Thank you, Dr. [Thelma] Daly.

I wish to begin by paying tribute to your wonderful president emerita, the Honorable Dr. Dorothy Height. Like many of you, I have been praying for her full and speedy recovery. Dr. Height is an invaluable American. She means so much to our historical struggles in education and civil rights. She was doing civil rights when Martin Luther King was still learning to spell. She has marched a long road, bringing light to thousands all across the country and across the twentieth century. I know she has many miles left to go.

God bless you, Dr. Height. May he command his angels to guard you in all your ways. Thanks to you and others like you, African Americans hold unprecedented positions of power and influence.

I hear you will honor my friend and colleague Condoleeza Rice tonight, and I congratulate her. As Condi and Colin Powell and I can attest, we are not outside the system anymore; we are the system. It's our job now to make sure the system helps all of our people, especially the children.

I know your theme today is "Leave No One Behind: Legacy, Vision, Leadership." Ladies, you special ladies of the National Council of Negro Women, I'm here today to ask your help, because America needs your help, especially African Americans. "Leave No One Behind: Legacy, Vision, Leadership." I want to offer a vision of what we can do today, and then ask you for your leadership in turning that vision into the legacy we can leave for our children.

Let's look at where we are. Everywhere I go this fall, I hear people talk about how America is united. They talk about how adversity brings us together, how the strength of our communities has been revitalized, and how, if we stick together during the war on terrorism, when the battle is over we will still be a more harmonious people-a better America.

Now, there's a lot of truth to that. But I'm not entirely persuaded. When we win the war against terrorism and our soldiers march home victorious, we still won't be fully united. We won't be united unless we take care of another problem. We won't be united as long as we are divided by the education gap.

On the NAEP fourth-grade reading test in 1992, the scores of African American children were 14.2 percent lower than those of their white counterparts. Eight years later, the situation is still the same.

On the 2000 NAEP reading assessment, 73 percent of white fourth-graders scored at or above basic, compared to only 37 percent of their black peers. While 40 percent of white fourth-graders read at or above the proficient level, only 12 percent of blacks and 16 percent of Hispanics perform as well.

The racial education gap is real, and it is not shrinking. This is not an indication of togetherness-this is divisiveness.

Last month we released the NAEP science scores. In science at the twelfth- grade level, I announced that the achievement gap closed slightly. How did it close? Well, black and Hispanic students stayed the same and white performance went down. That's not the way we want to close the gap. We must close it by improving the performance of our children.

As African Americans, our biggest educational challenge 40 years ago was access. Now our children have access to the schools, but access does not guarantee achievement.

Until we close this education gap, we will always be divided between those who are educated and those who are not. Until every child gets a quality education, we will not be one nation under God, indivisible.

Luckily, there is a federal official who understands this. He came into office promising to close the education gap. That official is our president, George W. Bush. He's invested the money to close the achievement gap. He invested his energy in changing the culture of education so that we can close the achievement gap. And he's invested his reputation, by staking it on the success of closing the achievement gap. No other president ever did this so directly for our children.

The first step in President Bush's plan is almost complete. Congress is putting the finishing touches on a bill based on the four principles of the president's No Child Left Behind plan. I think they will be done soon.

The principles are: accountability for results, local control and flexibility, expanded parental options, and doing what works based on scientific research.

I, too, am an advocate for those principles and for what I know they can accomplish. President Bush and I made them work in Texas when he was governor and I was superintendent in Houston. Black Texans improved, white Texans improved, and Hispanic Texans improved, and the achievement gap narrowed.

A recent report by the Education Trust showed how successful we were in closing the achievement gap. Let me quote one sentence from the report: "If African American [eighth graders] in Arkansas, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, Maryland, and West Virginia could swap... writing scores with their counterparts in Texas, the African American-White achievement gap in all of those states would disappear."

But we have responsibilities too. We've all become so accustomed to hearing these scores and hearing about the achievement gap that we have come to expect it. That makes us part of the problem. We should not expect it, and we should not accept it, we should reject it.

You've all heard the phrase, "the soft bigotry of low expectations." We can change that.

Let me give you some examples of these low expectations from MetLife's most recent Survey of the American Teacher.

Low-income students are less likely to report that their principal cares about all the students in their school.

Low-income students are less likely to report that their principal makes the school a safe place.

Low-income students are less likely to report that their school is helping to prepare them for the future.

Low-income students are less likely to report that their teachers encourage them very much to do their best.

Also, high-income students are more likely than low-income students to believe that their teachers and parents expect excellent work from them. Sadly, their assumption is correct. The survey shows that principals and teachers have lower expectations and less challenging curriculum if most of their students are low-income or minority.

Our children can achieve more than their schools think they can, and we can make it happen.

I'd like to focus on one particular cause that all of us can advance and that has proven to make a difference for our children. That is better reading instruction. Reading is the foundation of all learning, so let's start at the foundation. Children who can read can learn all of their other subjects. But when parents and schools don't teach children to read well, they usually never catch up. President Bush has committed five billion dollars over five years to his Reading First plan to ensure that every child reads by the third grade.

We know how to do it. Recently, research has given us a very clear understanding about how children learn and how we can teach them. My gift to you today is the brochure you found on your chair, Put Reading First.

This is the parents' edition of a longer report on reading curricula. Both editions can be downloaded from the Department of Education Web site or ordered for free.

This guide includes research that has taught us that children begin to develop an understanding of language in the first year of life. It has also taught us that learning to read becomes much harder after the third grade than before. That gives us a window of about eight years in the life of every child to go from no comprehension of language to reading fluently. It certainly can be done, but with far too many of our children, it is not done. Many schools across America don't use effective teaching methods, and their students don't learn to read well.

Prevention is better than intervention, and prevention requires information. I know that you are leaders of national or local organizations, so you can be very influential in helping me spread the message about how to help young children learn. Some of you are also mothers and grandmothers, so you can put this information to work in your own homes.

Talk with young children often, even before they can answer. Speak slowly and clearly so they can learn the sounds. Read to them often, but also make reading a part of your everyday life. Show children that you enjoy learning-seeing adults who read or visit the library makes a positive impression on a child. Keep books and magazines around the house and make it clear that you value reading.

Listening to a bedtime story, scribbling notes to family members, reading a cereal box or sign-these are beneficial ways to nurture a love and understanding of learning in a young child. Find reading material that your child likes, and read to or with him or her every day when you are both in a good mood and have time to enjoy it.

When your children start school, make sure their schools have good reading programs. Visit the classrooms, talk to the teachers, and examine the curriculum. The brochure I gave you gives you the criteria you will need to evaluate the programs. If the reading program at your child's school is not doing the job, order copies of the Put Reading First report and give them to the school.

If the school resists, don't take no for an answer. Take it to the school district and the board. Your children's future is at stake, and there's no substitute for learning how to read. A list of excuses will not get them a good job or make them good citizens. Only a good education and a good character will.

When I became superintendent in Houston, I tried to use test scores to understand the challenges on our campuses. Many of our elementary schools were struggling with students who faced tremendous barriers to learning and who moved through grade after grade without ever catching up. But one school was almost magically different. This school understood pre-reading and language development and rigorously worked with its young students to help them develop these skills.

Other schools have also put sound reading instruction methods to work and seen dramatic results. Los Angeles elementary schools teach reading using phonemic awareness, which research has taught us is indispensable to sound reading instruction. Their program also incorporates teacher training and literacy coaches. And this fall, for the first time ever, first-graders in Los Angeles outperformed the national average in reading and spelling on a major test. They made dramatic changes in teaching, and won dramatic improvement in performance.

Another example is Parham Elementary in Cincinnati, where 80 percent are poor, and 99 percent are minority. Parham started to focus on ensuring that its students had a strong foundation for reading, in addition to many other reforms. It adopted a research-based method of reading instruction beginning in Kindergarten. Parham third-graders who passed the reading section of a proficiency test rose from 10.5 percent to 82 percent of all the school's third-graders. It can be done.

I said before that all of you have a role to play, and now I want to make it specific. Take the booklets I gave you back to your organizations. Take them back to your local schools. Order more copies for your friends and colleagues.

I want you to spread the message that our children can learn. They need to hear it, and their parents need to hear it. I want you to spread the message that parents and grandparents and neighbors and babysitters can make a difference. I want you to tell them how to make that difference. When you get back home and people ask you what you learned in Washington, I want you to give them this news.

The way they talk to their children matters. Reading with children matters. The choices teachers make matter. And above all, parents and communities can influence schools. We can't ship our kids off to school but ignore what goes on inside. We've tried that, and it didn't work. The adults of every neighborhood have a responsibility to the children of that neighborhood to ensure that the schools are using methods that work, and getting real results.

Every one of us must take responsibility for this task. Our children will learn to read earlier and with more confidence. They will become participants in their education, not recipients. They will have more choices and more freedom.

President Bush says reading is the new civil right. Let's give our children this right. If we do this, we can close the achievement gap. If we do this, we can heal our divisions. If we do this, we can become one nation in reality, not just on paper. If we do this, we can do anything.

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