Hillary Clinton On Education: 8 Things The Presidential Candidate Wants You To Know
Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton announces her long-anticipated bid for the 2016 presidential nomination today. During her four years as Secretary of State and the last two years giving speeches and promoting her memoir, “Hard Choices,” she has said little about education issues.
These remarks come from then-New York Senator Clinton’s appearance at the April 2007 convention of NYSUT, the federation of New York teachers’ unions, during her last presidential campaign. Back then there was no Common Core curriculum debate and she never uses the phrase “school choice” in her speech. She does mention that it “takes a village” to educate a child. A lot has changed since that event eight years ago when she called newly elected New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who was ousted from office less than a year later, “a leader in the mold of Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt.” We’ll see if her other views have evolved:
Vouchers:
I’ll tell you why I won’t support vouchers. Number one, I don’t think they’re constitutional. But number two, I don’t see how you would implement them without having a lot of people get vouchers for schools that would be teaching things antithetical to American values.
Supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton get ready in Manhattan on Saturday for the upcoming announcement of her run for president. (Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
Charter schools:
I actually do believe in charter schools.
Teacher pay:
Not only don’t we pay teachers what they deserve to be paid, in other countries that have better test scores than ours–you hear about that all the time–actually teachers get paid much more on an even standard with professionals who are engineers and in other walks of life.
We have to face the fact that we have a lot of people who come out of school burdened with student loans and decide they can’t go into teaching, so we lose a lot of good young people.
How to spend tax money:
Let’s put money into what we know does work, like smaller class sizes, higher teacher pay and better curriculum.
Let’s use interventions that work. That means extended learning time, it means summer school, it means stronger parental involvement from the very beginning of a child’s schooling.
Character and behavior education:
I believe it is time we get back to teaching discipline, self-control, patience, punctuality. The biggest complaint that I hear from employers is that young people who show up for jobs don’t have those habits. They don’t get there on time. They don’t know how to conduct themselves appropriately.
There are wonderful pictures in museums in New York that I’ve seen where at the turn of the last century there were all the immigrants who were coming into New York and the schools were basically the place where kids were socialized. Where they were given the chance to learn how to fit in and behave and conduct themselves. And I think we’re leaving too many kids to raise themselves. They don’t have adult supervision and responsible mentoring in the way that every child needs. And we all know that education starts at home. And if we don’t have parents who appreciate that, it’s very hard for the schools and the teachers to make up that deficit… It does take a village to raise and teach a child.
Public schools:
The public school system has been, I believe, second to the Constitution, the most important institution in making America the great country that we have been over the last 200 plus years…
Public education must be defended, yes it has to be modernized but never doubt for a minute if we turned our back on public education we would be turning our back on America. I will not let that happen.
Universal preschool:
I want to start by making preschool available to all the children who need it in order to prepare them to be successful at school.
For every dollar invested you get a seven dollar return. Children stay in school, their behavior is better and their academic performance improves over what it would have been without preschool.
Personal background:
Clinton, 67, graduated near the top of her class at Maine South High School in Park Ridge, Illinois, in 1965. She went on to graduate with a degree in political science fromWellesley College, a women’s school in Massachusetts, in 1969. She earned her law degree at Yale Law School, where she met her future husband, President Bill Clinton, who had attended Georgetown University. Their daughter, Chelsea, went to Sidwell Friends School in Washington (the same school the Obama daughters attend). Chelsea has a history degree from Stanford University, a master’s degree and doctorate in international relations from Oxford University in England, and a master’s in public health from Columbia University.Hillary Clinton On Education: 8 Things The Presidential Candidate Wants You To Know - Forbes:
