Remarks and a question-and-answer session at Kramer Junior High School

Weekly Compilation of Presidential Documents, Feb 7, 1994

There's a whole different thing going on about privatization, which I think is what you want me to talk about. Baltimore, for example, has 9 or 10 schools now where the local school board has contracted with a private company, and they've given them whatever the budget of the school was and let them organize the schools, try to improve the physical facilities, try to operate them well. Then they are responsible for the principal, the teachers, how the thing operates. I think school districts ought to try it if they have real problems in their schools.

Those schools are called charter schools, where the public school system gives a charter to a private group to operate the schools. If the schools aren't working and if the school board decides they can't make them work, then I think they ought to try this. If it works, great, and if it doesn't work, they're no worse off than they were. So I think they ought to have the right to try it. I think they should be encouraged to try it. Our legislation which is moving through Congress encourages this sort of experimentation.

Let me say this in defense of our schools: Public schools and public housing projects--let's put them in there, too--they both worked just fine when you had strong families, strong communities, and the people who lived in them had a job. Public schools and public housing projects didn't really start to break down until the family and the jobs and the community started breaking down. So we have loaded a whole lot onto our public schools. Now, that means we've got to be smart and we've got to be creative because, still, the schools is the best hope that all of you have. But do I think it ought to be tried if a school's not working and the school board wants to try it? You bet I do. I don't see what we have to lose by trying it. If the school board wants to do it, I'm all for them. National Information Superhighway

Q. Mr. President, how will the national information superhighway impact schools? The President. Great question. If we do it right, what the national information superhighway will do is to set up a system in which if the schools can get the appropriate computer equipment, which I think will happen in the future, that a school like this one could be connected to schools all over the country, maybe all over the world, to libraries all over the country. You could interconnect with special television stations that were putting out certain information. In other words, you could have access in the school, in the classroom, to worlds of information that now you have to go someplace to find. It would, in effect, bring instantaneously, literally, in theory, billions of pieces of information into the fingertips of students all over America in all schools. And it's very, very important in its implications for American education because if we do the national information superhighway right and we make sure that we get the kind of communications equipment, the kind of trained personnel we need out in the schools, it could go an enormous way toward vanishing or erasing the difference between wealthy school districts and poor ones, between wealthy schools and poor ones, by giving everybody access to the same information at the same time. You could also have special courses like interactive video to take courses that otherwise could never be made available in schools, immediately, everywhere. So, if we do it right, it's going to be great for education. It's also going to be a great equalizer for us. I'm really hopeful about it.