Bill Clinton: “It's like trying to turn a battleship around or it's basically trying to hold 400 ping-pong balls in your arms, because…”

“It's like trying to turn a battleship around or it's basically trying to hold 400 ping-pong balls in your arms, because it's--but the point is when you get something that works, if you can get enough visibility to it, people can be looking at it and involved in it, and you basically--you empower the parents and the students and all these other people who come in here. There was a very impressive man from the State social services there who talked about how he brought in--if all these kids had any problems, about all the services at the school. And he said, ``All these pathologies are in our communities, but all the antibodies are, too,'' which I thought was a real--great one-liner. So what I tried to do is to put the Federal Government in the business of adding funding where it's needed, holding up things that work, having high standards but not adding to the problem of over- regulation. Riley has reduced Federal regulations in education by about 40 percent since he's been there. And this is a program that has, at the State level, an enormous amount of support--[inaudible]--as you might imagine. So parenthetically, it helps make the case for why we should cut the education funding in the balanced budget debate. But it also shows that there is a way to make schools work better, to have high expectations of kids, and to get some results. One of the things I find is that there's so much--people tend to give up now. They tend to think, ``Oh, the schools can't be made to work well,'' or ``The crime rate will never go down.'' But those things just aren't true. So--and this was an extraordinary school, which is why I really wanted to go there. I thought we could really juice it up. Mood of the Country”