[ Table of Contents ]
[1 Raising Student Achievement ]
When President Clinton and Vice President Gore came to office in 1993, they pledged to the American people that they would strengthen education at every level and lead the Nation toward an era of lifetime learning. Working together with State and community leaders, educators, and parents, they understood that the next generation of schoolchildren would have to be better educated and better prepared for the evolving demands of the new American economy. In short, they knew that the Information Age must become the Education Age.
The President and the Vice President also understood that the status quo in American education had to change. They began to articulate a new vision of American education focused on high standards for all children, increased investments to support better teaching and learning, and a new demand for rigor and accountability.
The Administration?s promise to challenge the status quo came at a time of tremendous need for change in American education. The late 1980s and early 1990s were marked by a growing national concern about the quality of teaching and learning. International comparisons of student achievement revealed both strengths and weaknesses in what and how America?s schoolchildren were learning. The achievement gap between rich and poor, white and minority, stubbornly persisted, so that the promise of educational opportunity for every child appeared to be an almost unreachable goal, even as record numbers of youngsters were coming of school age.
Despite promising signs of reform and increasing efforts to innovate, there was little in the way of a national consensus about how to move American education forward into the 21st century. And the recession of the early 1990s served as a powerful and often harsh wake-up call for many adult Americans who realized that they did not have the skills they needed to be part of the growing knowledge-based economy. Yet for many of these same Americans, getting a college education or learning a new set of skills was financially out of reach, even as experts called for increased opportunities for lifelong learning.
In reality, American education in 1993 was struggling to redefine itself and was unprepared and unable to respond to the many new and growing demands being placed on it.
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Even in 1994, too many Americans are separated from each other by the pernicious belief that children who are poor and disadvantaged do not have what it takes to reach high levels of achievement and that no amount of education will alter this circumstance.
Secretary Richard W. Riley |
To challenge this status quo, the Clinton-Gore Administration proposed a series of comprehensive reforms to provide a world-class education for all: bold measures to fix failing schools, benchmarks for measuring student progress and teacher quality, and accountability and innovation throughout the Nation?s public schools. As champions of education reform, the President and Vice President were determined to end the tyranny of low expectations that too often denied millions of children the opportunity to gain a quality education.
The Administration sought to galvanize a national effort to raise both standards and expectations throughout public education. From the beginning, the President and Vice President emphasized that while public education would remain primarily a State and local responsibility, it would increasingly become an important national priority. That is why the Administration vigorously and successfully opposed congressional efforts to eliminate the U.S. Department of Education.
The Administration provided States the resources necessary to put into place reforms driven by results and effective strategies based on research and experience. The Administration also placed a new focus on reading and child literacy, and provided new national leadership on improving teacher quality. New efforts to encourage academic rigor ranged from an increased emphasis on learning algebra in the eighth grade to a new call that Advanced Placement classes be taught in every American high school.
The Administration?s education agenda also recognized that gaining a college education was essential to the economic well-being of millions of Americans increasingly worried about the growing earnings gap between workers with more education and workers with less. As a result, the Administration successfully sought significant new investments in traditional and successful Federal higher education programs such as Pell Grants and TRIO, and introduced new policies assuring every American the financial support they need for at least two years of college.
The Clinton-Gore reform agenda sought to deliver creative, comprehensive, and significant changes in education. Importantly, it fostered coherence and collaboration among Federal education programs for the first time. The Administration broke with the past and moved away from the traditional Federal regulatory approach to a new model of partnership with States and local school districts that encouraged innovation, promoted flexibility, and cut red tape.
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We are at an important point in our country's history. We are entering a fast-paced, information-driven, technologically sophisticated global economy. And our Nation's schools must strive to teach an increasingly diverse student population with a variety of special concerns and needs. President Clinton |
Innovation took other forms as well. The Administration promoted new choices for parents by supporting the creation of thousands of break-the-mold public charter schools. Hundreds of creative partnerships have linked colleges and universities to new efforts at the elementary and secondary level to improve reading, teacher quality, and the use of technology, and to expand access to college. In just a few short years, for example, 1,400 college and universities joined the America Reads Challenge, 26,700 college work-study students now serve as reading tutors, and thousands more serve as math tutors.
The Administration has made a historic investment in public schools, doubling revenues for education and training and targeting those funds to where they are needed most. At the same time, the Administration responded quickly to the new and evolving shape of American education. Americans, for example, are learning earlier and later in life. In response, the Administration put a strong new emphasis on early childhood education, including major funding increases for Head Start and other pre-kindergarten programs. At the same time, it created new lifelong learning tax credits for the millions of adult going back to school to learn new skills.
The Administration also calmed long-standing and divisive debates in American education?from the proper way to teach children reading to disputes over the role of religion in America?s public schools. New research was commissioned to help end the "reading wars," and for the first time, the Department of Education provided guidelines outlining the religious freedom of America?s schoolchildren.
The Administration also made extensive efforts to encourage greater parent and family involvement in our schools, to create new business and community partnerships, and to involve America?s many faith communities in local efforts to support teaching and learning. Over 6,000 family, faith, business, and community organizations joined the Partnership for Family Involvement in Education.
At the same time, the Administration took the initiative to make every American school safer, more disciplined, and drug-free by creating new partnerships between schools and communities through the Safe Schools/Healthy Student initiative, itself a unique partnership among three Federal agencies. Moreover, the Administration supported character and civic education, and made new efforts to ensure that schools protect personal religious beliefs and value respect and responsibility.
At the heart of the Clinton-Gore education agenda is the continuing effort to forge a national consensus linking new investments in teaching and learning with higher standards and a new demand for rigor and accountability. With higher standards and greater accountability as foundations, the Administration has made school reform in the Nation?s poorest schools a top priority.
In 1994, the Administration took direct aim at the established practice of giving poor children a watered-down curriculum by reforming Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which supports the education of 11 million disadvantaged children in 13,000 school districts. A sustained and ongoing effort has put a new emphasis on schoolwide reform and has created a new level of flexibility, including the elimination or revision of two-thirds of all Federal regulations at the elementary and secondary education level. With the strong support of Congress, the Administration won new funding for comprehensive school reform demonstration programs and a new $134 million accountability fund to help turn around low-performing schools.
Moreover, the Administration has focused national attention on improving teacher quality, securing Federal investment in the recruitment, preparation, mentoring, and support of new teachers for the first time in 30 years. The Administration has promoted rigorous standards, supported high quality professional development, and vigorously called for a complete reform of the teaching profession at every level.
Over the past seven years, the Administration has successfully pursued a wide-ranging legislative agenda that supports the new and growing national consensus on high standards in specific, practical, and concrete ways.
In 1994, Goals 2000 became law, creating a new framework of support to give local schools, districts, and every State the resources to develop new academic standards, aligned assessments, and accountability mechanisms.
In 1996, the Administration set a national goal that all children in America read well and independently by the end of third grade, if not earlier, leading to passage of the Reading Excellence Act in 1998, the boldest child literacy law in 30 years.
In 1997, the reauthorization of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act focused attention not merely on ensuring access to public schools for the Nation?s six million students with disabilities, but also on ensuring that these students get a high-quality education aligned to high standards.
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Our schools—at all levels—are public institutions built with public investments. And we'll get a better return on that investment if we keep our school doors open, rather than letting them become wasted space after three o' clock. After-school care, organized by our public schools and our community organizations, can engage and enlighten our children, so they never fall prey to destructive influences. That is a goal every parent, and every caring American, must share. Vice President Gore |
In 1999, the Department of Education began implementing a seven-year plan to reduce class size by adding 100,000 new qualified classroom teachers for grades one to three to further strengthen reading and early childhood development to make sure that all children have a good start on their education.
The abundance of innovations, improvements, and new partnerships are beginning to make a difference. Almost every State has adopted standards and methods for measuring academic achievement in their schools, and after years of hard work educators, teachers and parents are starting to get good news. In the latest national assessment of reading, for example, test scores improved in all three grades tested (fourth, eighth, and twelfth) for the first time ever.
More high school students are now taking more challenging courses, and the number of students taking Advanced Placement courses has risen steadily. SAT and ACT scores have also risen in the 1990s and are now at the highest level in a quarter of a century, even as more minority, low-income, and limited English proficient students take these tests. Moreover, a record number of students with disabilities are now learning alongside non-disabled students in thousands of classrooms across the Nation.
While encouraging reform at the elementary and secondary level, the Administration has also made major great strides in increasing access and opening new pathways to college for millions of Americans. This comes at a time when more high-school seniors than ever before (67 percent) are going directly to college, and when millions of other Americans are going back to school to gain new skills.
The increasing enrollments and greater diversity in the Nation?s colleges and universities—even as the cost of higher education has gone up—reflect seven years of efforts by this Administration to make higher education more accessible and affordable for all students.
Pell Grants for low-income students increased from a maximum of $2,300 in 1993 to $3,300 in 1999. These grants now amount to a $7.6 billion investment that benefits over 3.8 million students. In addition, by continually expanding the Federal Work-Study program and by launching the national service initiative, AmeriCorps, in 1994, the Administration has enabled millions of students to earn money for college while working and serving their communities.
The Direct Lending Program, created in 1994, and other improvements in the Federal student financial aid program have saved students $8.7 billion on their loans, while saving taxpayers $5 billion, over the course of the Administration.
In 1997, the President signed the Hope tax credit into law, giving working and middle-income families a new $1,500 tax credit for the first two years of college. That same year, the President signed into law the Lifetime Learning Tax Credit. Together, these two measures in 1998 provided $3.5 billion in educational savings for 4.8 million American families.
In 1998, a new initiative called GEAR UP began creating new pathways to higher education by linking high-poverty middle schools to local colleges and universities. The program now reaches over 250,000 students and involves 164 institutions of higher education.
Greater accountability accompanied the greater investments in helping families pay for college. The student default rate declined from 22.4 percent in 1990 to 8.8 percent in 1997, and collections on defaulted student loans increased from $1 billion in 1992 to $3 billion in 1999.
American education is improving. After years of effort, the Nation?s schools have turned a difficult corner. With clear national leadership, America has gotten serious about education. The status quo that defined the educational landscape in 1993 is being transformed. The new emphasis on high standards, coupled with increased investments and increased accountability, will be the chief legacy of the Clinton-Gore education agenda.
But the task of school reform is far from complete. In the coming months, the Administration will continue to vigorously pursue its education agenda. The objectives are many: strengthening accountability measures to fix failing schools; expanding public school choice; passing school construction legislation to modernize thousands of over-crowded and worn-out school buildings; providing resources to close the digital divide; and expanding college opportunity tax credits to help millions more working and middle-income families pay for college. Congress must also pass legislation to continue reducing class size, to expand after-school and summer school opportunities, and to improve America?s teaching force. Working together with parents, students, teachers, businesses, and State and local leaders, the Clinton-Gore Administration will continue to extend educational excellence and opportunity to all Americans.
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[1 Raising Student Achievement ] |