Clinton's Keota, IA K-12 Education comments: the full transcript

There are a number ofrecentdiaries on the subject of Hillary Clinton’s remarks on K-12 education in Keota, Iowa yesterday that seek to color Clinton’s comments in one way or another, but thusfar, there has been no complete transcription of Clinton that is not sourced to a news outlet or selectively excerpted (with personal emphasis by the diarist).

So I decided to directly transcribe the five minutes of commentary on K-12 education from yesterday’s remarks, and try to the best of my ability to neutrally summarize each discrete point, and index these to the first second of those points on the provided Youtube video. Hopefully this will prove somewhat helpful toward having an actual evidence-based discussion on Clinton’s stated education policy. Use it as you will.

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Transcript: Hillary Clinton, Remarks on K-12 Education, Keota, Iowa, 12/22/2015

(1) 17:10

...I’m also going to do everything I can to defend education, and to make it clear that the best way to improve elementary and secondary education is to actually listen to the teachers and educators who are in the classrooms with our students, and not scapegoat them and treat them as if they don’t have any contribution to make.

(2) 17:42

And I want to say a word about small rural schools like this one, because I know that was the original reason why you all got so excited and why you were stalking presidential candidates (laughter). And I don’t blame you. And I actually looked up some numbers. You know, Iowa has one of the best education systems in the country and has had for some time. And I believe…(applause)...since I grew up in Illinois, we used to take a test they called the Iowa Basic Test, we used to take that test all the time...I wasn’t happy about it (laughter), but we did it because your education system was viewed as one of the best in the country. And your students have I think the second highest ACT scores in the country. And I looked at the average of what Iowa students have, which is higher than the national average – this school’s students are higher than the Iowa average.

(3) 18:49

And…(applause)...so...for the life of me I don’t understand why your state government and I know Governor Branstad vetoed the money that would have come to help this school. And it was a bipartisan agreement, you know those are hard to come by these days...you had a bipartisan agreement in your legislature for more one-time student funding, to help deal with some of the financial challenges that districts like this one have, and Governor Branstad vetoed it.

(4) 19:25

Yet at the same time you have these laws which require if you have a deficit you may not be able to be a school district...it doesn’t make sense to me. When you...when you...something is not broke, don’t break it, right? And this school district, and these schools throughout Iowa are doing a better than average job.

(5) 19:46

Now, I wouldn’t keep any school open that wasn’t doing a better than average job. If a school’s not doing a good job, then, you know, that may not be good for the kids. But when you have a district that is doing a good job, it seems kind of counterproductive to impose financial burdens on it.

(6) 20:03

So, the federal government doesn’t have a whole lot to do with this, this is mostly state and local decision-making. Very little, less than 10%, I think maybe 7% or so of the money that is used to run schools in Iowa comes from the federal government. So therefore this is primarily a state issue.

(7) 20:23

But as president what I am looking for are schools that exceed expectations, and I don’t care whether they are urban, suburban, or rural.

(8) 20:32

And where there are small districts like this one I know you’ve got online opportunities, and maybe there should be exploration about how you can also share teachers and all the rest of it, but I am very partial toward districts that are doing well. And from everything I can tell, this one is.

(9) 20:54

And so I hope that you can work through whatever your financial and political challenges are with the state government and at least have a fighting chance to keep providing the quality of education that produces students like these three young women. I meet a lot of students and you can be very proud of not only them but I am sure so many others for the way they present themselves, the way they conduct themselves, and how effective they have been in making their case.

(10) 21:23

So when we talk about rural development, you’ve got to also talk about rural education, and I think we’ve got to go hand in hand, and maybe Tom will have something more to say about this, because we’re going to diversify the rural economy, we want to make sure that we have the best possible schools in order to produce the students and the adults that are going to be part of that new economy, particularly when it comes to clean energy in Iowa.

(11) 21:51

I also believe we need to do more on early childhood education. A lot of kids are not prepared when they come to school, and they never catch up, so I would like to see us try to help, starting with the most disadvantaged kids, to give them a better early head start, a better universal kindergarten experience, so that they can be successful.

(12) 22:14

And then on the other end, we have to make college affordable, which it isn’t right now for a lot of hardworking families, and I have a whole plan about how to do that.

(pivots to higher education and the ACA)

Listen to teachers and educators, don’t scapegoat them.

Iowa has a superior education system, and Keota is outperforms the Iowa average.

Governor Branstad vetoed a bipartisan agreement to provide one-time funding to Keota (and local school districts like it).

Laws that automatically close school districts in times of deficit don’t make sense. High performing schools should be left alone.

I would not keep any below-average schools open, but above-average schools should not endure financial burdens.

This is primary a state and local issue.

My focus as president is to look for high performing schools, wherever they are.

Maybe there are possibilities in online, collaborative learning, but I’m partial to high performing districts.

I hope you can work with state government to work out the challenges in your high-performing district.

Education is critical to rural economic development.

Early childhood education is also important, beginning with Head Start and kindergarten.

College should be more affordable for hardworking families.

I won’t bold any parts of the transcript or to try to cherrypick what was said. I believe these are the totality of Clinton’s remarks on K-12 education in Iowa yesterday.

To me, the substantive (and debateable) policy declaration in these remarks boils down to this:

Clinton says that, relative to the averages, high-performing schools should be sensibly funded, and low-performing schools should be closed.

Now there’s much left unsaid on the latter point – does Clinton intend to let low-performing schools passively fail through underfunding, or does she believe they should be actively shuttered? Where and how will those teachers and students be reallocated/redistributed? Or did she perhaps misstate her views, and will she clarify, or reverse the statement? (For example, a recent Clinton campaign statement begins to walk back the remarks.)

Many of the “clarifying” diaries seem more spin than substance. YMMV. Yes, Clinton says that high-performing schools deserve funding, but she also clearly says that underperforming schools should not be kept open. She did in fact say both of these things, with the strongest emphasis on high performing schools. That should certainly invite scrutiny of Clinton’s policy on underperforming schools in particular. And given that frontpager Laura Clawson’s initial diary accurately pointed out that underperformance correlates strongly with low incomes, a policy of shuttering underperforming schools does disproportionately impact low-income students and districts.

There may be debate around Laura’s use of the word “most” to qualify “low-income schools”, but it does seem like this could be proved or disproved with a straightforward statistical analysis of whether a majority of low-income schools are also below the national average in terms of standardized tests (which, per Clinton’s remarks on standardized testing, would seem to be how she quantify “average” performance). I suspect that such an analysis would justify Laura’s use of the term.