Software Vault: The Gold Collection/Software Vault - The Gold Collection (American Databankers) (1993).ISO/cdr11/wh930514.zip/05-14A.TXT

Internet Message Format | 1993-06-26 | 11KB

From @lex-luthor.ai.mit.edu:[e-mail]  Fri May 14 18:46:45 1993
Date: Fri, 14 May 1993 13:26-0400
From: The White House <[e-mail]>
To: [e-mail],
Subject: President's Remarks at Ceremony Honoring Blue Ribbon Schools

                           THE WHITE HOUSE

                    Office of the Press Secretary
________________________________________________________________
For Immediate Release                               May 14, 1993


                       REMARKS BY THE PRESIDENT
                       IN BLUE RIBBON CEREMONY

                            The South Lawn

9:51 A.M. EDT

         THE PRESIDENT:  Thank you very much.  Thank you,
Secretary Riley.  Thank you, ladies and gentlemen.

         I want to welcome you all to the White House today on
this gorgeous day.  I hope you've enjoyed yourselves.  The Marine
Band has been in especially fine form this morning.  I woke up to
them; I went jogging to them.  (Applause.)  I almost felt like a
President this morning for sure when I was walking over to the Oval
Office -- they were playing a march that was written for the
coronation of a British monarch, so I almost got myself confused.
(Laughter.)

         There are 228 schools here represented today, the
winners of the Blue Ribbon Awards this year.  And all of you are
winners representing what is best in American education and public
and private schools and urban and suburban and rural schools.  You
all share some common features with all your differences:  Visionary
leadership; a sense of shared purpose; a climate conducive to
learning; impressive academic achievement brought on not only by
gifted teachers but also by responsible and open student behavior;
and real involvement of parents and often the broader community in
the life of the school.

         I spent a lot of time thinking about these educational
issues over the last 12 or so years.  I spent more of my time as a
Governor on education than on any other single issue except for the
economy of my state.  I spent hundreds of hours, I suppose, in
schools in my state and around the country over the last 12 to 15
years and some time in one of the schools from Arkansas that's being
honored today.

         A hundred years ago the key to a strong economy was our
raw material base.  Fifty years ago it was mass production.  Now it
is clearly the trained human mind.  We live in a world where the
average person will change work seven or eight times in a lifetime,
when the volume of knowledge is doubling every few years.  When
people in Silicon Valley making new computers and new computer
programs tell me their average product life is now down to 18 months,
clearly the reasoning, creative, facile but also deep mind is key to
the future of the United States.  We also live in a time when hardly
anybody can get and keep a decent job without more education that too
many of our people lack today.

         If we could multiply the grade schools here represented
on this lawn all across the country, we could really revolutionize
education in America.  I must tell you that the most challenging --
(applause) -- give yourselves a hand.  That's a good idea.  The most
challenging thing I ever faced as Governor and the most continually
frustrating was going into our schools and realizing that virtually
every challenge in American education has been met successfully by
somebody somewhere.

         There are people succeeding against all the odds and
producing magnificent results in extremely difficult circumstances.
There are schools producing world class results by any rigorous
measure.  The problem with American education is that we have never
found an effective way to help replicate success, partly because the
magic of education is always what happens in the individual classroom
between the teacher and the student, supported by the parents,
strengthened by the culture of a school that is set overwhelmingly by
a gifted principal.  I know that.

         But there have to be ways to recognize the plain fact
that notwithstanding the funding problems, not withstanding the
inequalities, notwithstanding all the problems that American
education, you can find virtually every problem in our country solved
by somebody somewhere in an astonishingly effective fashion if you
look at enough schools.  So the challenge for us here is to figure
out how to replicate that.  That is what Secretary Riley and I are
trying to do with the Educate America Act, the Goals 2000 Act that we
presented to the United States Congress, a bill we believe will lead
to the creation of world-class learning standards, and also help to
promote the idea that, clearly, all reforms must occur school by
school.

         Goals 2000 will, in effect, enshrine the national
education goals in the law of the land, raise expectations for all
students, and help to enrich the content of our courses, the training
of our teachers, and the quality of our textbooks and our technology.

         Finally, the bill will challenge our schools to show
real results.  We believe students and schools should have more
flexibility in dealing with federal programs and should be shooting
toward real results and clear standards.  Goals 2000 is the framework
for that educational effort in this administration.  It will
facilitate fundamental reforms in our schools, and I must say that's
probably why some people don't like it all that well, including some
members of my own party in the Congress.

         But we can't raise standards and achievement either by
leaving things the way they are, or simply by piling on more
particular governmental programs and mandates from Washington.  After
all, we're only providing about seven percent of the total financing
of public schools today, and while I hope to reverse that trend and,
over the next five years, get the percentage back up to somewhere to
where it was over the last several years -- (applause) -- still the
lion's share of the financing and the lion's share of the learning
reforms must come from you and people like you.  And that means we
have to have a different approach in the way the national government
relates to our schools.

         I hope that the Congress will not dilute the package
that I sent to them.  I hope we can pass the bill in a way that will
represent a real change in the way the national government relates to
the schools and a real increase in confidence in proven local
leaders.

         I'd also like to say that the private sector in this
country has shown an astonishing willingness to become more involved
in education ever since the issuance of The Nation at Risk Report 10
years ago.  The New American Schools Development Corporation, on
which Governor Baliles serves on the board and which Governor Riley
and now Secretary Riley mentioned, has already raised millions of
dollars from public spirited business leaders.  It has path-breaking
design teams which are providing us with valuable lessons about how
school innovations all around America can help us to reach world
class standards.  And it is trying to help replicate what works,
which I still believe is our most urgent task.

         Through these new designs they will be able to provide
promising alternatives for schools and states as they work to
reinvent their schools with the help of Goals 2000 and other reform
efforts that this administration will make.  I ask all of you to
support this legislation and the work of the New American Schools
Corporation.  I ask you to support it in the larger context of what
we must do as a nation.

         Think of what has happened to bring us to this point
where we have come to 17 months in a row with unemployment rate at
seven percent or higher in every month, even though we are allegedly
in an economic recovery.  What has happened to bring us to a point
where most American families are spending more hours on the job than
they were 20 years ago with lower real incomes than they made 10
years ago, including some of the families represented in this
audience?

         What has caused that?  Our lack of ability to be
continuously productive, our lack of ability to create more and more
new jobs that will stand the test of the rigorous global economy.
What we have to do in our administration, and what I earnestly ask
for your support in doing is to reverse the trends that have brought
us to this past.

         Let us first of all bring down the government deficit
that has gotten our debt from $1 trillion to $4 trillion in the last
12 years simply by telling people at election time what they wanted
to hear:  I'll cut your taxes and write you a check.  All the
arithmetic teachers in this audience could have figured out that
sooner or later that would get us in trouble.  Nobody could have
passed math in this town in any of your schools in the last 12 years
who with a straight face said I've got you a deal, I'll cut your
taxes and I'll send you a check.  (Applause.)

         So it fell to me to try to change that ratio.  And the
House of Representatives Committee on Ways and Means yesterday
reported out a bill which does a lot of that.  It restores both
spending cuts and tax increases to a proper balance.  It will bring
the deficit down by $500 billion over the next five years.  It will
provide important new incentives for small businesses and for larger
businesses to continue to invest, to create jobs in our country.  It
provides a real tax break for working families with children with
incomes of under $29,000 to offset the impact of the energy tax and
reward work so there will never be an incentive for people with
families not to work.  Because if this tax bill passes, for the first
time in our country's history, because of the changes in the tax
code, we'll be able to say that if you work 40 hours a week and
you've got a child in the house, you will not live in poverty.  These
are important things.  And over 70 percent of the money comes from
people with incomes above $100,000.  (Applause.)

         The budget package also over the next five years will
increase our commitment to Head Start, to apprenticeship training,
with partnerships with our schools and our post-high school programs,
and opens the doors of college education to everyone through a
radical reform in the student loan program and national service.
(Applause.)  It focuses on, in other words, increasing investment,
bringing down the deficit, and bringing us together as a country
again.  This Goals 2000 legislation is an important part of that.  It
is our effort to do our job here as well as you do your job back
home.  If we did our job here as well as you've done yours, then
America could celebrate and give itself a blue ribbon in just a few
years.  (Applause.)

         Thank you very much, and God bless you all.  (Applause.)

                                 END10:02 A.M. EDT