Dear Parent, Teacher, Principal, Superintendent, Community and Business Leader:
Many of you have been asking, "What can I do to help improve our schools? How can the new GOALS 2000 Act assist us in our efforts to improve student learning and safety in our schools?"
On March 31, President Clinton signed a law that offers new tools and opportunities to achieve your own education goals and high standards -- the GOALS 2000: Educate America Act. It is the most important new federal legislation affecting K-12 education in years. The Goals 2000 Act sets as national priorities education improvement and participation -- but to be accomplished through local and state ingenuity, not through federal control.
This booklet is designed for you. It offers general information on the Act itself, as well as questions that can help you analyze what needs to be done to improve learning in your schools and in your community. These questions can also lead you to promising practices and cutting-edge efforts to improve teaching and learning and to have a safer and more disciplined learning environment.
Like the Act itself, this booklet aims to assist you in making the most of a rare opportunity. We are seeing in this country an emerging "convergence of opinion" about how American education must change if we're to reach the National Education Goals. Despite this growing agreement on what works to make schools better, each community and each state has to do the hard work of addressing its own problems and setting its own goals.
We do know that we must set high expectations -- challenging academic and occupational standards -- for all children. And we must do whatever it takes to help every child reach those expectations. That's what GOALS 2000 is about and what President Clinton's whole approach to education is built around.
It's not going to be easy. But together, we can reinvent American education -- school by school and community by community. Together, we can move toward the National Education Goals and move every child toward achieving higher levels of learning.
I hope you will join this effort to help every child reach for a bright future. I hope you will seize this opportunity as if our future depends on it...because it does.
[An Invitation]