Bill Clinton: “Let me say why I think Lydia's comments are so important. In the end, whatever we do in the schools needs to be…”

“Let me say why I think Lydia's comments are so important. In the end, whatever we do in the schools needs to be reinforced by what the children hear at home. And we learned a lot over the last, oh, 12 or 13 years, since the issuance in 1984 of the ``Nation At Risk'' report. But one of the most important things that I learned in all these years I was working as a Governor on standards and educational improvement is that in the United States there were too many parents who tended to believe that their children's performance in school was largely due to their income or their racial or ethnic background or whether English was their first language. And in a lot of other cultures that we're competing with, they believe their children's performance in school is directly related to effort and the level of support they get from the parents at home. And it seems to me that you can have a debate if you want about what you think is right, or is it 90 percent one and 10 percent the other, but there is only one attitude likely to produce positive results for the children, and that is to believe that what children learn is largely the function of effort and the level of support they get in the home. So when the parents say something like what Lydia has said, it seems to be profoundly important. The other thing I'd like to say--you say you came up in the schools of the Bronx in a different time. It put me in mind of something else that's especially important to California. This country has been built by generation after generation of immigrants who came to this country and believed that their children would do better than they did and would fully participate in the American dream. I would argue there were two elements to that: One is the immigrants worked like crazy, saved, and gave their kids a better life; second, their kids had a good education and were assimilated into the mainstream of American life. We are becoming an ever more pluralistic society. And more and more of our immigrants are people who desperately need not only for the working age parents to have the chance to get good jobs and build a good future but for those children to have that future, too. We cannot become the country we ought to become, as a multiethnic, multiracial democracy in a world that will value that enormously, in the absence of a good educational system. And again I say, having teachers who believe in high expectations and having parents who believe that if their schools work properly and have high expectations, they will support that and they will tell their children that what they learn will be a function of effort more than IQ, those two things will count more than anything else the rest of us will do. Then all of us have to do is show up, do our part, and create the system that will enable those kinds of teachers, those kinds of parents, and those kinds of children to succeed. So I think we ought to give our teacher and our parent another hand. I think they did a great job. [Applause] I'd like to ask the Secretary of Education, who has been my friend and colleague on this for nearly 20 years now, to talk a little bit about what we're doing to try to work with the States to get the standards movement up and going and, specifically, to prepare the fourth grade reading and the eighth grade math examination by 1999 so that it meets the standards that Delaine Eastin and others in other States would expect it to. Mr. Secretary. [The discussion continued.]”