My life

At the beginning of August, President Bush announced that he was inviting the nation’s governors to an education summit the following month. We met September 27 and 28 at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Many of the Democrats were skeptical of the meeting, because the President and his secretary of education, Lauro Cavazos, made it clear the meeting was not a prelude to a large increase in federal support for education. I shared their concern, but was I excited by the prospect that the summit could produce a road map for the next steps in education reform, just as the Nation at Risk report had done in 1983. I believed the President’s interest in education reform was genuine, and agreed with him that there were important things we could do without new federal money. For example, the administration supported giving parents and students the right to choose a public school other than the one to which they were assigned. Arkansas had just become the second state after Minnesota to adopt the proposal, and I wanted the other forty-eight states to follow suit. I also believed that, if the summit produced the right kind of report, governors could use it to build public support for more investment in education. If people knew what they would get for their money, their aversion to new taxes might lessen. As the co-chairman of the Governors’ Task Force on Education, along with Governor Carroll Campbell of South Carolina, I wanted to build a consensus among the Democrats, then to work with the Republicans on a statement reflecting the outcome of the summit.

President Bush opened the meeting with a brief but eloquent speech. Afterward, we all took a stroll around the central lawn to give the photographers something for the evening news and morning papers, then went to work. The President and Mrs. Bush hosted a dinner that night. Hillary sat at the President’s table and got into a debate with him about how bad America’s infant-mortality rate was. The President couldn’t believe it when she said eighteen countries did a better job than we did in keeping babies alive until the age of two. When she offered to get him the evidence, he said he would find it himself. He did, and the next day he gave me a note for Hillary saying she was right. It was a gracious gesture that reminded me of the day in Kennebunkport six years earlier when he had personally escorted three-yearold Chelsea to the bathroom. When Carroll Campbell was called home to deal with an emergency, I was left to work out the details of a summit statement with the NGA chairman, Republican governor Terry Branstad of Iowa; the association’s education staffer, Mike Cohen; and my aide, Representative Gloria Cabe. Laboring until well after midnight, several of us hammered out a statement committing the governors and the White House to development of a set of specific education goals to be achieved by the year 2000. Unlike the standards movement of the last decade, these goals would be focused on outputs, not inputs, obligating all of us to achieve certain results. I argued that we would look foolish unless we came out of Charlottesville with a bold commitment that would put new energy into education reform. From the start, most of the governors were behind the cause and supported the idea of making the summit the start of something big. Some of the President’s people weren’t so sure. They were afraid of committing him to a big idea that could get him into trouble by raising expectations of new federal funding. Because of the deficit and the President’s “no new taxes” pledge, that wasn’t in the cards. In the end, the White House came around, thanks to John Sununu, who was then the White House chief of staff. Sununu convinced his White House colleagues that the governors couldn’t go home emptyhanded, and I promised to minimize public pressure from the governors for more federal money. The final summit declaration said, “The time has come, for the first time in U.S. history, to establish clear national performance goals, goals that will make us internationally competitive.”

At the end of the summit, President Bush hand-wrote me a very cordial note, thanking me for working with his staff on the summit and saying he wanted to keep education reform “out there above the fray”

as we headed into the 1990 midterm election. I wanted that, too. The governors’ education committee immediately began a process to develop the goals, working with the White House domestic-policy advisor, Roger Porter, who had gone to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar a year after I did. We worked furiously over the next four months to reach agreement with the White House in time for the President’s State of the Union address.

By the end of January 1990, we had agreed on six goals for the year 2000:

• By the year 2000, all children in America will start school ready to learn.

• By the year 2000, the high school graduation rate will increase to at least 90 percent.