Good morning. First, I want to thank Lisa and Kathy for inviting me to speak today. You are both doing wonderful work for the children of America.

I also want to acknowledge some special guests who are with us today:

• Dr. James Barker, of the Pennsylvania State Board of Education,
• Carlos Cervantes, of the South Carolina State Board of Education, and
• Tony Colon, the Vice President of the National Council of La Raza.

Thank you all for being here.

Eighteen months ago, the Department of Education awarded $5 million to a partnership between the National Council on Teacher Quality and the Education Leaders Council to help create the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence.

This project is vitally important, because as we work to leave no child behind, we are also working to meet the highly qualified teachers challenge.

• By 2006, all teachers of core academic subjects must be highly qualified.
• In order to reach this goal, we're all going to need to do things differently. We're going to need to be innovative.

To achieve our goal of a quality teacher in every classroom, we need to do two things:

• Raise academic standards for new teachers, so they are prepared to teach our children to high levels, and
• Remove the barriers that are keeping thousands of talented people out of the classroom. The American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence addresses both, which is why Congress specifically authorized it within the No Child Left Behind Act.
• Its assessments maintain extremely rigorous academic standards for teachers. Individuals must be true scholars to earn this credential.
• And it provides an innovative option for individuals who would be turned off by the hoops and hurdles of traditional teacher preparation and certification programs.

It focuses on what teachers need to know and be able to do in order to be effective—instead of the number of credits or courses they've taken.

It demands excellence rather than exercises in filling bureaucratic requirements.

Think of the implications. Talented college graduates from fields other than education, or top-notch professionals from fields like engineering or consulting, could demonstrate their readiness to teach through a rigorous online assessment.

States that adopt the American Board as a route to full state certification can have these promising individuals in their classrooms quickly in order to meet urgent needs. And policy makers, administrators and parents can sleep well knowing that only the best and brightest are receiving this credential; standards are kept sky-high, where they should be. These teachers truly will be "highly qualified."

I want to commend the state of Pennsylvania, which has already adopted the American Board as one of their routes to certification. I hope other states will follow Pennsylvania's lead.

Some people will argue that this change is too radical, that it's too risky, that we should maintain the status quo. Well I agree that it's radical—it's radically better than the system we have now, a system that drives thousands of talented people away from our classrooms.

The American Board will not replace States' current systems of teacher certification, but it can supplement these systems, and provide a rigorous route into the classroom for thousands of top-notch candidates.

This program is just getting off the ground, but I see a world of promise ahead of it. I'm proud our Department has played an important role in its creation.

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