    communities we have here in this consortium. It was a phenomenal thing.
        Now, the Government did not do that for anyone. All it said was, you
    served your country; here's a college degree if you can get it--if you
    can get it. And that's the beauty of education; you can't really give it
    to anyone. You can put it out there, and you can help people, but the
    students themselves have to seize it.
        Now, this has been an obsession of mine for a long time. I grew up
    in a State--when I was born in my home State, our per capita income was
    only a little over half the national average right after World War II.
    And I know that everything good that's happened there in an economic way
    has been in no small measure the result of our elevating the levels of
    education. In a much more personal sense,

    [[Page 76]]

    I am absolutely certain that I would not be standing here as President
    today if it had not been for my teachers. It is clear, and I'm certain.
        When I became Governor almost 20 years ago now, we began to do
    things to try to help advance the cause of education. My daughter just
    had one of her best friends up here to the Inauguration who is a student
    at a school of mathematics and science that I established as one of my
    last acts as Governor. Dr. Kimmelman mentioned the National Education
    Goals, which were promulgated by the Governors and President Bush in
    1989. I had the honor of being the Democratic Governor whose job it was
    to draft the goals.
        So I know a lot about those goals. And I thought they were very good
    then; I think they're better now, because the wealth of our country now
    no longer primarily depends upon our oil, our gold, our land, or our
    factories. It is now and will increasingly be measured in the minds and
    creativity of our people and our achievements in science and technology
    and also in the humanities, because we have to learn how to manage all
    this new power we're giving to ourselves.
        We have to, in short, commit ourselves for the first time now to
    have the best education in the world, not just for the few but for the
    many. We have the best higher education system in the world; there's no
    question about it. But we do not have the best system of education in
    the world from start to finish for all of our children, and we cannot be
    satisfied until that is exactly what we have in the United States of
    America. Now, the Congressman said this; the Secretary said this; Dr.
    Kimmelman said this. In America, we have a unique heritage. Our
    educational system is a local system governed by local school boards and
    the people that appoint; governed by laws enacted at the State level,
    not the national level. And the Federal Government's role in education
    basically is a fairly recent vintage. It goes back about 30 years or so.
        But essentially, what the Federal Government has tried to do over
    time is to equalize opportunity in education by opening the doors of
    college to more people, by recognizing that some districts don't have
    the resources and some States don't have the resources to meet the needs
    of people, by dealing with the problems of populations who have needs
    that may be more expensive. And I think one of the great advances in
    education in my lifetime has been the provision of educational services
    through the school systems to students with disabilities, enabling them
    to achieve enormous things.
        And then, increasingly, over the last 10 to 12 years, the Education
    Department has tried to do more in research and in spurring reform. And
    since I have been in this office, we have moved in all those areas.
    We've dramatically increased the number of people in Head Start. We've
    improved and expanded college scholarships, college loans, and work
    study, adding 200,000 more places there at the end of the last Congress.
    Thank you, Congressman Porter. And the biggest increase in Pell grants
    in 20 years. We've done that. We've helped 70,000 young people work
    their way through college by serving their community in the AmeriCorps
    program.
        And we did pass two things that I thought were very important for
    grassroots reform. One was the so-called school to work program, which
    helps deal with young people who aren't going to 4-year colleges but do
    need further education. We know now that unless you have at least 2
    years of education after high school, young people this day and age are
    almost certain to be put in jobs where their incomes go down, not up.
        The other was the Goals 2000 program, which had a simple idea. We
    should have a system by which school districts and States can establish
    very high national standards but have more flexibility school by school,
    district by district, to decide how to meet those standards. That's what
    Goals 2000 was about. So it just simply says, we at the national level
    will give the States some money and then the States can give it to
    school districts. If they will figure out--if they will, A, set high
    standards for themselves and then, B, figure out how they want to meet
    those standards and be held accountable for them.
        And that's what this First In The World Consortium did. There is no
    better model for what we were trying to do in the entire United States
    of America than what you have

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    done here. And you should be very proud of yourselves.
        Now, as we look to the next 4 years, there are some things that I'd
    like to do in that first category--that basket of things I mentioned. I
    do think there are more things we need to do in the area of equal
    opportunity and helping deal with resource problems. The most important
    thing we can do is to open the doors of college to all and to make sure
    that the first 2 years of college become as universal by the year 2000
    as a high school diploma is today, and I think--that's clear that we
    know how to do that.
        We have proposed a $1,500 tax credit for people for the first 2
    years of college, which is the cost of a typical community college
    tuition in America; a $10,000 a year tax deduction for the cost of any
    college tuition--I can see you adding it up now--[laughter]--and making
    it easier for more people to take out IRA's and then withdraw from them,
    tax-free, if the money is used to pay for a college education. I think
    all of those things will help.
        We've proposed to collapse all these Federal programs, about 70 of
    them, that pay for various kinds of job training and get rid of all of
    them, put the money in a fund and send every unemployed or underemployed
    person who would be eligible for any of them a simple voucher, a skills
    grant that they could then take to the nearest community college or
    other educational institution to decide on their own what kind of
    training they need, which I think is a very important idea.
        We have funds in there to complete our work of connecting all of our
    schools to the information superhighway by the year 2000, which will
    make it possible for the first time in history for students in the
    poorest or in the most remote school districts to have access to the
    same information other children have, in the same way at the same time.
    It can literally revolutionize educational opportunity in a way that I
    believe is very important.
        And finally, it's not a problem here, but I've spent a lot of time
    in our schools, and it's very hard to lift children up in schools that
    are falling down. The educational infrastructure of the country has
    deteriorated dramatically, number one. Number two, we have for the first
    time a group of young people coming in that are going to be bigger than
    the baby boom cohort. We have now the largest number of young people in
    our schools in history. I'm glad for that; it takes a big burden off us
    baby boomers that--[laughter]--the kids are taking over again. It also
    means great things for how we're going to pay for all of our retirement
    several years down the road. [Laughter]
        But in the near term, I have championed a proposal that has been
    spearheaded by Senator Carol Moseley-Braun that will spark a 20 percent
    increase in school construction and renovation that I think is very
    important, by having the Federal Government use limited monies to
    leverage down the interest rates when school districts make an extra
    effort to do things that have to be done in their schools. That is also
    important. And finally, for the districts that need it, I also have been
    a great champion of the charter school program, and that is all in our
    budget. The mayor and I are going down to Chicago in a few moments to
    talk to the school board about that.
        Now, all of these things will help, but how are we going to get the
    standards? There are two things that we're going to do in the next 4
    years, I hope, that I believe will make all of the difference. Number
    one is we are going to hire 30,000 reading specialists to mobilize a
    million volunteers to teach every 8-year-old in the country to read
    independently by the third grade. Now, we can talk all about the
    standards in the world, but if the children literally cannot read--an
    astonishing percentage of our young people are not proficient in reading
    when they have to learn these things--then we can't achieve very much
    later on.
        It is true that our student population is the most diverse in
    history in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, national origin. But that
    can be a great asset for the United States. There is no other large
    democracy as diverse as ours. And in a global society, in a global
    economy, that's a huge, huge asset. But we have to have the language of
    common parlance in order to enable us all to function together. And we
    simply have to provide the resources and the people, and we're going to
    need a lot of volunteers to do this, but it will literally revolutionize
    education in

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    America if we have universal literacy by the third grade. And that is
    the goal of this, and I hope all of you will support that.
        But the most important thing we can do is something that the Federal
    Government should not do directly, but something I'm convinced will not
    happen unless we get out here and beat the drum for it and work for it,
    and that is to have recognized high standards for math and science and
    other basic subjects that are national in scope, measured by national
    and international standards, adopted locally, implemented locally, but
    nationally recognized and nationally tested throughout the United
    States. Until we do that, we will never know whether we have achieved
    our goal of international excellence in education for every student in
    the United States. And I ask your support for that.
        This has never happened. People have talked about this. When we
    wrote the national education goals, we anticipated that we would have to
    develop a set of national standards, not Federal Government standards,
    national standards. The councils of mathematics teachers and science
    teachers have done a lot of work on this. A lot of work has been done on
    this.
        But nobody has yet been willing to say, or at least we haven't had
    enough people willing to say, whether they were Governors or State
    superintendents of education or local school boards, ``We're all going
    to accept these, and we want to have some tests we can give to our
    students which will measure not how smart they are, not what they might
    have happened to learn but whether they know the things that we say are
    essential for every student to know in math and in science in order to
    succeed and win in the world they're going to live in.'' That is what we
    must do as a nation, and we have delayed too long. We shouldn't delay
    any more. By the time we start the new century, we ought to have these
    standards adopted, embraced, and evaluated in every school district in
    that United States, and I want you to lead the way, just as you are
    here.
        I have heard all the arguments in the world against this. But no one
    has yet made a compelling case to me for how calculus is different in
    Chicago from Little Rock, Arkansas, or Cody, Wyoming, or for that
    matter, Germany or Singapore or any other place in the world. That is
    what is the genius behind what you've done here with this First In The
    World education consortium.
        We already know we're not doing well enough as a nation. What our
    students in general learned in math in the eighth grade is learned in
    Japan in the seventh grade. Even more troubling to me, what each year
    students in Germany and Japan learn 10 to 20 math subjects in depth, our
    students are asked to cover 35 math subjects, and therefore don't learn
    any of them in depth.
        Last year, educators around the world gave a half a million
    students, including 40,000 in the United States, the same test at the
    same time to give us a clear picture--our first clear picture--of what
    world-class education really means and how close we are to meeting it.
    We learned that our eighth graders are above the international average
    in science but below it in math. We know that every child in America,
    however--we can see that from the tests--we know that every child in
    America can meet these high standards if we have the courage and the
    vision simply to recognize the standards, to set them as the bar we're
    trying to jump over, to teach them, and to test whether children have
    learned them.
        I do not understand why we are so afraid to do this. Don't we
    believe in our children more than this? And I do not believe there is a
    rule that says if you happen to be poor, you can't learn these things. I
    don't believe that, either. When we were writing these goals--I remember
    it was about 2:30 in the morning--we got to this thing, ``What are we
    going to say about math and science?'' And somebody said, ``Well, we're
    going to be--we're going to be first in the world in math and science in
    the 21st century.'' And another person said, ``Well, that will never
    happen. Now, how can we set a goal we know we can't meet?'' So they
    looked at me and said, ``What do you think, Bill?'' And I said, ``Well,
    okay, suppose we just say our goal is to be third in the world.''
    [Laughter] There was no more discussion. We wrote the goal. Our goal was
    to be first in the world.
        And this is not political rhetoric. Every single examination of the
    capacity of the human brain has shown that over 90 percent of the

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    people in our country can learn way over 90 percent of what they need to
    know to do very, very well in the world we're going to live in. Sure, it
    will be harder for some than others. Some subjects are harder for some
    people than others. Not everybody will know everything on every exam,
    but we can do this. And we can no longer hide behind our love of local
    control of the schools and use that as an excuse not to hold ourselves
    to high standards. It has nothing to do with local control.
        There's no school board in America that controls the content of
    algebra. I just left a junior high school where I saw these young people
    making their own automobiles out of paper and rubber bands and paper
    clips. Stand up there. Where are the students in that class? Here they
    are. All of the students in the class I just visited, stand up.
    [Applause] So they built these light little cars with their paper
    wheels, and they wound up this propeller with a rubber band that was
    tied across the whole length of the car and then it went ahead and they
    said, ``This demonstrates one of Newton's laws of motion, which is that
    every action generates an equal and opposite reaction.'' And they also
    talked about how the wheels had to be round instead of flat, but they
    couldn't be too slick, because there would have been no friction, and
    then no motion would be possible.
        Now, that is--the rule for that is not different in California.
    [Laughter] It is still the same. And I told these young people when I
    saw them with their cars, I said, ``If I would have had a class like
    this when I was 13, I might be in a different line of work today.''
    [Laughter] It was so exciting. But to pretend that somehow holding
    ourselves to these standards and agreeing that there has to be some
    uniform way of measuring them is giving up local control, is just an
    excuse to avoid being held accountable because we're afraid we can't
    make it. And it's selling our kids down the drain, and it's wrong. It is
    not right.
        So what happened when you did it? What does that report say? It
    says, in effect, that the eighth graders from the First In The World
    Consortium tied for first in the world in science and tied for second in
    the world in math. I think that's pretty good for their first time out.
        That happened because--look around this room. Can you imagine a
    school district or a set of school districts with more genuine local
    control than this one, with--more these, more parental involvement, more
    committed teachers, more--you know, you've got local control. But you
    didn't use it as an excuse not to throw your hat in the ring. I think
    it's great that it came out this way. But if you had finished eighth and
    ninth, I would still be here at pat you on the back because you had the
    guts to do it.
        That's the important thing. That's the important thing. When we were
    coming out here on the airplane, the Congressman and Mayor Daley and
    Secretary Riley and Kevin O'Keefe of our staff, we were talking about,
    you know, what men talk about on airplanes, we were talking about
    basketball--[laughter]--and how Michael Jordan scored 51 points last
    night. And Kevin O'Keefe reminded me that there was somewhere a
    basketball coach who had removed Michael Jordan from the high school
    basketball team. Now, what's the point of that? [Laughter]
        You know, we laugh about it. The coach might have made the right
    decision, and the decision he made may have spurred him on to what he
    later did. But the point is, it's okay if you're not winning when you
    start. It's okay. I know more about--but Scottie Pippin, who is from my
    home State, was essentially the manager of a college basketball team
    when he was a freshman in a very small school--couldn't even make the
    team. By the time he was a senior in college, he was the best player in
    that division in the United States, and he was only beginning. When you
    play a game like that, you know how to measure people. I mean, there is
    a way you keep score there.
        Again, we're not talking about young people's human worth. You don't
    diminish somebody's human worth; you enhance their human worth when you
    help them to develop their capacities. So I cannot say again, I am
    elated that you scored so well. I almost wish you hadn't done quite this
    well, so I would--because everybody else is going to say, ``Well, we
    wouldn't do that well.'' That's not the point. That is not the point.
    The point is to know the truth so you can do better. That is the point.

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        Finally, let me say that there are things that we can do in the
    Department of Education. We can validate this testing mechanism. One of
    the problems I had--there are lots of standardized tests in America
    today, you know. Most kids are tested until the tests are coming out
    their ears. But what are the relevant tests? These tests shouldn't be IQ
    tests. These should be effort tests and effort directed in the right
    direction. The thing that's good about this test is, this test measures
    whether these young people know what it is important to know in
    mathematics and science at this point in their life, if they're going to
    be very successful at a later point in their lives and if their nations
    are going to be successful. That's the important thing.
        So we can help. We can help with the Goals 2000 program. We can help
    with the charter schools. We can help schools to join in this movement
    toward setting strong national standards and then to know that if they
    give the students examinations, that the tests are relevant to what it
    is they're saying the children should know in the standards. We can do
    that.
        The schools can push ahead. We could have every superintendent in
    the country prepared to give the speech that we heard this
    superintendent give today. We can do that. But what really will have to
    happen is that business leaders and parents and community leaders,
    religious leaders, people that are at the grassroots level are going to
    have to demand that this be done and are going to have to say, ``Do not
    be afraid. And if it doesn't come out okay the first time, don't
    worry.'' We're going to use that not as a stick to beat somebody to
    death with but as a spur to lift people up with. That's what we have to
    say.
        And so again I say: The young people in this room today are going to
    live in the greatest age of possibility, the greatest age of promise
    ever known. Our obligation as Americans is to give all of them the
    change to make the most of their God-given abilities, to give all of
    them the chance to live out their dreams, to take whatever they have and
    make the most of it. And we will never get this job done unless we do
    what this First In The World Consortium has done. And if we do it, sure
    as the world, America will be number one.
        Thank you, and God bless you.

    Note: The President spoke at 12:08 p.m. in the gymnasium at the
    Glenbrook North High School. In his remarks, he referred to Mary
    Hamblet, teacher, Wood Oaks Junior High School; Dr. Paul Kimmelman,
    consortium coordinator; Mayor Richard M. Daley of Chicago; Nancy Firfer,
    village president, Glenview; and Mark Damisch, village president,
    Northbrook; and Chicago Bulls basketball players Michael Jordan and
    Scottie Pippen. A portion of these remarks could not be verified because
    the tape was incomplete.