U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings delivered the keynote remarks at the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Education Leaders Forum in Paris. Following are the Secretary's remarks:

Thank you, Ralph [Young], for that kind introduction, and for your work at Microsoft to build partnerships that go well beyond technology.

To my friend Gerri Elliott and everyone else from Microsoft, thank you for making this event happen. I know this is a transitional time for you all. You're losing a great leader in Bill Gates. Microsoft's loss is education's gain. We're thrilled to have his intellect and commitment.

Director-General Matsuura, thank you for your leadership of UNESCO, which has made it one of the strongest voices for education in the world. You have done a terrific job. The United States is proud to be your partner in that effort.

Let me also say a word about our host city and country. Some people talk about "springtime in Paris." As a student of history, I prefer being here between the Fourth of July and Bastille Day!

Your nation supported our revolution, taught our founding fathers, and gave us the "gift" of liberty, and you have our everlasting thanks.

There is a paradox to education. A quality education can open up worlds of opportunity and bring people together.

And yet, much of it takes place alone, with quiet study within the four walls of a library or classroom. [Ralph, with cellphones and TVs off, I tell my daughters!]

The same is true for technology, I would guess. Long days spent in isolation, writing code and perfecting software, have given us the ability to communicate with people anywhere in the world in a nanosecond.

The technology revolution has provided a golden opportunity to improve higher education and expand its reach. Now, we must make it more accessible, affordable, and accountable.

But we no longer have the luxury of being isolated, as we once did. We cannot learn from the past without a vision of a future—a vision both expansive and inclusive—a vision based on individual choice and need.

That's why, in 2005, I convened a Commission on the Future of Higher Education to take advantage of this golden opportunity.

We invited the best and brightest leaders from academia, the private sector, and government to develop a plan for the future—including Microsoft's Gerri Elliott.

The report, "A Test of Leadership," called for universities and colleges to change from "a system primarily based on reputation to one based on performance."

It got a lot of attention and commentary. Some said, "We've been doing this a lot longer than you"—and they were right! Some universities in America are more than three centuries old.

Some said, we have "the best system of higher education in the world"—a boast we hear so often that we often forget how hard other nations are working to compete.

And a few people said, "Please don't tell me how to do my job. I know how to do it."

I would agree that we have done a good job of educating society's elite. We've been good at advancing opportunity for people who were afforded it at birth. But that alone is no longer our only work.

Now, we must do more, much more. I do not want to tell universities how to do their job. But, as Secretary of Education, I do want to let them know what we at the federal level expect as a one-third investor—a true partner—in American higher education. We expect them:

To knock down barriers and change habits which inhibit progress;

To build human capital by educating more people from diverse economic and cultural backgrounds;

To use technology and innovation to advance change and empower students; and

To continue our emphasis on excellence in research and scholarship, as well as nurture and cultivate partnerships with private and philanthropic sectors.

Higher ed must become more agile, informative, and student-centered. That is the only way to achieve sustainable success, as this conference contemplates.

And so I have urged our colleges and universities to adopt my Higher Education Commission's recommendations as soon as possible.

These recommendations include greater collaboration and alignment of coursework between colleges and high schools. We need freshmen prepared to succeed, not saddled with expensive, time-consuming remedial classes.

Another recommendation is to focus on non-traditional learners, such as adults returning to school to gain an edge in the competitive global economy.

We also must place a greater emphasis on community college students.

These are often students who work while attending school. Community colleges have pioneered flexible and agile learning opportunities, based on technology, and tailored to consumer demands and local workforce needs. That is why roughly half of our 14 million undergraduates are enrolled in them.

Above all, we need more information and transparency in higher education.

While helping my daughter choose a college a few years ago, I found plenty of guides on the best "party schools," but none on the "best prospects for opportunity after graduation," for example.

We can shop for a car online, and find out price, gas mileage, even the number of cupholders. But it is often difficult to find out the true cost of a four-year degree or the average length of time it takes to get one.

I believe that a portion of ever-rising tuition costs should be invested in better data and information systems that can make choosing the right school a "point-and-click" exercise—easier and more accessible.

I know you feel the same way. UNESCO has launched a new portal that will provide comparative, up-to-date information on higher education in different countries.

It's time to get out of our comfort zone, to throw open the gates of academia and start collaborating with others to make things better.

I am optimistic we can make it happen. Why? Because we are doing it now—by preparing our young students, in primary and secondary school, to succeed in college and in life.

Six years ago, President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act into law. It does not tell schools how to do their job. But it does let them know what is expected from them.

First and foremost is to bring every child up to grade level or better in reading and math.

And, like UNESCO's Education for All campaign, we finally gave ourselves a real deadline: 2014. Of course, I have yet to meet a mom or dad willing to wait that long!

The law was a response to a system that educated some students very well, but kept others in pockets of despair, isolated from their futures. They were mainly minority and low-income students, living mainly in the inner cities of America.

The system was dysfunctional, a "rising tide of mediocrity," in the words of our famous 1983 A Nation at Risk report.

So we pushed ahead, knocking down barriers, changing habits, rising above the tide.

We found that when we set the expectations bar higher, our children and teachers work harder to clear it.

We found that when we measure and publish test scores and other information, schools and communities work harder to move children forward.

Today, reading and math scores are rising, and our "achievement gap" between minority and white students is finally narrowing considerably. We've learned that what gets measured, gets done.

This is what it means to cultivate human capital.

That goes for adults, too. Remember, students are not the only ones who drop out of school. Half of our teachers leave the profession within five years.

So we established a $100 million Teacher Incentive Fund to help reward teachers who get the best results.

And we are empowering parents with better information and more choices, including afterschool programs and free tutoring, even transportation to a better-performing public school.

Finally, we recognize that 90 percent of the fastest-growing jobs require post-secondary training or education—especially in science, math, and technology.

Two years ago, we began awarding special grants to our college students who take a rigorous course of study and/or study in the science and math fields.

More than $400 million in grants were awarded in just the first year, benefiting 360,000 students, many of modest means, who are getting good grades in these challenging fields and courses.

In short, we are shifting our educational center of gravity away from generic traditions and toward the needs of the individual—more mobile, more connected, and more familiar with technology than ever before.

In America, it took 18 years to go from A Nation at Risk to "a nation of results." Once again, we do not have that luxury today! Our world is moving too fast.

Higher education must follow the trends we've applied to primary and secondary systems, toward openness, transparency, and accountability. That is the only way to solve what Bill Gates calls "the problem of scale" and help as many people as possible.

Metcalfe's Law states that as the number of users on a network grows, the value of that network increases exponentially. Therefore, the best technology is that which benefits the most people, who then improve the technology just by using it.

Imagine Cup finalist Louis Sayers said it well: "There's no one telling us that we can't do something.... If we don't like [it], we change it, and at the end of the day we know that [it] was built by us."

That is how we build a global platform for collaboration. It is the opposite of isolation. And it's exactly what we need right now!

Students care little for labels like public or private, for-profit or non-profit. They do care about convenience, affordability, quality, responsiveness—and results.

None of us can afford to leave our human capital untapped. Sixty years after the United Nations proclaimed education to be a fundamental human right, nearly 800 million people across the globe cannot read or write, two-thirds of them women. About one in four children fails to complete just five years of basic education.

Let us commit to getting high-quality educational resources in their hands. Let us vow to make higher education the centerpiece of a new era of global change and cooperation.

By working together, we can set both a course for the future and an example for today.

Thank you, Microsoft and UNESCO, for engaging all of us in this critical topic. Let's get to work. We have nothing to lose and a world to gain.

Thank you.

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