Remarks at James Ward Elementary School in Chicago, Illinois

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Jan 15, 2001

We also have had a big increase in work-study slots, a big increase in Pell grants, another big one this year, up to $3,700 a year now, the maximum grant. And 150,000 of our young people have earned money for college while serving in AmeriCorps. I just met one of them outside on the way in--150,000 in 6 years. It took the Peace Corps 30 years to amass 150,000 volunteers. And I might just say, to the side, so much for those who say this generation of young people is self-seeking. It is the most stunning example of community service in modern American history, and it's also helping a lot of people to go on to college.

We started a program called GEAR UP, which is now serving 1.2 million disadvantaged middle school students. We send college students out to help mentor them and convince them they can go on to college, come up with a plan for the rest of their academic career until they get out of high school, and tell them right then in middle school what kinds of financial aid they can get where, so they will know from the time they're in the sixth or seventh or eighth grade that they can actually go to college and the promise will be kept.

All told, we have doubled education funding in 8 years, more investment, provided the largest expansion of college opportunity in 50 years, since the GI bill, and gotten the results for more accountability: Test scores are up; the dropout rate is down; advanced placement courses in high school are being taken by 50 percent more kids--in the last 5 years, 50 percent more-300 percent more Hispanic kids, 500 percent more African-American kids are taking advanced placement courses.

Not surprisingly, the SAT scores are at a 30-year high in America, and the college-going rate has gone up 10 percent. This strategy works. Higher standards, great accountability, more investment, equal opportunity--it works. And we have come a long way toward an America in which every child enters school ready to learn, graduates ready to succeed, and has the opportunity to go on to college.

Of course, the lion's share of the credit belongs to people like you, to the teachers, the principals, the parents, the community leaders. But it is up to the rest of us to create a framework in which those four objectives can be pursued.

We will hear a lot of talk in the future, I'm sure, about education reform, and I applaud it. I hope that education reform all across America will become more and more a bipartisan issue. In the last four budgets that we had, we had a bipartisan budget. We fought about it. We argued about it. I had to threaten a bunch of vetoes, but in the end we had a bipartisan majority for every single thing that I talked about here today. And we ought to give credit where credit is due. This should not be a partisan issue.

When my wife was growing up in a suburb of Chicago, I'll never forget my father-in-law and my mother-in-law talking about how it was an overwhelmingly Republican place. Goldwater carried it 4 to 1 in '64, and the other 20 percent thought he was too liberal. It was a big Republican place. They never voted down a school bond issue, ever. The difference in the Republicans and the Democrats on education was where the money ought to come from.