Contact: Lindsey Kozberg (202) 401-3026

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Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your invitation. It shows that you are both a patient and a kind audience.

I want to begin by thanking Hugh Price for his outstanding leadership of this stellar organization, which has been marked by many notable achievements. I would like to give him a particular note of thanks for his work as a member of the Education Transition Advisory Team for President Bush.

I have had the privilege to be involved in many meetings with Hugh, and I can tell you that he commands the respect of everyone he meets. Thank you, Hugh.

Because I am from Houston, I cannot miss this opportunity to commend Sylvia Brooks, President and CEO of the Houston Area Urban League. During her tenure I proudly watched her convert a troubled organization into the high-performing League that you know today.

The Urban League has a long and proud history of success for Black America. From your earliest days as a supporter of social workers, you were a friend to black workers who needed training and education. As you grew, you helped integrate labor unions, New Deal programs, and defense contracting. You have helped people with issues from housing to health to voting to investing.

But in education--my special interest--you have more success stories than I can count. Your Madison affiliate saw that high mobility caused problems for children in school, so it started the Single Family Rent-to-Own program, which helps families buy houses. You developed a free, bilingual guide to help New York eighth graders prepare for statewide tests. In Rhode Island, you send volunteers to read to young children at lunchtime. At the national level, your Project Success program helps kids who dropped out of school get their high school diploma. The Gillette/National Urban League Scholarship and Internship for Minority Students helps people finish college. And many other fine programs.

Congratulations to everyone who had a hand in this glorious history. The progress of African Americans in this country is in large measure a testimony to leadership of the National Urban League. Your leadership has meant so much to so many. And for this, I am not alone in thanking you--all America thanks you.

But, I am here today not just to praise your past, but to help you think about your future. I want to ask for your powerful leadership in the goal of overcoming a daunting challenge--a challenge that not only threatens the prosperity of African Americans, but every family in this country. A challenge which limits the horizons of our children.

In this century, a fourth grade education is no longer enough to support a family. That was our past--it cannot be our future.

Our future is not like our past. For example, during the past twenty years, computer technology has moved into high gear, carrying our world quickly into the twenty-first century.

From discoveries in neuropsychology to innovations in rocketry, technology has made the impossible possible. New and emerging technologies are becoming so much a part of our lives that we take for granted the efficiency and comforts these innovations bring. Although the novelty has passed, the change is permanent.

Our world will never be the same, yet our education system is the same. It has not yet changed to meet the new demands of our twenty-first century culture and economy. So, our challenge is "finding the leadership that can take a stagnant system which has institutionalized the failure of minority and disadvantaged children, and transform it into a system that prepares children to step into a fast-changing, fast-paced future, the 21st century."

Although we cannot know the future with certainty, we do know two things with certainty: First, the future it will be characterized by change. Rapid change. Second, education is the best means we have for preparing for that change. Education will separate the wheat from the chaff.

Just as our past--our history--created the world we live in, the actions we take today will shape our future.

So we must rethink our leadership so it supports the values of the information age. We cannot enter the Internet age with typewriter mentality.

Earlier I mentioned many of the successful Urban League programs in education. Like those great programs, there are also many great schools across the country. But a handful of great programs and a handful of great schools are not enough.

Until our system is great, we are leaving children behind. We need to broaden the success of great programs and great schools to create great systems, which reach every child.

We need to make quality education an expectation, not an exception.

In other words, we don't need to change education programs; we need to change the education culture. That's what President Bush has promised to do.

I've read that some of your members were pleasantly surprised when you heard that President Bush was planning to address your conference. It shouldn't have been surprising. He campaigned as a reformer with results, and there has never been a president as dedicated to helping us achieve our goal of healing our neighborhoods by lifting up African American children.

You'll find, if you haven't already found, that President Bush shares many of our values, especially when it comes to education. I know that you believe in high standards for every child instead of excuses for the hard to teach. I know that you believe in accountability for performance instead of letting kids slip through the cracks. I know that you believe in meeting every child more than halfway, and I know that you believe in preparing everyone to share in the American dream.

These are the kinds of principles that have enlightened so many lives throughout the Urban League's history, and they are the principles that motivate the President's education plan--No Child Left Behind. His plan has four pillars: accountability, local control and flexibility, expanded parental choice, and doing what works.

This is a commonsense plan based on what we can do--what we must do--to empower black Americans within our communities.

Ladies and gentlemen, urban America has a friend in Washington, and his name is George W. Bush.

He will change the culture of education, even down to the first year of a child's life. All adults have a critical role in helping young children with pre-reading and early learning skills. Hugh Price joined us last week at the White House Summit on Early Childhood Cognitive Development, where we talked about ways to encourage families and caregivers to engage young children in conversations and prepare them for learning. There are countless ways to improve education, and early cognitive development is where we must start. We cannot wait until first grade.

The Summit included groups who can spread the word to communities across the land about how to teach skills to young children. This morning, I participated in the announcement of your new reading program, Read and Rise. With programs like this one, your leadership is already fulfilling that promise and spreading that word.

If we take the time to talk and listen to our children, to read with them, to surround them with books, to help them put names on things in their environment, to carry on intelligent conversations with them, we will help build a firm foundation of skills and knowledge that will help them learn to read and be successful when they enter school.

Early childhood development is just one sign of this President's commitment to ensuring that no child in America will be left behind. I want to make sure you understand how dramatic his goal is.

No Child Left Behind is a major national commitment to reaching a very challenging goal.

Our children are not learning what we have decided they need to be learning. Even worse, there is an achievement gap between minority students and their peers, and this gap is not shrinking.

This is not just a problem about single parents on welfare--this is a problem that stretches into working class and middle class neighborhoods, also.

We have too many excuses in all of our schools, and too few plans for attacking the past with commonsense solutions. President Bush who will be remembered for putting an end to the excuses in education--and he will be the President who started an era of progress in our schools.

I'd like to talk with you about the philosophy behind his plan, because it's not only more profound; it's also more radical than anything you find by looking at its constituent parts.

The first proposition is that every child can learn. This doesn't mean that after you siphon off the kids who have learning disabilities, the kids who were never properly taught how to read, the kids who never learned English, the kids who disrupted their classrooms, that most of the rest can learn. It means that all of these kids, the ones our system calls "hard to teach," can learn, too.

The implications of this proposition are significant. It means excuses are not good enough: we need results. It means orderly classrooms are not enough: We need results. It means rising average performance is not enough: We need results for each student.

A second proposition is that our system has not worked that way. It has assumed that many children cannot learn. It has depended on making excuses. It has depended on writing off a certain portion of the children entrusted to it. It has depended on measuring success--by the number of teachers hired, by the number of classrooms built, by the number of grants approved, by the number of non-academic programs added, by the high level of spending.

In other words, by any measure other than student performance if students do not meet standards, under our current system we lower the standards. If teachers do not know their subject, under our current system we lower the standards. If students are not learning, under our current system we exclude them from the tests. If students are not learning, under our current system we blame them.

This is the way the system has been working. And it's obviously unacceptable for the future.

Let me explain how I know. Seven years ago in Houston, we had all the problems a big urban school district could be expected to have. Poverty, language barriers, low-achieving students with a troubled home life--you name it. As our friends on the moon would say, "Houston, we have a problem."

We performed a miracle. And when I say we, I was the smallest part of it. There were many excellent teachers and principals who made this possible. It wouldn't have happened without them. But they had a great tool called statewide testing, which allowed districts and parents and communities to hold their schools accountable.

Everyone knew which schools were succeeding and which were failing, and which student was learning and which needed our help. You can't know that without testing.

A report by the Education Trust, stated that reforms in Texas dramatically improved education for all Texas students. Most important, the report concludes that the reforms in Texas have worked to close the achievement gap.

According to the numbers, white Texans are improving, black Texans are improving, and Hispanic Texans are improving. All children are improving.

The report says the Texas reforms "have made a positive difference for students overall, particularly low-income and minority children."

The large achievement gaps of 1994 have shrunk substantially, from 36 to 21 percentage points for African American students.

A more recent Education Trust report puts it a different way. "If African American [eighth graders] in Arkansas, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, Maryland, and West Virginia could swap NAEP writing scores with their counterparts in Texas, the African American-White achievement gap in all of those states would disappear."

So if someone asks you why I came to Washington with President Bush, you can say I came because I am a true believer in his plan and in him. I saw it happen with my own eyes.

The success stories are not limited to Texas. Every city has some good schools, even in tough neighborhoods. You can find a public school on one side of the street that is doing well, and one across the street that is failing. We need to spread what works, and President Bush is all about doing that.

When he arrived in Washington in January, he asked both parties to join him in doing something a little different--a little bit un-Washington-like. He asked them to put aside their traditional party politics and to come together to support commonsense reforms that measure success in terms of student progress rather than dollars spent or excuses uttered.

We must give both parties credit. They came together under the President's leadership. They passed his bill by overwhelming, bipartisan majorities: 384 to 45 in the House, and 91 to 8 in the Senate.

The Urban League has come to Washington at an auspicious time for our education agenda. A committee of House and Senate education leaders continues to meet on Capitol Hill to turn the House and Senate versions of the bill into a single unified engine for changing our school system.

But these leaders know they have important work ahead. In sum, they have the chance to make good and certain that the final bill fulfills the promise of comprehensive education reform. To do that: They will need to grapple with the 135 amendments the Senate added to the bill that threaten to bog it down in red tape and exacerbate the proliferation of programs we set out to eliminate. They will need to make sure that the billions of dollars we will be spending are linked to reforms that change the way our schools do their business. More of the same won't do. They will need to come up with workable goals for states and schools but must not succumb to excuses. They will also need to confront the state of our special education programs, and commit to improving the way we deliver services to children with disabilities before locking in a system that allows for misidentification and mismanagement.

The Senate proposed an amendment to the current reform bill that would fully fund the federal share of special education and make that funding mandatory. President Bush and I support increased funding, but given the state of our special education programs, we feel strongly that the funding debate and the reform debate regarding special education need to happen together, and that this amendment strategy is misguided, with potentially serious consequences for our young students.

The state of our special education programs should be an area of particular concern for the Urban League.

The Department of Education has commissioned a comprehensive study due out this fall that we fear will confirm the many reports we already have showing us that schools consistently over-identify minority children as special education students.

Black students represent 34.3 percent of all children identified with mental retardation, and 20.2 percent of the students placed in special education programs--yet they represent only 14.8 percent of our school-age population. State data show that in most states, black students are more than twice as likely as other students to be identified as mentally retarded.

Research we already have suggests that many children are placed in special education simply because they cannot read. This not only prevents them from reaching their full potential, it also robs children with real learning and physical disabilities of the federal, state, and local dollars and services intended for them. The Individuals with Disabilities Education Act is up for reauthorization next year, and President Bush and I are committed to reforming the special education system at that time so we can link more funding to better services for our children with special needs.

Through discipline and cooperation Congress can strengthen the four pillars of the President's plan, and they can make sure no child will be left behind.

But they can only do this if they commit themselves not to repeat, retain, or recreate the programs and policies that have failed to improve the performance of disadvantaged children in the past.

With that task in the hands of Congress, I want to leave you with a warning and a charge.

The warning is that this will not be easy. Making sure every child learns is possible, but it is hard. It will take all of us.

My charge to you is to take up that challenge, and I can think of no organization better suited to tackle what lies ahead.

So I urge you to get a copy of No Child Left Behind. Read it. Learn it. Make it your mission. Make it your life's work.

To meet our challenge, we need the support and commitment of the African American community. These are our children being left behind. And we must take action at every level. We must refuse to tolerate mediocrity. We must raise all our children up, from the first to the last. Start early! We've tried to run an education system without accountability for 25 years, and it has failed. We've tried accepting excuses instead of results, only to discover that employers aren't impressed by excuses. We've tried writing off kids as hard to teach, and all around our communities we see the consequences.

Let's raise standards for all of our kids, and help them to meet those high standards.

I saw this kind of action produce results in Houston. I expect to see it happen in Los Angeles and Chicago and Shreveport and Boston.

It's going to happen because parents are going to hold their schools accountable. It's going to happen because their schools are going to respond to that accountability with change. It's going to happen because Congress is going to put the federal role in education on the right side of reform. It's going to happen because we have a President leading the way who made education his highest priority and the achievement gap his target.

No President has ever promised to close the achievement gap before, and it's about time one did.

Our nation and our community will see great things from President Bush, but the greatest work of all is to be done in our neighborhoods by ordinary people. If there are enough of us working in our neighborhoods, teaching parents to read to their children, holding schools accountable for results, lifting people up, refusing to take excuses--if there are enough of us, a little from each of us will be enough. Saving America's children is a challenge that is bigger than Washington, bigger than state capitals, bigger than the Secretary of Education, and bigger than the school boards.

It is the biggest and best challenge we face but if we all work on it, with wisdom and rigor and devotion, we can meet it together.

Ladies and Gentlemen, urban America has a friend in Washington DC, and his name is George W. Bush.

Thank you.

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