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Article 4416 of alt.politics.clinton:
Path: bilver!tous!peora!masscomp!usenet.coe.montana.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!news.acns.nwu.edu!uicvm.uic.edu!u45301
Newsgroups: alt.politics.clinton
Subject: CLINTON SPEECH TEST: EDUCATION
Supersedes: <92230.030751U45301@uicvm.uic.edu>
Organization: University of Illinois at Chicago
Date: Monday, 17 Aug 1992 18:06:53 CDT
From: Mary Jacobs <U45301@uicvm.uic.edu>
Message-ID: <92230.180654U45301@uicvm.uic.edu>
Lines: 748
SEND COMMENTS AND QUESTIONS REGARDING THIS INFORMATION TO THE
CLINTON/GORE CAMPAIGN AT 75300.3115@COMPUSERVE.COM
(This information is posted for public education purposes. It does
not necessarily represent the views of The University.)
========================================================================
"They Are All Our Children"
Governor Bill Clinton
East Los Angles College
Los Angeles, CA
May 14, 1992
Thank you very much, President Suarez, ladies and gentlemen. Thank
you for coming here today and for giving me the opportunity to
come to this very important institution of education to talk about
a subject that I care about very deeply.
I wanted to come to a community college in this community to talk
about this subject, because you represent the future of America's
education - and the future of America's economy.
It is enrollment in these kinds of institutions that is exploding.
In my state, last year, with the support of the state's business
community, we raised the corporate income tax one half of one
percent and put it all into two-year institutions of higher
education to try to make more opportunities for people like you.
Your president told me on the way in today that this year, this
institution had to turn away between four and five thousand people
who wanted to take advantage of the programs here. That is a
significant problem for our economy and one which I hope to
address today.
I want to talk about the role that education will play in your
future and in your country's future. Education is the issue that I
know most and care most about because I've spent more than 11
years now as a governor on the front lines of the battle to
revolutionize, revitalize, and reform education.
As a governor, as a co-chair of the nation's education summit,
and as a parent of a child in the public schools of Little Rock,
Arkansas, I have devoted more of my time and energy to education,
than to any other issue.
We know two things about education in our country today. It's more
important to our economic well-being than ever before. And we
still don't have the educational quality or opportunities that our
people need.
The key to our economic strength in America today is productivity
growth - a phrase that means more products and services from each
one of us. In the 1990s and beyond, the universal spread of
education, computers, and high speed communications means that
what we earn will depend on what we can learn and on how well we
can apply what we learn to the workplaces of America.
That's why, as we know, a college graduate this year will earn 70
percent more than a high school graduate in the first year of
work. That's why the earnings of younger workers who dropped out
of high school, or who finished but received no further education
or training, dropped by more than 20 percent over the last ten
years alone.
We know that too many students drop out of school. And too many
who do finish still don't have the basic skills they need to get
and keep good jobs. We know, too, that all children can learn, but
that it's tougher to teach them when so many bring society's
greatest problems through the schoolhouse door.
We know we have real gaps in American education, opportunity gaps
and responsibility gaps which are more important to our national
security today than the missile gaps which played such an
important role in the presidential election of 1960.
The education opportunity gaps between ourselves and the rest of
the world - and among our own people - are immense. We have a
shorter school year than all our major competitors. We do less
well than most all of them on comparative tests in math and
science. And while we send more of our high school graduates on to
college than any other nation, we do far too little for the
forgotten half that do not go on to college or don't even finish
high school, a group that other nations take care to train and
retrain throughout their lifetimes.
Within our country there are wide gaps in the level of readiness
for children to start school. Many lack the basic building blocks
of knowledge and thinking without which learning simply cannot
occur. There are huge gaps in how much we spend on students, and
in what kinds of courses and other opportunities they have. The
distinguished American writer, Jonathan Kozol, has called these
gaps "savage inequality."
Most important, there are massive performance gaps among our
schools that cross economic and social lines, schools that I have
seen with my own eyes in this country.
Take for example, the Beasley Academic Center in Chicago. Here's
a school located in the neighborhood with the highest murder rate
in Illinois, yet it ranked consistently in the top ten percent of
the schools in all tests.
Or Thomas Jefferson Junior High School, a mile from our nation's
capital in Washington with a 98 percent minority population. In
the mid-1980s, during three out of four years, Thomas Jefferson
sent a team to the final four in the national junior high school
mathematics competition.
I could give you example after example after example from Maine to
California which prove beyond question that all children can
learn, but that fact leaves us all the more frustrated when these
results are not achieved everywhere.
Just as there are opportunity gaps in education, there are
responsibility gaps as well. Places where our system fails because
people don't do their part. Politicians who posture instead of act
on education. Schools where turf battles get more attention than
gang battles. Bureaucrats who'd rather shuffle paper than change
lives. Teachers who have burned out and have given up, and are
just going through the motions. Parents who treat school as
government-financed child care. Citizens who couldn't care less
about education as long as they keep their local taxes down, and
students who sometimes act more like kids in "Beverly Hills 90210"
than the kids in "Stand and Deliver."
Just look at the Student Loan Program, for example. Since 1980,
the cost of defaults in the Government Guaranteed Student Loan
Program have increased 14 times over, from $239 million in 1980,
to $3.4 billion this year.
In Washington, D.C., five doctors who got the government to
finance their medical education in return for promising to
practice in chronically underserved rural or urban areas are now
being sued for breaking their promise.
People like these deadbeat doctors cost more than money. They deny
medical education to others who would have kept their word and
deny urgently needed medical care to blighted urban areas and
forgotten pockets of rural poverty.
Look at the President's own record on education. At the education
summit in 1989, I was part of a small group representing
Democratic and Republican governors in the White House, who worked
late into the night to hammer out six national education goals for
our nation in the year 2000.
And, let me just repeat them here. By the year 2000, all students
should be mentally and physically ready to learn. By the year
2000, we should raise the all-time high school graduation rate to
90 percent, the international standard. By the year 2000, we
should have national standards that our children should know at
the 4th, 8th, and 12th grades, in math and science and language,
and geography, and history, and other subjects, and a meaningful -
- not a meaningless -- a meaningful set of national exams to
measure whether we know what we're supposed to know.
By the year 2000, we should be second to none in achievement in
mathematics and sciences. By the year 2000, our schools should be
safe, disciplined, and drug-free. By the year 2000, we should have
a lifetime system of learning which guarantees that we give all
adults the chance to learn to read, the chance to get a GED if
they don't have a high school diploma, and the chance to get
training throughout their lifetimes. Those were the goals.
Now we knew that state and local governments would have to provide
most of the funding for public education as they do now. But we
also knew that in the decade of the eighties, the percentage of
the federal budget going to education had declined by about 50
percent. And the percentage of local school budgets coming from
federal funds had declined dramatically.
So in the agreement we asked the White House to make some
commitments, and the White House promised to fully fund the Head
Start program, among other things. Yet now, in the fourth year of
Mr. Bush's administration, according to one study, only 36
percent of the eligible children of this country are being served
by Head Start.
The President promised to support bilingual education. It has been
cut by 47 percent during the 1980s while we have faced an
explosion of immigrants arriving fom around the world.
The President now promises to improve worker training, but federal
employment and training outlays have gone down 26 percent in the
1980s. And the President's current budget calls for removing
224,000 trainees from the Job Training and Partnership Act, an act
his own Vice President helped to write into law.
He himself has pledged to help end adult illiteracy by the year
2000, yet the President's proposed budget eliminates four needed
literacy programs, including one that helps to teach literacy to
inmates incarcerated in prisons, when we know that ignorance is
one of the main causes of crime in this country.
But one promise he has kept. When he said, and I quote, "I don't
believe it is the federal role to say the federal government will
pay for every kid to be educated in college." Now that's a
commitment he's kept.
He has taken bold, decisive action to keep that promise. He's
proposed eliminating Pell grants for any family that earns more
than $10,000 a year. If your income's over $10,000 a year, you're
too rich to get any college aid. But, if you make $300,000 a year
you're still poor enough to need a capital gains tax cut. It
isn't right.
Those who do receive Pell grants know that they are so small; they
are worth about half as much as they were a decade ago. The 1993
budget cuts overall student aid by $79 million. The President even
recently vetoed a bill that would have allowed Americans to deduct
the interest on their student loans from their tax returns, and
use IRA savings for college costs.
Why did he veto that bill? Because the bill payed for this
assistance to the middle class with a modest tax increase on the
richest Americans. And he was opposed to the tax increase on
people whose incomes went up in the 1980's, while their tax
burdens went down.
Now that the election is upon us, he has reversed part of 11 years
of administrative effort by advocating a policy to give greater
access to students to student loans, eight or nine months after I
called for universal access to student loans for all Americans.
It took this President more than a year after our education summit
to send an education plan to Congress. And, while there are some
impressive sayings in the President's "America 2000" proposal, the
heart of the Bush education plan is to tinker around the edges, to
build 535 new public schools, one for every congressman and
senator. That's how that number was decided.
Instead of providing real incentives to improve and to restructure
all of our schools, they want to raise up a few and leave the rest
behind. The President's education plan amounts to a form of
trickle-down education that won't help Americans anymore than
trickle-down economics helped us in the 1980s.
We must close the gaps in our society between what people are
capable of achieving and what we ask of them; between what we
promise our people and what we deliver. Regardless of who's to
blame, and there's always enough blame to go around, what we
really need is to forget about blame, roll up our sleeves and get
to work.
Let's be clear. This situation is not all bad. There are great
schools, great teachers, great principals in America, great places
where learning is occurring against all the odds. There are huge
numbers of Americans, like you, who understand the importance of
education to your future, and who are filling the classrooms of
our community colleges.
There are public officials from school boards to governors and
legislators, to members of Congress, and yes, people in this
administration in Washington, who really do care about education.
But the fact is we are not doing enough. Because I've spent so
much of my life over the last decade working on education, I wish
we had time to talk about every aspect of it today. But today I
have to confine myself to what I believe the President and the
national government could do. Otherwise, we won't be out of here
until lunchtime and you'll be sorry I came.
America needs an education President who shows up for class
everyday, not just once every four years. In the first 100 days
of my administration, I'll give Congress and the American people a
real education reform package. I'll work day and night to get it
passed, unlike our current President who often proposes and then
leaves it to someone else to dispose of or not to act at all.
First, we must implement that portion of the national education
goals which calls for the establishment of world-class standards
in math and science and other subjects.
Today we have an educational system that too often moves people up
the ladder whether they study or not, graduates people whether
they know anything or not, and dumps people into the work force
whether they have the skills it takes to succeed or not. And that
is wrong.
We must develop a meaningful national examination system. Not one
of these so-called norm reference tests that you give two or three
years and then every American is making above the national
average, and the only people who make out are the people who sell
the tests.
We need to determine whether our students are meeting the
standards we set and we shouldn't use the national standards and
the national test simply to measure performance. They should be
used to increase expectations, and to give schools incentives and
structures to improve students' performance. It is just not true
that only our most gifted students can do demanding work. Our
competitors all around the world know that effort, not ability,
makes the biggest difference in educational achievement.
That is the real lesson of the outstanding national achievements
achieved in inner city poor and rural schools by remarkable
teachers. It is the lesson of the wonderful movie "Stand and
Deliver," set here in Los Angeles, in which Edward James Olmos
played Jaime Escalante, whose advanced math students at Garfield
High School, led the nation in passing the advanced placement
tests.
My wife and daughter and I have watched that movie together a lot
of times. Every few months my daughter asks me to go rent it
again. I asked many members of my administration to go and see the
movie when it came out. And when they would come out of the movie,
I would say, "What was the lesson of the movie?" And they would
say, "That guy is an amazing teacher."
I would say no, that's one lesson. The real lesson is: all
children can learn.
All over this country, when parents and teachers and
administrators challenge students to do their best, they come
through with world-class performances. It is not a question of
I.Q. It is a question of vision, will, organization, and effort.
We will never close the achievement or the opportunity gaps
without high standards and real measurements.
The second thing we need to do is to make sure all of our kids
start out on a level playing field, because national standards
can't be fair unless we do. We have to work hard to see that
every American school has a challenging, rich curriculum, that
every teacher has the opportunity to develop the skills that he or
she needs to teach well.
In the past, the poor and the minority and the immigrants have too
often been the victim of the system which held them to lower
standards than others and provided fewer opportunities than other
children got. Too often less is expected -- and less is provided.
We must both have high standards and a level playing field of
opportunity so that all can reach the standards.
One of the things that means is preschool for every child who
needs it. Surely a country that found $500 billion to bail out the
savings and loan industry can find $5 billion to fund the Head
Start program. Surely we can carry out the recommendations of the
National School Readiness Task Force, which I chair, so that
states and localities can offer prenatal care, day-care, and
family support services that can prevent learning problems and
equip children to make the most of school.
Surely we can provide more funds to the Chapter One program so
that we can have smaller classes in the early grades for poor and
disadvantaged children. There are now clear national studies,
coming out of the state of Tennessee, which demonstrate
conclusively that if you get class sizes for poor kids down as low
as 15-to-1 in the early grades, they have permanent measurable,
lasting learning gains which increase the chances of their staying
in school, succeeding, and winding up in a place like this, just
as you have. And we ought to pursue those reforms.
Finally, we ought to restore schools as the safest, not the most
dangerous, places in our society again - not a place where kids do
bullet drills instead of fire drills.
Earlier this year, I visited Thomas Jefferson High School in
Brooklyn. One month later two students, to whom I spoke, were shot
to death while walking in the hall.
Three years ago I visited a grade school in south central L.A.,
6th grade class. And I asked these children what they were most
worried about. They were bright, articulate, intelligent children.
They were most worried about being shot going to and from school.
They were most worried then about being forced to join gangs when
they got in the eighth grade. Those kids now are in the ninth
grade. I've often wondered in the last few days after what
happened here, how many of them wound up in gangs, and whether
they looted and whether they're all still alive. They're all our
children.
A national government ought to provide security equipment, help
cities put more police on the streets, on the beat, in the
neighborhoods, and around school. And it ought to pass the Brady
Bill and require a waiting period before people with criminal
records, or mental health histories, or those who are too young
can just get guns without proving anything.
These are all our children. And there can be no level playing
field where people are not safe in their schools.
I also believe that we need to give some people a level playing
field by giving them some more leverage in the schools they
attend. I support magnet schools in big cities. I support public
school choice. I think parents of children ought to have the
ability to go to schools other than the ones their residence
dictates within the public school system. But the present
administration wants to use public funds to subsidize parents to
send their children to private schools.
Now, while I support public school choice, and our state was the
second state to adopt it, I am unalterably opposed to a voucher
system to give people public money to take to private schools.
We already spend less than many of our competitors on kindergarten
through twelfth grade education, a smaller percentage of our
income. Now is not the time to further diminish the financial
resources of schools, when budgets are being slashed by states all
across America. When the federal government has restricted its
commitment to education, now is not the time to adopt a private
school plan.
The third thing I think we ought to do is to launch an all-out
effort to increase our high school graduation rate to 90 percent
by the year 2000. Nearly a quarter of our high school students
fail to graduate on time. In some cities the drop-out rate is 50
percent. That dooms the people who do it to a series of low skill,
low wage jobs or a life on the outskirts of society which often
leads to crime and to prison.
It's no wonder we have the highest incarceration rate in the world
and spend more money to keep people in prisons than to send them
to college. We need to make something of the lives we're wasting.
In my state we do something that might not work in a big city but
it works in a rural state. You drop out of school for no good
reason, you lose your driver's license. More than 1,750 young
people have lost their driver's license since we passed the law,
but our state now has the highest graduation rate in our region.
The other state that's about tied with us is West Virginia,
another poor state that was the first state to adopt the driver's
license law.
If I were President, and when I become President, we will help
schools prevent dropouts and reach out to the young people who do
drop out to bring them up to the same world class standards that
we expect of everyone else. We need to give students incentives to
stay in high school. Programs like the "I Have a Dream" program in
New York, where Eugene Lang, a businessman, promised a group of
students that if they'd stay in school, he would send them to
college. A program like "Contact" in Orlando, Florida, where a
young friend of mine named Charles White organizes businesspeople
to work one-on-one with students who might get in trouble and keep
them in school and give them summer jobs and insure there's a
future for them after they get out of high school.
A program like the Academic Challenge Grant that we adopted in my
state where we made the bottom two-thirds of our kids, by income,
eligible to get $1,000-a-year scholarship for four years. If they
made a C+ average on the recommended college courses, stayed off
drugs and behaved themselves, as a matter of right they got the
scholarship. We need to give people incentives to stay in school.
But we need to help those who drop out anyway. We need things like
youth opportunity centers, which have been proposed in New York,
opportunity centers that would provide youngsters regular contact
with an adult who cares about them. It would give students who
don't succeed in traditional school settings a second chance to
make it in an alternative learning environment.
I'd like us to consider forming a Youth Opportunity Corps that
would recruit young high school dropouts for a year or two, pay
them entry-level wages, and help them develop self-discipline,
learning skills and skills training.
As we reduce our military forces in the wake of the Cold War, we
could make the most of the training facilities and the expert
personnel of our military -- the best training ground on Earth --
by using them to teach in the Youth Opportunity Corps, and giving
them a chance to continue to serve their country instead of just
putting them into the street. A Youth Opportunity Corps would give
dropouts the opportunity and the discipline to complete their high
school diploma at the same standards as everyone else and a second
chance to earn a decent living.
The fourth thing we should do is to challenge American business to
live up to its responsibility, to help Americans develop skills in
the workplace.
Something's wrong with a country that strips the dignity from blue
collar work by permitting younger workers with a high school
diploma watch their earnings drop 20 percent over a decade.
In our administration, we'll establish a national apprenticeship
program, like those in Europe, that will encourage non-college-
bound students to stay in school, take challenging courses, move
into the workforce and then get two years of further training on
the job, in cooperation with institutions like this community
college. That's what we need to do for those kids.
Last year in our state we passed a statewide apprenticeship bill.
The other day, a woman in northwest Arkansas told our program
director there how proud she was that her daughter, as a result of
the apprenticeship program, will now be earning a higher wage than
her own mother makes in her regular job. For that mother and that
daughter, the American dream is still coming true. Knowing your
child can have an opportunity for a better life is an important
part of restoring hope in this country.
We also need to establish a national system to teach every adult
in the work force to read and give every working adult the chance
to earn a high school diploma within the next five years. It
doesn't cost that much money. You could do a lot of it in the
workforce. In my state, a very small state of 2.4 million people,
we spend more money on adult education now than our next-door
neighbors in Texas, a state five times our size. But it is the
best money we have ever spent.
We have increased by more than four times in the last eight years
the number of adults in our job training program and it is working
to lift their incomes. We ought to teach everybody to read who has
got a job, give everybody who has a job a high school diploma.
Then they can come to places like this.
Instead of treating job training as a poor stepchild, in our
administration we will require employers to invest 1 to 1.5
percent of payroll in the retraining of their own workforce. This
is what our competitors do. And we will require them to spend it
on workers up and down the line.
In America, 70 percent of the job training paid for by private
companies goes to the top 10 percent of the employees. But our
competitors in Europe and Japan give job training programs to
people up and down the line. Because smart folks know that the
frontline workers make the money for you, and you'd better retrain
them every year if you want your productivity to continue to rise.
At the same time, we need to force our government to straighten
out and streamline the unbelievable bureaucratic maze of the
countless of publicly funded training programs, each with their
own application forms, eligibility criteria, rules and procedures.
That needs to be done, too.
Finally, to respond to what your president said, we need to make
sure every American who wants to, has the chance to go to college.
For the last 12 years, under the last two Presidents, until this
President's election year conversion last month in Pennsylvania,
these administrations have worked harder to make it harder for
millions of Americans to get help to go to college.
Here's what I would like to do. I think we ought to scrap this
existing student loan program. We waste over $3 billion on default
and $1 billion of bank subsidies every year. I'd like to replace
it with what I call a domestic GI bill, a national service trust
that would give every American, regardless of income, the right to
borrow the money to finance a college education.
All of you could show up and borrow the money. You won't have to
be poor, although to be sure, you could be poor and get it. You
could be middle class and get it. You could be upper-middle class
and get it. But you have to be willing to pay the money back.
And it would be your choice.
You'd have one of two options. You could sign a contract to pay
the money back as a small percentage of your income after you go
to work, which you would pay at tax time so you couldn't beat the
bill. But you would pay not just according to how much you
borrowed but also according to how much you make. So we would
never cripple people or discourage them from becoming teachers or
public servants or doing other work that might pay less money but
be otherwise more rewarding. You would pay according to your
ability to pay.
Or you could chose to pay it off with public service. If you
borrowed the funds for two years of education, you could do one
year of work at a reduced salary, paid by the national government,
as a teacher, a law enforcement officer, in a drug program, with
troubled children, or you could work to help kids stay out of
gangs and in schools, solving the problems of your community and
getting your own education. We could get a whole generation of
Americans to do that.
In the end, politicians can't and won't solve this problem for
you. If we are going to compete and win again, we are all going to
have to work harder and work smarter and become lifelong learners.
I know this can happen because I have seen it happen before.
In 1978, a distinguished educational advisor consultant named Kern
Alexander came to my state and said that a child would have a
worse chance to get a good education in Arkansas than virtually
any other state in the country. We didn't point the fingers or
place blame. We just went to work.
In the early 1980s when I became Governor for a second time, my
wife and I and a committee of distinguished Arkansans that she
chaired traveled our state and talked to parents and teachers and
ordinary citizens. We began what has been a decade-long struggle
to raise standards and improve opportunity in our state. We've
raised taxes twice and put all the money into education. The sales
tax in 1983 and then -- half a cent on the sales tax and one half
of one percent on the corporate income tax in 1981.
We have done some things no other state has done. We became the
first state in the country to require existing teachers to take
and pass a test to continue to get recertified. You can imagine
how popular that was. But you know what? After two years, most of
them passed, and those that didn't shouldn't have been
recertified, and they weren't. And we raised pay and morale in the
end.
We became the first state to require students at the eighth grade
level to pass an exam to be promoted to high school. They said,
"Oh, you can't do that, you'll increase the dropout rate." But you
know what? The dropout rate went down and the graduation rate went
up because there were no more bored kids in high school who
couldn't at least read, because of the eighth grade test.
We went for smaller classes in the early grades, for elementary
counselors for the kids. We had the lowest high school
college-going rate in the country in 1980, but now we are up to
the national average.
These things can happen. We can change the future and the
opportunity for all the people in America if we work together, if
we have high standards, if we close the opportunity gap, if we
close the responsibility gap.
You know, I was born at the end of World War II in a state where
the whole state had a per capita income that was just a little
above half the national average. Most of us lived, in other words,
below what you would call the poverty line now. We didn't know
much about that or anything else having to do with federal
statistics. But we did know that if we worked hard and played by
the rules and got a good education, we could get ahead.
What bothers me so much about America today is that there are so
many people who are being left out of that opportunity channel.
I got a chance to get a world-class education, starting in my
public schools. I had the opportunity to work my way through
college, to work my way through law school. I had six jobs doing
it but it didn't kill me. But it was economically possible because
I also had a scholarship and a loan. I had the kinds of things
that now too many people don't have. And I know that if it hadn't
been for my education, the help I got in scholarships and loans,
as well as the chance I had to work my way through school, I
wouldn't be standing here giving this speech today.
And I got into this race because I could not tolerate any longer
seeing millions of Americans squander the opportunities that ought
to be theirs because we do not have a good economic policy to
create more jobs in this country and because we do not take
advantage of what is there because of educational gaps in
performance, achievement and standards.
And I tell you, one of the major issues that ought to be on the
front-burner in this presidential election is who can be the real
education President -- and how America can be the country that
puts education first again.
Thank you very much.
