Bill Clinton on how to save the public schools.

In the March issue, we ran a story on the peril of the country's public schools that began by noting that the nation's leaders have consistently failed to make education a top priority. The piece specifically criticized President Clinton who, with his daughter safely enrolled in the private Sidwell Friends School, has "kept us waiting" on public education.

Since then, the President has risen in the polls and, newly confident, begun to consider what he might do in a second term. According to a report by Matthew Cooper in The New Republic, the point man for developing that vision is domestic policy advisor Bruce Reed. And Reed's most recent major project, with speech writer Michael Waldman, was Clinton's address before the education conference of governors and business leaders in Palisades, New York, on March 27.

Whatever text Waldman and Reed prepared, this speech was clearly the President's own. He referred back to various panels at the summit and to his own considerable experience in Arkansas. He showed not just that he is familiar with schools, but that he understands them. In the course of 35 minutes, he laid out a reform plan that was intelligent, comprehensive, and politically courageous.

If you're scratching your head wondering what speech we're referring to, that's because you didn't catch it on C-Span and depended on journalists to report it to you. All but a few of the major papers neglected to mention what was truly significant in the speech--Clinton's call to reduce the bureaucracy, recruit good principals and hold them accountable, and improve the ranks of teachers. Regarding this last measure, a favorite of reformers like us, the President endorsed "alternative certification"--allowing able people with knowledge of the subject to teach without going through education schools--and merit pay for teachers. Stories in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times omitted these issues entirely. Time and Newsweek didn't cover the speech at all.

Had they been paying attention--or known what to listen for--the reporters in Palisades would have also heard Clinton take on a core Democratic constituency. After praising teachers and pointing out that good ones are the key to successful schools, Clinton said that the process of removing teachers who are burned out or not performing up to standard ... has to be much faster and far less costly than it is." In essence, Clinton was calling for bad teachers to be fired. this is anathema to the teachers' unions--who seem to believe their job is to protect the marginals and incompetents, not the vast majority of teachers who are hardworking and effective. But Clinton is right on target. He is also right to want to include teachers' unions--and, of course, teachers themselves--in the monitoring and evaluation of teachers. "[S]tate and school systems and teachers unions needs to be working together," the President said. We couldn't agreement.

We applaud the President-and hope he'll stay with this topic as long as it strikes. Since you're not likely to read a full account of it elsewhere, we are reprinting portions of Clinton's address. --The Editors

I suppose that I have spent more time in classrooms than any previous President, partly because I was a governor for 12 years and partly because I stiff do it with some frequency. I believe the most important thing you can do is to have high expectations for students--to make them believe they can learn, to tell them they're going to have to learn really difficult, challenging things, to assess whether they're learning or not, and to hold them accountable as well as to reward them.

Most children are very eager to learn. Those that aren't have probably been convinced they can't. We can do better with that. I believe that once you have high standards and high expectations, there is an unlimited number of things that can be done. But I also believe that there have to be consequences.... [I]f you want the standards movement to work, first you have to do the hard work in deciding what it is you expect children to learn. But then you have to have an assessment system, however you design it, in your own best judgment at the state level, that says, "no more free passes." If you want people to learn, learning has to mean something. Mat's what I believe. I don't believe you can succeed unless you are prepared to have an assessment system with consequences.

In Arkansas in 1983 when we redid the educational standards, we had a very controversial requirement that young people pass the 8th grade tests to go on to high school. And not everybody passed it. And we let people take it more than once. I all it's time to do that. But even today, after 13 years, I think there are only five states in the country today which require a promotion for either grade to grade or school to school for its young people.... The worst thing you can do is send people all the way through school with a diploma they can't read.... [Y]ou will never know whether your standards are being met unless you have some sort of measurement and have some sort of accountability.... [W]e shouldn't kid ourselves. Being promoted ought to mean more or less the same thing in Pasadena, California, that it does in Palisades, New York....

I was always offended by the suggestion that the kids who grew up in the Mississippi Delta in Arkansas, which is the poorest place in America, shouldn't have access to the same learning opportunities that other people should and couldn't learn. I don't believe that. I think we should begin with a concrete standard for reading and writing because the most troubling thing to me is that we've been through a decade in which math and science scores have risen and reading scores have stayed flat. Intel recently had to turn away hundreds of applicants because they lacked basic reading and writing skills. Secretary [of Education Richard Riley says that every child should be able to read independently by the end of the third grade. And parenthetically, that if that were the standard, I think we would be more successful in getting parents to read to their children every night, which would revolutionize the whole system of education anyway.

The second thing I think we have to do is to face the fact that if we want to have these standards for children, standards and tests, we have to have a system that rewards and inspires and demands higher standards of teachers. They, after all, do this work. The rest of us talk about it, and they do it. So that means that first of all, you've got to get the most talented people in there. There's been a lot of talk about this for a decade now, but most states and school districts still need work on their certification rules. We should not bar qualified, even brilliant young people from becoming teachers. The Teach For America group in my home state did a wonderful job, and a lot of those young kids wind up staying and teaching, even though they can make two and three times as much money doing something else. Every state should, in my view, review that. I also believe any time you're trying to hold teachers to higher standards they should be rewarded when they perform.

I know that in South Carolina and Kentucky, if schools markedly improve their performance, they get bonuses and the teachers get the benefit. That's not a bad thing; that's a good thing, and we should have more of that.

I want to thank Governor Hunt for the work he's done on the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. We had the first group of teachers who are board certified in the White House not very long ago. Every state should have a system, in my opinion, for encouraging these teachers to become board certified. The Federal Government doesn't have anything to do with that. Encourage these teachers to become board certified because they have to demonstrate not only knowledge but teaching skills. And when they achieve that level they should be rewarded. There should be extra rewards when they do that.

We also need a system that doesn't look the other way if a teacher is burned out or not performing up to stand. There ought to be a fair process for removing teachers who aren't competent, but the process also has to be much faster and less costly than it is. I read the other day that in New York it can cost as much as $200,000 to dismiss a teacher who is incompetent. In Glen Ellyn, Illinois, a school district spent $70,000 to dismiss a high school math teacher who couldn't do basic algebra and let the students sleep in class. That is wrong. We should do more to reward good teachers; we should have a system that is fair to teachers but moves much more expeditiously and much more cheaply in holding teachers accountable. So state and school systems and teachers' unions needs to be working together to make it tougher to get licensed and be certified, easier and less costly to get teachers who can't teach out of the classrooms, and clearly set rewards for teachers who are performing....

The third thing I think we have to do is to hold schools accountable for results. We have known now for a long time that the most important player in this drama besides the teachers and the students are the school principals.... And yet, still, not every state has a system for holding the school districts accountable for having good principals in all these schools and then giving the principals the authority they need to do the job, getting out of their way and holding them accountable, both on the up side and the down side. To me, that is still the most important thing. Every school I go into, I can stay there about 30 minutes and tell you pretty much what the principal has done to establish a school culture, an atmosphere of learning, a system of accountability, a spirit of adventure. You can just feel it, and it's still the most important thing.

Secondly, the business community can do a lot of work with the governors to help these school districts reinvent their budgets, I think. There are still too many school districts spending way too much money on administration and too little money on education and instruction. And there needs to be some real effort put into that, that goes beyond rhetoric. I mean, I was given these statistics, which I assume ar-e true because I had it vetted four different times-i hate to use numbers that I haven't-if it is true that New York City spends $8,000 a student on education, but only $44 goes to books and other classroom materials, that's a disgrace. That's wrong. And that's time in a lot of other school districts. We cannot ask the American people to spend more on education until we do a better job with the money we've got now...

Let me also say I think we ought to encourage every state to do what most states are now doing, which is to provide more options for parents.... I'm excited about the idea that educators and parents get to actually start schools, create and manage them, and stay open only if they do a good job within the public school system. Every charter school I visited was an exciting place. Today, 21 of you allow charter schools. There are over 250 schools which are open; 100 more are going to open next year. Freed up from regulation and top-down bureaucracy, focusing on meeting higher standards, the schools have to be able to meet these standards if you impose them....

Let me just mention two other things briefly. I don't believe you can possibly minimize ... how irrelevant this discussion would seem to a teacher who doesn't feel safe walking the hails of his or her school or how utterly hopeless it seems to students who have to look over their shoulders when they're warning to and from school. So I believe that we have to work together to continue to make our schools, safe and our students held to a reasonable standard of conduct, as well....

And one of the primary targets I would have if I were a local leader trying to redo my district budget is to reduce the amount spent on administration so that I could invest more money in keeping it open longer hours, especially for the latch-key kids and the other kids that are in trouble that don't have any other place to go. So that's something that I think is very important. Finally, let me just echo what Governor Miller said about the technology. We did have a embarrasing in California, and we hooked up actually more than 20 percent of the classrooms to the Internet on a single day. But we need every classroom and every library in every school in America hooked up to the Internet as quickly as possible. We set a goal as the year 2000; we could actually get there more quickly....

I believe that this meeting will prove historic. And again, let me say, I thank the governors and the business leaders who brought it about. In 1983, we said, "We've got a problem in our schools. We need to take tougher courses. We need to have other reforms." In 1989 we said, "We need to know where we,re going. We need goals." Here in 1996, you're saying you can have all of the goals in the world, but unless somebody really has meaningful standards and a system" measuring whether you meet those standards, y6u won't achieve your goals. That is the enduring gift you have given to America's schoolchildren and to America's future....