[Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents Volume 36, Number 18 (Monday, May 8, 2000)]
[Pages 978-985]
[Online from the Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]

<R04>
Remarks at the 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 advertising for the district.

[[Page 979]]

    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. 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 slow 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

[[Page 980]]

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.
    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 pre-school, 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

[[Page 981]]

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 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,

[[Page 982]]

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 Waihee 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 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 in to 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

[[Page 983]]

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 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; 67 
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, 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.

[[Page 984]]

    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 grown-ups 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 
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

[[Page 985]]

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, and his wife, Judi, Lt. Gov. Stephen L. Henry, and 
former Gov. John Y. Brown of Kentucky; State Attorney General A. B. 
Chandler III; State Treasurer Jonathan Miller; State Speaker of the 
House Jody Richards; Mayor Waymond Morris of Owensboro; Diane Embry, 
principal, and Crystal Davidson, teacher, Audubon Elementary School; 
former Gov. John Waihee of Hawaii; and former Senator Wendell Ford and 
his wife, Jean.