A r c h i v e d  I n f o r m a t i o n

Good afternoon. I want to thank all of the partners who made this forum possible. And if you'll allow me a personal note, I'd like to thank my right arm and counselor, Terry Peterson, whom you all heard from this morning. Terry was one of the driving forces who made this forum possible. He was also with me in South Carolina when our school improvement efforts produced an historic increase in the number of AP students in our state, as he mentioned to you earlier. I want to thank him and his staff for their wonderful work in putting together this important conference.

I also want to thank all of you for coming to Washington. You couldn't have come at a better time. We announced the new federal education budget on Monday, and I am proud to say that the Clinton-Gore administration has asked for the highest level of federal funding for Advanced Placement programs ever.

We have proposed $20 million in state grants over the next year. That's an increase of 33 percent over last year's funding, and a 500 percent increase over the funding of two years ago. Congress, of course, must approve our proposal. But in the meantime, with $20 million potentially available, I expect to see a real stampede to the grand ballroom at 3:45 this afternoon for the session on "Reviewing the Federal Grant Application Process."

My friends, I am excited about expanding Advanced Placement opportunities because I have always believed that America's young people are a lot smarter than we sometimes give them credit for. I have been secretary of education for seven years, and I have been privileged to meet with world leaders and many outstanding educators. But one of the smartest people I have met in this job was a five-year-old boy at a school in Virginia. America has always been filled with children as bright and eager as that wonderful young man. But we adults have not always encouraged all our children to reach their potential. For too long in this country, we made assumptions about students' abilities based on the color of their skin, or their parents' lack of education, or the country they came from, or whether they came to school in a wheelchair. We even made assumptions about ability based on gender. As a result of this tyranny of low expectations, many students were never encouraged to take challenging or Advanced Placement courses.

Writing in Newsweek magazine in March of 1998, the journalist Jay Mathews described the problem very well. He wrote that AP courses have been "treated like the best family china, brought out only for special guests." Mathews said that offering challenging courses only to the best students "occurs in most American high schools and is usually justified, like bunny slopes for uncertain skiers, as a way to save ill-prepared students from crashing into mountainous reading lists. Yet...[this] practice can be blamed for much of low motivation and achievement" in our high schools.

I know that bringing about change is difficult. Some teachers, principals, and parents oppose expanding AP opportunities because they think it's too hard on the students-or themselves-and some schools fear that allowing too many students into AP courses may ultimately lower the school's pass rate on the exams. But as I travel the country and talk to students, teachers, principals, and parents, I can see a real sea change in attitudes about student ability. Today, the idea that all students can learn to challenging standards is gaining wide acceptance, and higher standards are in place in all 50 states for all students.

This change gives us an historic opportunity to open the doors of advanced courses to many more students, to expand the number of schools offering AP and International Baccalaureate courses and exams, to offer many more dual enrollment college courses in high schools, and to improve the quality of AP courses and teaching. This forum is about exploring these opportunities, and I believe that we can take a big step here toward revolutionizing course taking in our middle and high schools.

I'd like to briefly describe my own experience with expanding AP opportunities when I was governor of South Carolina. We took several steps to improve our record in Advanced Placement.

The state agreed to pay for the exams and make them free to the students. That obviously was key. The state also paid for start-up costs for training teachers, including the creation of teacher centers. This took a big financial burden off the school districts. And the state required that our public colleges and universities give college credit for students who scored a "3" on the exams-a real incentive for students to take rigorous courses.

Yesterday evening, you met one of the beneficiaries of that expansion-Jeffrey Livingston, who earned enough college credits in South Carolina to enter Harvard as a sophomore. I am so proud of Jeffrey, and I'm sure you were all impressed with him, too, as well as our other student guest, Jordanna Grant.

It all boils down to this-when you innovate, create partnerships, improve teaching, and have high expectations for students, you can get many more students off the bunny slopes and onto the Advanced Placement slopes.

President Clinton, Vice President Gore, and I are eager to support your efforts, as I mentioned a few minutes ago. The $20 million in grants that we have requested for the next year will expand AP opportunities by giving states, school districts, and schools an incentive to put more AP courses in place if they currently don't have them. It will also give students an incentive to take the courses and help pay for approximately 75,000 AP tests.

In addition, states and participating schools can use the funds to develop curriculum for AP courses, to train teachers to teach those courses, or to offer more courses like AP art and AP music, which are just as important in the effort to help students reach high standards as AP calculus or biology.

The president has also proposed a new $10 million initiative called Next Generation Technology that would provide grants to help develop high-quality AP courses on the Internet. This will bring Advanced Placement into the 21st century world of distance learning with its potential for reaching large numbers of students.

With this support, I can announce to you today that the goal of the Clinton-Gore administration is to help every American high school to offer AP courses within the next two years. My friends, we are serious about Advanced Placement, you're serious about Advanced Placement, and together, we can make things happen.

For example, I believe we can help every high school in America to add at least one advanced course each year for the next 10 years. That's a goal we can meet, particularly in light of the growing interest in challenging courses. New research shows that between 1984 and 1997, the number of AP exams taken by high school students nearly tripled, going from 50 exams per 1,000 12th-graders to 131 exams.

To keep the momentum rolling, we must keep the AP pipeline humming. The road to AP doesn't really begin in middle school. That is why the president's education budget calls for more support to education at every level.

We are asking for a dramatic expansion of our support for after-school programs to give students expanded learning opportunities. We want to increase our investment in mentoring programs to help middle school students select the right courses-including algebra in the 8th grade and geometry in no later than the 9th grade-to put them on the road to Advanced Placement and college.

We want to launch a new $1 billion initiative to recruit, prepare, and support good new teachers. We want to accelerate our efforts to reduce class size and hire 100,000 new teachers.

And we are asking Congress to continue to help us open the doors of college to all. In the Clinton-Gore years, the amount of available student financial aid has risen more than at any time since the G. I. Bill was enacted. We want to make sure that all students who earn college credits through Advanced Placement can afford to go college and use those credits.

My friends, I want to end by taking a moment to discuss one of my favorite books-Frank McCourt's unforgettable biography, Angela's Ashes. I had the pleasure of visiting with Frank in Ireland and here in America.

I'm sure many of you have read Angela's Ashes or seen the current movie based on it. It is a memoir of Frank's childhood, which was filled with great poverty. But the book includes uplifting passages about education. In one passage, Frank's teacher says to his class:

"You have to study and learn so that you can make up your own mind about history and everything else. But you can't make up an empty mind. Stock your mind, stock your mind. It is your house of treasure, and no one in the world can interfere with it?You might be poor, your shoes might be broken, but your mind is a palace."

On behalf of the American people, I want to thank all of you for helping our nation's students to fill their palaces with knowledge and joy and wonder. And I thank you for helping all students, through challenging coursework, to discover the house of treasure in their minds. Thank you very much.