Bill Clinton on how to save the public schools - excerpt from Pres. Clinton's speech on public education reform

Washington Monthly, May, 1996

In the March issue, we ran a story on the peril of the country's public schools that began by noting that the nation's leaders have consistently failed to make education a top priority. The piece specifically criticized President Clinton who, with his daughter safely enrolled in the private Sidwell Friends School, has "kept us waiting" on public education.

Since then, the President has risen in the polls and, newly confident, begun to consider what he might do in a second term. According to a report by Matthew Cooper in The New Republic, the point man for developing that vision is domestic policy advisor Bruce Reed. And Reed's most recent major project, with speech writer Michael Waldman, was Clinton's address before the education conference of governors and business leaders in Palisades, New York, on March 27.

Whatever text Waldman and Reed prepared, this speech was clearly the President's own. He referred back to various panels at the summit and to his own considerable experience in Arkansas. He showed not just that he is familiar with schools, but that he understands them. In the course of 35 minutes, he laid out a reform plan that was intelligent, comprehensive, and politically courageous.

If you're scratching your head wondering what speech we're referring to, that's because you didn't catch it on C-Span and depended on journalists to report it to you. All but a few of the major papers neglected to mention what was truly significant in the speech--Clinton's call to reduce the bureaucracy, recruit good principals and hold them accountable, and improve the ranks of teachers. Regarding this last measure, a favorite of reformers like us, the President endorsed "alternative certification"--allowing able people with knowledge of the subject to teach without going through education schools--and merit pay for teachers. Stories in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times omitted these issues entirely. Time and Newsweek didn't cover the speech at all.

Had they been paying attention--or known what to listen for--the reporters in Palisades would have also heard Clinton take on a core Democratic constituency. After praising teachers and pointing out that good ones are the key to successful schools, Clinton said that the process of removing teachers who are burned out or not performing up to standard ... has to be much faster and far less costly than it is." In essence, Clinton was calling for bad teachers to be fired. this is anathema to the teachers' unions--who seem to believe their job is to protect the marginals and incompetents, not the vast majority of teachers who are hardworking and effective. But Clinton is right on target. He is also right to want to include teachers' unions--and, of course, teachers themselves--in the monitoring and evaluation of teachers. "[S]tate and school systems and teachers unions needs to be working together," the President said. We couldn't agreement.

We applaud the President-and hope he'll stay with this topic as long as it strikes. Since you're not likely to read a full account of it elsewhere, we are reprinting portions of Clinton's address. --The Editors

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 stiff 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]f 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 free passes." If you want people to learn, learning has to mean something. Mat'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 all it's time 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.... The worst thing you can do is send people all the way through school with a diploma they can't read.... [Y]ou will never know whether your standards are being met unless you have some sort of measurement and have some sort of accountability.... [W]e 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....