America 2000: Six Goals, Strategy, and Path to Goals 2000

America 2000 was a national education strategy announced by President George H.W. Bush on April 18, 1991, aimed at overhauling American schooling through world-class academic standards, school choice, new privately designed schools, and lifelong learning. It set six goals for the country’s schools to reach by the year 2000, drawn from a 1989 summit between the president and the nation’s governors. Congress never passed its accompanying legislation, but the framework carried directly into the Goals 2000 law that President Clinton signed in 1994.

Where It Came From

The strategy grew out of the Charlottesville Education Summit, held September 27–28, 1989, at the University of Virginia. President Bush convened 49 governors for the first summit of its kind since 1965, focused entirely on education.¹ Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton co-led the National Governors Association education task force there, and Tennessee Governor Lamar Alexander, soon to be Bush’s Secretary of Education, was also in the room.

After the summit, Clinton and White House domestic-policy adviser Roger B. Porter worked out a set of national education goals. Bush announced six of them during his State of the Union address on January 31, 1990.² A bipartisan National Education Goals Panel, made up of governors, administration officials, and members of Congress, was created to track progress.¹

The Six National Goals

The goals set a deadline of the year 2000 and ran from early childhood to adult literacy. As adopted by the president and governors in 1990, they were:

All children would start school ready to learn.
The high school graduation rate would reach at least 90 percent.
Students would demonstrate mastery of challenging subject matter in English, mathematics, science, history, and geography by grades 4, 8, and 12.
American students would be first in the world in math and science achievement.
Every American adult would be literate and possess the skills to compete in a global economy.
Every school would be free of drugs, violence, and firearms.³

The goals were deliberately aspirational. Critics later argued that several, particularly the pledge to rank first in the world in math and science, were unrealistic from the start.⁴

What the Strategy Proposed

When Bush unveiled America 2000 on April 18, 1991, he framed it as a national strategy rather than a federal program. Secretary Alexander called it a “crusade.”⁵⁶ The plan had four tracks.

Better Existing Schools

The first track targeted the country’s 110,000 existing schools. The administration proposed world-class standards in English, mathematics, science, history, and geography, and voluntary national exams called “American Achievement Tests” for students in grades 4, 8, and 12. Schools and districts would issue annual report cards. The plan offered $40 million in grants for high-performing districts and a Merit Schools Program to reward schools making notable gains toward the national goals.⁷

A New Generation of Schools

The plan’s most novel element was a call to build schools from scratch. Bush requested $550 million from Congress to create at least 535 New American Schools — one per congressional district — by 1996. Business leaders formed the New American Schools Development Corporation (NASDC), a nonprofit charged with raising $150 to $200 million in private funds to award contracts to research-and-development teams that would reimagine what a school could look like.⁷ Alcoa CEO Paul O’Neill chaired the corporation.⁵

Adult Learning and Workforce Skills

The third track looked beyond K-12. It called for “skill clinics” in workplaces and communities where workers could get a diagnosis of their job skills and a referral to training. The administration also asked businesses and labor unions to develop industry-specific proficiency standards, and proposed expanding the national adult literacy survey.⁷

Communities as Places of Learning

The fourth track called on families, businesses, civic groups, and religious organizations to take active roles in school reform. Communities that adopted the six goals, published progress report cards, and supported creation of a New American School could earn designation as an “America 2000 Community” from their governor.⁸

Why the Legislation Failed

Bush transmitted the “America 2000 Excellence in Education Act” to Congress on May 22, 1991. Its most contentious provisions involved school choice. The bill proposed that federal Chapter 1 compensatory education funds would “follow the child” to whichever public or private school a family selected, and it created grants to support parental-choice programs.⁹

The administration later added a “GI Bill for Children,” modeled on the veterans’ GI Bill, offering $1,000 annual scholarships to children from middle- and low-income families that could be used at any lawful school, including private and religious ones. Bush sought $500 million for the experimental program, though Alexander acknowledged that would cover only a fraction of eligible children.¹⁰

Public-school organizations fought the voucher provisions, calling them an election-year ploy that would drain resources from public schools. In early 1992 the Senate rejected a $30 million voucher plan by 57 to 36. In the House, Representative William D. Ford of Michigan, who chaired the Education and Labor Committee, stripped private-school choice language from the companion bill (HR 3320).¹¹ The broader America 2000 bill died when it was blocked by a Republican filibuster in the Senate.¹² By July 1992, Bush conceded that Congress was unlikely to approve the proposal and shifted school choice into a campaign issue.¹⁰

The Piece That Moved Without Congress

The private-sector arm of the plan pushed forward on its own. The NASDC drew nearly 700 applicants between October 1991 and July 1992 and selected 11 winning design teams. Funding problems later reduced that number to nine, and after a demonstration phase from 1993 to 1995, two more teams were dropped for lack of national scale-up potential.¹³

The winning designs tended toward progressive pedagogical approaches such as interdisciplinary curricula, learner-centered instruction, and multi-age groupings, rather than the truly radical departures some proponents had hoped for. RAND research three years into implementation found that scaling these designs within existing districts proved extremely difficult, hampered by clashes with entrenched school cultures, politicized school boards, and rigid union contracts.¹⁴

How It Became Goals 2000

When Bill Clinton won the presidency in 1992, the education goals he had helped draft as a governor followed him to the White House. On March 31, 1994, Clinton signed the Goals 2000: Educate America Act, codifying the original six goals and adding two more, on teacher professional development and parental participation.¹⁵²

Goals 2000 shared America 2000’s DNA but dropped its most divisive piece: the Clinton law contained no provisions for private-school vouchers. Instead, it offered formula grants to states that committed to developing their own academic standards, student performance benchmarks, and aligned assessments. Clinton described it as the first time the country had set national education standards, while insisting the law contained “not one single mandate or order to any State or any local school district.” The bill passed with bipartisan support, drawing over 300 votes in the House and 63 in the Senate.¹⁵ Federal funding for Goals 2000 state grants ranged from roughly $340 million to $476 million per year through the late 1990s.¹⁶ In October 1994, Clinton signed a companion measure, the Improving America’s Schools Act, which reauthorized the Elementary and Secondary Education Act and aligned Title I funding for disadvantaged students with the new standards framework.¹⁷

Were the Goals Met?

When 2000 arrived, the verdict was bleak. Writing in late 1999, economist Richard Rothstein said the nation had “flunked all eight goals.”⁴ The high school graduation rate, stuck at roughly 75 percent since 1965, never approached the 90 percent target.¹⁸ The Goals Panel’s own reporting called the aspiration for American students to rank first in the world in math and science effectively “meaningless” given how students actually performed.¹⁹

The panel acknowledged some progress. School readiness indicators, measured largely through child health data such as immunization rates and low-birthweight percentages, improved. Progress on academic proficiency and math and science achievement was described as “spotty and far short of expectations,” and the panel admitted it had never devised satisfactory benchmarks for several goals.¹⁹ Because Congress never agreed on national standards or tests, each state set its own benchmarks, making consistent national measurement impossible.⁴

The National Education Goals Panel disbanded in early 2002, overtaken by the No Child Left Behind Act, which President George W. Bush signed that January. Observers by then called the original goals “passé” and “meaningless,” and congressional support for the panel had thinned.²⁰

None of the eight goals were fully achieved by their deadline, and the specific mechanisms America 2000 proposed — voluntary national tests, a voucher system, 535 new schools — never materialized as Bush envisioned. What lasted was the framework: the idea that the federal government and the states shared responsibility for setting and tracking academic standards, an approach that ran through Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, and later federal education policy. Forty-nine states eventually adopted academic standards in core subjects under the Clinton-era legislation.¹⁷

1
Education Week. Historic Summit Fueled Push for K-12 Standards
2
National Education Goals Panel. National Education Goals Panel Report
3
ERIC. National Education Goals
4
Economic Policy Institute. Lessons of Goals 2000
5
The American Presidency Project. Address to the Nation on the National Education Strategy
6
Education Next. Leadership Makes the Difference: Lamar Alexander and K-12 Education
7
The American Presidency Project. White House Fact Sheet: The President’s Education Strategy
8
ERIC. America 2000: An Education Strategy Sourcebook
9
The American Presidency Project. Message to Congress Transmitting Proposed Legislation To Promote Excellence in Education
10
Education Week. Unable to Sell Congress on Vouchers, Bush Says Campaign Will Tout Choice
11
Education Week. Buoyed by Senate Vote, Ford Backs Off Deal on School Choice
12
ERIC. Education Policy History
13
RAND Corporation. New American Schools Design Teams
14
Fordham Institute. New American Schools: A Short, Opinionated History, Part II
15
The American Presidency Project. Remarks on Signing the Goals 2000: Educate America Act in San Diego
16
Congressional Research Service. Goals 2000: Educate America Act
17
Clinton Presidential Library. Education Reform
18
Education Policy Analysis Archives. Goals 2000 and the Graduation Rate
19
National Education Goals Panel. NEGP Findings Report
20
Education Week. Mission Imponderable, Goals Panel to Disband