Clinton Goes After Dole In Ohio -- Oct. 21, 1996

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Clinton Takes On Education From His Bully Pulpit

By Wolf Blitzer/CNN

NORTHBROOK, Ill. (AllPolitics, Jan. 22) -- President Bill Clinton's first out-of-Washington trip in this second term was designed to use his bully pulpit. He visited an affluent suburban Chicago high school where he urged schools across the country to participate in internationally recognized achievement tests in math and science.

"To pretend that somehow holding ourselves to these standards and agreeing that there has to be some uniform way of measuring them is giving up local control is just an excuse to avoid being held accountable because we're afraid we can't make it," Clinton said. "It's selling our kids down the drain and it's wrong."

The president made his pitch in the suburban school district because it had participated in one such federally funded study and scored well. Clinton believes the Education Department should be encouraging other schools to follow suit.

"It has nothing to do with local control," Clinton said. "There's no school board in America that controls the content of algebra."

But not everyone thinks it's such a good idea. Critics say the federal government should simply get out of the way.

Patrick Reilly, of a group called Citizens for Education Freedom, says, "It is the parents who really drive true changes in education, and public education will only improve to the extent that parents are given some say in what's going on in the schools and the president speaking from the bully pulpit is not going to give them that opportunity."

Clinton's trip marks what the White House says will be a new pattern in this second term. Officials say his first-term trips were almost always designed to promote his position on hot legislative or political issues. But now, with the president no longer having to worry about getting re-elected, they say he has the luxury of highlighting pet projects, like the improved test scores here.

"I was just thinking," he told the class, "if I had had a class like this when I was their age, I might have gotten into a different line of work."

At a middle school, physics students demonstrated the advantages and disadvantages of friction, a subject he's very familiar with back in Washington.

Whatever the president learned about friction in the classroom, White House officials say he still has some pressing education initiatives in his new budget, including requests for more money. At the same time, he still faces a potential Republican effort to dismantle the Department of Education. And that's friction.