Our Goals 2000 proposal will empower individual school districts to
experiment with ideas like chartering their schools to be run by private
corporations or having more public school choice, to do whatever they wish
to do as long as we measure every school by one high standard: Are our
children learning what they need to know to compete and win in the global
economy?
Goals 2000 links world-class standards to grassroots reforms and I hope
Congress will pass it without delay. Our school to work initiative will for
the first time link school to the world of work, providing at least one
year of apprenticeship beyond high school. After all, most of the people
we're counting on to build our economic future won't graduate from college.
It's time to stop ignoring them and start empowering them. We must
literally transform our outdated unemployment system into a new
reemployment system. The old unemployment system just sort of kept you
going while you waited for your old job to come back. We've got to have a
new system to move people into new and better jobs because most of those
old jobs just don't come back. And we know that the only way to have real
job security in the future, to get a good job with a growing income, is to
have real skills and the ability to learn new ones. So we've got to
streamline today's patchwork of training programs and make them a source of
new skill for our people who lose their jobs. Reemployment, not
unemployment, must become the centerpiece of our economic renewal. I urge
you to pass it in this session of Congress.