Speech to the National Governors' Association Education Summit. Today, President Clinton speaks to the National Governors' Association, in Palisades, New Jersey, about our challenge to improve education for America's children. The President will urge states, communities, businesses, parents, teachers and students to come together to meet this national challenge.

A critical challenge that demands action. We must face two basic realities: Some of our public schools are failing and we cannot walk away. If we work together, we can revitalize our schools. President Clinton is doing everything in his power to focus America's attention on this urgent challenge.

Real progress. President Clinton has helped America make real progress on meeting this challenge by giving communities more flexibility and demanding more accountability in return. He has:

• Enacted Goals 2000, emphasizing standards and accountability;
• Worked with businesses and communities to make the School-to-Work program a reality;
• Cut regulations at the Department of Education by half, and revised the rest to encourage flexibility and emphasize results.
• Helped take guns and drugs out of our schools with the Gun Free Schools Act, the Safe and Drug Free Schools initiative and by supporting random drug testing of student athletes.

Five challenges. In today's speech, the President will issue six new challenges to states, communities, businesses, parents, teachers and students to make our schools stronger.

1. Standards for students:

   A. "No free pass." Challenge every state to develop achievement tests at every level that students must pass to graduate or be promoted. If students aren't ready to move on, we must work with them after school and over the summer, and if necessary, hold them back.

   B. Every Child Reading by the End of Third Grade. Set a concrete standard for the most basic of skills: reading. Every school district, teacher and parent, must be committed to a ensuring that every child is reading by the end of the third grade, and every parent should read to their child 30 minutes a day.

2. Standards for teachers:

   A. Change Certification Rules that Bar Many Talented Young People from being Teachers: Support alternative certification procedures with high standards to bring talented people into teaching as long as high standards are met. Governor Clinton reformed certification procedures in Arkansas. We should do it everywhere.

   B. Reward Excellent Teachers and Find Ways to Dismiss Incompetent Teachers: Challenge teachers to meet high standards for performance and states to reward them when they do. Make it easier and cheaper to remove incompetent or ineffective teachers, while providing more rewards for successful teachers and schools. We shouldn't bash teachers; we should try to find ways to keep the best teachers in the classroom.

3. Standards for our schools:

   A. Focus on teaching, not administration. Challenge states to cut regulation and overhead, and spend more on the classroom, not on administration.

   B. Public school choice, charter schools. President Clinton believes that parents should be given the right to choose which public school their children will attend. The President's balanced budget calls for seed money to help start 3,000 charter schools over the next five years.

   C. Close or fix broken schools. Challenge states to take direct action to shut down or fix schools that don't work.

4. Make schools safe, disciplined and drug free.

   A. Permit Uniforms and Drug Testing. Support School uniforms and other innovative approaches to increase discipline and reduce violence. In Long Beach, school uniforms have helped reduce school crime 36%.

   B. Make It Easier for Teachers and Schools to Take Appropriate Disciplinary Action. Children can't learn and teachers can't teach unless there is order in the classroom. More states should follow the lead of Indiana, New York and Maryland in giving teachers and schools the power to remove disruptive students.

   C. Enforce tough truancy laws. Follow the model of Police Chief Reubin Greenberg in Charleston, South Carolina.

   D. Community Schools as Safe Havens. Support Crime Trust funding that encourages community schools to stay open for longer hours -- at the time when students need a safe haven and when most juvenile crime is committed. We must provide young people a safe place to go to keep off the streets, particularly during the peak hours of juvenile crime -- between 3:00-6:00 p.m.

5. Accept technology literacy challenge for all students.

   A. Ensure that Technology Literacy Challenge is Met for Every Schools and Every Student: States and local communities must ensure that students do not become divided by access to technology. States should accept the President's $2 billion Technology Literacy Challenge to help ensure that all students are technologically literate and all schools can meet the four pillars of the technology literacy challenge: classrooms wired to the information superhighway; computers in every school and classroom; technology-trained teachers, and engaging learning software that challenges students.

   B. Ensure Teachers Can Teach Their Students to Become Technologically Literate: Work with teacher unions, colleges and corporate America to ensure that every new teacher can use and teach technology.