President Sees Lesson in School Report

Citing a new report on below-average performance in urban classrooms, President Clinton on Thursday urged that the nation embrace education standards that can be applied to all students “without regard to their race, their income or their background.”

The comments, made at a political fund-raiser in New York City, reflected Clinton’s continued push for a program of national standards in U.S. classrooms that would be backed up by testing, an effort that has run into widespread opposition.

“We cannot pretend, if we have a truly progressive vision of the future, that we can ever achieve what we want to achieve unless we hold our children--all of our children--without regard to their race, their income or their background, to high standards of learning,” the president said.

Students should then be given “the support they need to meet those standards and measure whether they do or not, and if they don’t, keep on working at it until they do.”

Earlier this week, a report by the independent publication Education Week found that more than half the students in many urban schools are failing to master basic skills in reading, mathematics and science, with the poorest districts tending to fare the worst.

Clinton used the report’s findings to buttress his argument that U.S. schools should adopt a national program of testing to ensure that fundamental skills are achieved, targeting fourth-grade reading and eighth-grade math.

So far, 15 major school districts--including Los Angeles Unified, Long Beach, New York City and Chicago--have indicated that they would cooperate with the national effort. (California is moving to implement a set of its own standard tests in the public schools.)

However, Clinton’s testing proposal has sparked widespread resistance among lawmakers and many educators. Late last year, a coalition of Republicans and black and Latino Democrats thwarted the plan.

The minority Democrats argued that a child’s self-esteem could be damaged by failing to perform well on an exam. On Thursday, Clinton in effect called such criticism shortsighted, contending that it is the failure to gain necessary knowledge that ultimately could jeopardize a person’s well-being.

“In the end, when they’re 50, their self-esteem will be more harmed by not being able to read and write and learn new skills than it will by having been held back one year in school when they were 10,” he argued. “And we have got to have that kind of commitment to national standards, to rigorous standards.”

Clinton did not address the major criticism among conservatives of his push for standards: that it would represent a federal intrusion into an area that traditionally has been the domain of local districts.

The president’s comments came as he addressed a fund-raiser for the Democratic National Committee at the ornate Dakota on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, the apartment building where former Beatle John Lennon lived and was killed.

The luncheon aimed to raise $250,000 from guests contributing $5,000 each. Those attending included actors Leonardo DiCaprio, Kevin Spacey, Lauren Bacall and Uma Thurman; director Barry Levinson; and model Christie Brinkley.