And speaking of the family, let’s turn to a matter on the mind of every American parent tonight:  education.  We all know the sorry story of the sixties and seventies—­soaring spending, plummeting test scores—­and that hopeful trend of the eighties, when we replaced an obsession with dollars with a commitment to quality, and test scores started back up.  There’s a lesson here that we all should write on the blackboard a hundred times:  In a child’s education, money can never take the place of basics like discipline, hard work, and, yes, homework.

As a nation we do, of course, spend heavily on education—­more than we spend on defense.  Yet across our country, Governors like New Jersey’s Tom Kean are giving classroom demonstrations that how we spend is as important as how much we spend.  Opening up the teaching profession to all qualified candidates, merit pay—­so that good teachers get A’s as well as apples—­and stronger curriculum, as Secretary Bennett has proposed for high schools—­these imaginative reforms are making common sense the most popular new kid in America’s schools.  How can we help?  Well, we can talk about and push for these reforms.  But the most important thing we can do is to reaffirm that control of our schools belongs to the States, local communities and, most of all, to the parents and teachers.

My friends, some years ago, the Federal Government declared war on poverty, and poverty won.  Today the Federal Government has 59 major welfare programs and spends more than $100 billion a year on them.  What has all this money done?  Well, too often it has only made poverty harder to escape.  Federal welfare programs have created a massive social problem.  With the best of intentions, government created a poverty trap that wreaks havoc on the very support system the poor need most to lift themselves out of poverty:  the family.  Dependency has become the one enduring heirloom, passed from one generation to the next, of too many fragmented families.

It is time—­this may be the most radical thing I’ve said in 7 years in this office—­it’s time for Washington to show a little humility.  There are a thousand sparks of genius in 50 States and a thousand communities around the Nation.  It is time to nurture them and see which ones can catch fire and become guiding lights.  States have begun to show us the way.  They’ve demonstrated that successful welfare programs can be built around more effective child support enforcement practices and innovative programs requiring welfare recipients to work or prepare for work.  Let us give the States more flexibility and encourage more reforms.  Let’s start making our welfare system the first rung on America’s ladder of opportunity, a boost up from dependency, not a graveyard but a birthplace of hope.