-- I first heard this from a PBS documentary during the 2016 election. I just did a quick search, and this is the first article I clicked on [from the Huffington Post]: --
Below is a snippet, with the ranking I first heard about in the PBS documentary mentioned toward the end (I bolded it). I can't say this article will definitively confirm what I wrote, but it does seem to at least somewhat support it.
I remained puzzled why Hillary Clinton is derided and despised by so many. It seems clear to me from what I've heard that she's been an almost tireless advocate for children and the less fortunate in our society since her college days. I think her single-minded focus and determination to make a positive difference was not only a strong catalyst in her life, but motivated a lot of Bill's accomplishments. Quite honestly, I don't think Bill would have ever become President without Hillary by his side.
Some people will likely shout out something like, "Well, what about those emails?" To which I would say, "What about them". I spent a number of years working in Records Management, and given my experience and insights, I have yet to see where she did anything that could be considered immoral or unethical, much less illegal. I saw a woman in a group interview once who said she had a very negative opinion of Hillary, which was in line with what most of her friends felt. But she started to get a little skeptical about certain things that didn't add up, and did her own research. Only to discover--as she put--she [Hillary]
It goes to show the power of a charismatic personality (though I don't see it) to define somebody else in a negative manner, and have a large group of people (tens of millions) believe it without question. I heard that of people who disliked both Clinton and Trump in the 2016 election, 70% ended up voting for Trump. Why people would vote for a hardcore narcissist, failed businessman, and violent sexual predator over somebody who devoted their life to service still puzzles me to this day. -- Is Hillary a perfect person? No, I see her faults as well as anybody else. But I don't think her faults would have ever led us to the national crisis we face today.
...Clinton developed her curiosity — and ultimately her expertise — in the issues that would define her tenure as first lady of Arkansas before she moved to the state with the future president.
Following her graduation from Yale Law School in 1973, Hillary Rodham spent a year conducting postgraduate work at the Yale Child Study Center, during which time she published a widely cited
article in the Harvard Educational Review examining how children were viewed under the law, and offering significant proposals for reform.
She also landed a job working for the Children's Defense Fund, where she worked to expose discrepancies between census data and school enrollment — a time she recalled at the first public event of her 2016 campaign in Monticello, Iowa, this April.
"I was knocking on doors saying, 'Is there anybody school-aged who's not in school?' and finding blind kids and deaf kids and kids in wheelchairs who were just left out," she
recalled. "And I was able in Arkansas to work and try to improve education there and give more kids chances who really deserved them."
Hillary Rodham's path to improving education in Arkansas began in 1974 when she moved to Fayetteville and became just the second female faculty member at the University of Arkansas Law School. Bill Clinton lost his bid for a U.S. House seat the same year.
After she married the following year, retaining her maiden name, Bill was elected attorney general of Arkansas, and the couple moved to Little Rock. Meanwhile, Hillary's own career took off upon joining the high-powered Rose Law Firm, where she took on pro bono children's rights cases.
In 1977, Hillary co-founded and drew up the articles of incorporation for the Arkansas Advocates for Children and Families — a
group that for nearly four decades since has fought for expanded opportunities in early education, juvenile justice reform, increases in state funding for child health care and other major initiatives.
"She was a very forceful advocate to say the least," recalled Jim Miles, who worked with her to create the group and develop its mission. "I think Arkansas Advocates is one of the nation's premier child advocacy organization. They have tremendous peer respect."
After Bill Clinton was sworn in as governor for the first time in 1979, he appointed his wife to be the chairwoman of Arkansas' Rural Health Advisory Committee — a group that worked to expand health care access within the state's large rural population.
Around the same time, Hillary became a board member of the Arkansas Children's Hospital, where she helped establish the state's first neonatal nursery while she was pregnant with Chelsea. The facility has since expanded several times over.
Meanwhile, after reading about it during a trip to Florida, Hillary brought to Arkansas a program called Home Instruction for Parents for Preschool Youngsters, or HIPPY, which trains parents of at-risk children in early education methods.
It wasn't until after Clinton lost re-election in 1980 and then won his 1982 comeback bid that the newly minted political wife (who now made it known that she would henceforth be known as "Hillary Rodham Clinton") made what is widely regarded as her most significant and lasting contribution to public policy in Arkansas.
Shortly after he reassumed office in 1982, Bill Clinton named his wife as chair of the Arkansas Educational Standards Committee, an entity with the
daunting task of reforming the state's public education system, which was ranked at or near the very bottom of all 50 states in just about every measure.
To get a sense of how dire the situation had become, consider that a majority of Arkansas' 365 school districts at the time offered no art or chemistry classes, and almost half had no foreign language program to speak of. And teacher training in some districts was fourth-rate.
Don Ernst — who was a social studies teacher at Southside High School in Fort Smith, Arkansas, before joining Clinton's education policy staff — recalls walking into his school's biology lab and seeing two dozen unopened microscopes in storage. When he asked the biology teacher why the instruments weren't available to her class, she responded that she was afraid her students might break them.
Still, as Ernst recalls, school reform in Arkansas was not an easy sell.
"It was doing the right thing," he said. "But we also had to figure out how to deal with the politics of an anti-tax state and a state that has never been particularly fond of intellectuals and education."
Hillary spent months traveling the state to sell her proposals for reform — which included boosting course offerings, reducing class sizes and implementing testing requirements for both students and teachers — while soliciting ideas from parents and teachers.
In the end, the administration tied the package to an unpopular initiative to boost the state sales tax by 1 percentage point.
Though she faced heated pushback from the teachers' union and a related group, Hillary largely won over lawmakers in the end.
Political operatives in the state still laugh about the thunderstruck reaction that Rep. Lloyd George, a colorful state representative with a syrupy drawl, had to her presentation: "I think we've elected the wrong Clinton!"
Though Bill Clinton received most of the credit nationally for the reform package that he signed into law, Skip Rutherford, who has served for the last decade as the dean of the Clinton School of Public Service, said it was Hillary who "took Arkansas to a completely different level educationally."
"She was really saying, 'Look, when our students graduate now, they're going to be competing in a world economy,'" he said. "She was very visionary. She did it not for immediate gratification but for long-term success."
In recent years, Arkansas' public school system has been ranked by education groups as high as fifth in the nation and as low as 45th, as relatively low achievement levels have struggled to keep up with the high standards that Clinton implemented.
But in spite of the continued challenges, education in Arkansas is no longer the national laughingstock that it was when a common lament among self-conscious policymakers around the capitol was, "Thank God for Mississippi."...
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