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	Last updated 6.15.05

2005 Award for Outstanding Service
to Public Education

Former President Bill Clinton and the NAACP

Former President Bill Clinton and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) will receive The NEA Foundation Award for Outstanding Service to Public Education at the 11th Annual Salute to Excellence in Education Gala on Friday, December 9, 2005.

The Clinton administration’s many successes surrounding public education include providing higher education with its largest funding increase since the GI Bill of Rights passed in 1944, opening college doors with Hope Scholarships and Lifetime Learning Tax Credits, reducing class size through the hiring of 100,000 teachers, and encouraging higher standards to turn around failing schools. His administration also invested in school construction and safe school environments, funded after-school opportunities for more than a million children, and closed the “digital divide” by investing in educational technology for America’s schools. In addition, funds increased twofold for the Head Start program, resulting in significant gains in both the enrollment and quality of the program.

While Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas is perhaps the best-known example of the NAACP’s quest for educational equality, the organization has continued to collaborate, negotiate, legislate, litigate, and agitate on behalf of public education. The NAACP is actively engaged in a host of educational equality issues including the disproportionate assignment of minority students to special education classes and the effects of zero-tolerance discipline policies on minority students. In addition, the NAACP is working on a teacher recruitment, preparation, and retention plan with the goal of closing the achievement gaps and ensuring the promises of Brown in conjunction with the National Education Association (NEA), the American Federation of Teachers, the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and the National Alliance of Black School Educators.

The NEA Foundation Award for Outstanding Service to Public Education was created in 2000 to honor those who have made exceptional contributions to public education. Previous recipients include Mary Hatwood Futrell, Dean of The George Washington University’s Graduate School of Education and Human Development and former NEA President; LeVar Burton, host and co-executive producer of Reading Rainbow; the late Fred Rogers, creator and host of Mister Rogers Neighborhood; and Richard W. Riley, former U.S. Secretary of Education.