A packed audience comprised mainly of educators and affiliates from the medical school and the Child Study Center were on hand to hear Hilary Rodham Clinton talk in the School of Medicine's Harkness Auditorium. Her address there was part of a one-and-a-half-day symposium titled "Child Development: The Foundation of Education," which was being held to celebrate the School Development Program. Clinton has been a long-time supporter of the program, which was founded in 1968 by Dr. James Comer, the Maurice Falk Professor of Child Psychiatry. The program promotes the collaboration of parents, educators and the community to achieve greater school success for children. Since it was first introduced in two New Haven schools, the School Development Program has been initiated in more than 700 schools in the United States, Trinidad and Tobago, South Africa and England.
In her address, Clinton recalled how she spent time at the Child Study Center and Yale-New Haven Hospital while she was a student at the Law School. She went to the Child Study Center on the advice of two of her law professors because of her eagerness to learn more about issues affecting children and families that intersect with the law, including child abuse. She sat in on case conferences, participated in medical grand rounds and talked with patients. "It was certainly that work and that exposure," she remarked, "which deepened my belief in the need for interdisciplinary discussion, dialogue and cooperation when it came to doing the best we could in providing the support that families needed in the raising of children."
Clinton received some of her loudest applause as she paid tribute to Comer. "Before it became conventional wisdom, Dr. Comer knew that parental involvement was essential to the success of a child's education," said the First Lady. "He has demonstrated that it is possible for adults to collaborate with principals and teachers to create a positive and supportive school climate. And he's taught us how hard it is to do any of this, how hard we have to work to get parents -- especially parents whose experience with school was not very successful -- involved on behalf of their children. Perhaps more than anyone I know, he has taken the wisdom of the African proverb I borrowed for my book 'It Takes a Village to Raise a Child' to heart and put it into practice."
Clinton was also applauded as she spoke out against Republican-supported legislation for a school voucher program, which uses public tax dollars to send children to private schools. The current debate between legislators over vouchers, Clinton said, draws attention away from the real issue of public school reform. "[A]t a time when, more than ever, we should be devoting more resources, attention and intelligence to improving our public schools, some want to drain off these resources and give them only to a few, making it even more difficult for public schools to improve," she said. "Vouchers also divide communities at a time when one of our greatest challenges as a nation is to pull communities together across racial and economic lines. Even at their best, vouchers would be available to only a very small proportion of the population, leaving the vast majority of schools and students with fewer resources and even less hope."
Furthermore, Clinton said, recent studies of voucher programs in Cleveland have shown that students using vouchers to attend private schools have made "no significant academic gains."
Public school choice, stated Clinton, is a more favorable option and is one that can help improve schools. "[W]e do need to create within the public schools greater competition among schools and districts," she said. "That's why I strongly favor promoting choice among public schools, including charter schools, magnet schools, schools-within-schools . . . If a school is not desirable to the parents and children who would otherwise be required to attend because the outcomes are not good, because it's not an orderly environment, then let us provide the means for those parents and children to go to another school."
The First Lady also advocated for her husband's stated education agenda of modernizing and building schools, adopting voluntary national standards and tests, ensuring that every child can read independently by the third grade, hiring 100,000 new teachers and ending the practice of social promotion, among other reforms.
Clinton urged her audience to "redouble" their own commitment to public school reform, stressing the issues of improving teacher quality, parental involvement, early childhood development and after-school activities. "And we have to hold adults in the system accountable," she added. "We can't let another year go by. We've let too many go by so far where adults -- whether they are teachers or principals or school board members or elected officials or parents or anyone else in the community -- are permitted to point fingers at somebody else for the failure of any child."
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