Our President
Forum 2002 Address
To Shorten the Shadow: Providing High Expectations in Education
Con't
That said, I have high expectations for education. And I think it's time that we quit doing just little things and think big and fight big for education. I'm going to give you four things that I believe we should do.
One, the federal government should match the salaries of teachers in every state in our union, to double teachers' salaries in this country.
Now, I can see in your eyes that some of you all think this is far fetched and couldn't be done. But I'm going to give you a real good example of how this was done. It was not until the 1956 Highway Act that we began to build our interstate highway system in this country. That was the year when the federal government began to match state funds to do that. The federal government also had the right to say what kind of standards that we were going to have. There isn't anybody in this room who doesn't believe that teachers should be twice paid what they are today — but it would also give us a chance to set some national standards, which we very desperately need.
The second thing is: We've got to double the number of school counselors we have in the schools in this country. Yesterday at this podium were three wonderful examples of what schools can be. I visited each one of those schools and I can tell you that the reason they were successful in getting students to take the courses and to succeed in those courses, and then to go to college was that they had powerful guidance--powerful school counselors.
Third, every student in America has to have his or her own computer. Would we ever consider giving half our students books, and pencils, and paper, and leave the other half out? That's exactly what we do when we let only a certain number of our students have a computer. Every student in America should have a computer — and it costs less than a dollar a day to do that.
