Remarks in a roundtable discussion on charter schools at the San Carlos Charter Learning Center in San Carlos, California

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Sept 29, 1997

The President, Thank you very much. First, thank all of you for coming here today and sharing your Saturday morning. I thank the superintendent for his really marvelous remarks. He talked about all the things that we have in common. I saw a living symbol of his dedication to education above all else and one thing that we have in common that he didn't mention. If you look closely at his tie, you will see it is a pattern of golf halls and tees. [Laughter] And on this beautiful Saturday morning he's here with us. [Laughter]

Let me thank your instructional coordinator, too, for being here, leaving her 11-day-old baby. I would like to see the 11-day-old baby, but I think it's where's the baby? A wise mother leaves the baby outside. [Laughter]

Hillary and I are delighted to be here. And I want to spend most of my time just at this panel today. But I thank all of you for coming because I believe in charter schools, and I believe they are an important part of helping us to lift our standards and renew our schools and achieve the kind of educational excellence that all of our children need as we move into the 21st century.

I congratulate the San Carlos Learning Center for being the first of its kind in California, which obviously makes it among the very first in the United States.

Let me just give you a little, brief personal history here. When I was Governor of my State for 12 years, I spent a great deal of time working on school reform - and so did Hillary - spent lots of time in the schools, talking to teachers, talking to parents, talking to students, dealing with issues of curriculum development and teacher training and all those things. And when we were active in the 1980's, the State of Minnesota became the first State in the country to pass a public school choice law, to give parents and their children more choice among the public schools their children attended. I think we were the second State to pass that law. And we used it quite a lot.

Then, when I began to run for President in 1991, Minnesota became the first State in the country again to pass a charter school law, recognizing that sometimes it wasn't enough just to give the parents and the students choices but that we needed to give the educators and the parents and the students with whom they worked options to create schools that fit the mission needed by the children in the area, and that if you gave them options and held them accountable, we might be able to do something really spectacular. Then, 5 years ago today, I think, California became the second State in the country to adopt a charter school law, and then you became the first of those schools.

In 1994, I passed legislation in Congress to help us support more charter schools. By the end of 1995, there were about 300 charter schools in the country. Today there are 700 charter schools in the country. Many of them have been helped by the program we passed in Washington in 1994.

The historic balanced budget agreement that we just passed into law includes the largest commitment to new investment in education since 1965, among other things, expansion of Head Start programs, more funds to support computers in the schools - I'll say more about that in a moment - our America Reads initiative to help make sure every 8-year-old can read independently, and the biggest increased investment in helping people go to college since the GI bill passed 50 years ago: tax credits for the first 2 years of college, credits for the remainder of college, IRA's, Pell grants, work-study positions. All these together mean that for the first time ever we can really say, "If you're responsible enough to work for it, no matter what your income or your difficulties, college is now a real option for you in America, for every single American." And I'm very proud of all of that.

But one of the things that was in this balanced budget that didn't get a lot of notice is enough money for us to help to set up literally thousands more charter schools in America - because excellence in education is more than money. And from my point of view, having spent years and years and years working on this, we need two things. We need a set of national standards of academic excellence that will be internationally competitive in basic subjects, and then we need grassroots, school-based reform, because education is the magic that takes place in every classroom, and indeed in every student's mind, involving every teacher, every student, and also, hopefully, support from home.

So that's why these charter schools are so important to me. And that's why we've tried to help a lot more schools like San Carlos get started on the path that you've been on now for some years.

For people who don't know exactly what they are, let me say that charter schools are public schools that make a simple agreement. In exchange for public funding, they get fewer regulations and less redtape, but they have to meet high expectations, and they keep their charter only so long as their customers are satisfied they're doing a good job.