More Resources Speech Text Photos

A quality education is worth fighting for and the No Child Left Behind Act and UNESCO's Education For All initiative share complementary goals—including special attention for students once ignored and left behind—U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings said today during remarks at UNESCO's "Calling Higher Education to a Higher Calling" conference at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C.

"Education and literacy are necessities in a world devoid of certainty but abundant with opportunity," Secretary Spellings said. "Lives can be transformed, lifted over time from poverty and chaos to dignity and independence. Education offers a ladder on which to climb and a foundation upon which to stand.

"The No Child Left Behind Act and UNESCO's Education For All campaign complement each other—both place a special emphasis on opportunity for 'excluded and marginalized' populations, goals that all Americans can endorse."

Secretary Spellings noted the culture shift that has taken place during the past three years under the No Child Left Behind Act, saying that where once the nation's education system was "complacent," with some students leaving school lacking the most rudimentary of skills, today, "schools are accountable for …progress [and] we are seeing real changes in the classroom."

The secretary noted, however, that too many high school students graduate unprepared to succeed in higher education or the workforce, and said the president's budget proposal calls for extending the principles of accountability for results to high schools.

"We want to make a high school diploma a ticket to success in the 21st century, whether a graduate chooses higher education or the workforce. We owe it to our citizens and our shared future."

Pointing out the importance of education research and that President Bush has increased such funding by 60 percent, Secretary Spellings noted that both the Department's Institute for Education Sciences and UNESCO's Institute for Statistics have common goals because "to learn what works in education, we need good, sound data."

She also cited a UNESCO report, Financing Education – Investments and Returns, that shows the strong link between education and economic growth in developing nations. The study found attendance in school significantly increases one's earning power and access to the labor market, particularly for women. And another study by the University of Ottawa found that a rise of just 1 percent in a nation's literacy scores yields a 2.5 percent rise in productivity and a 1.5 percent increase in GDP per person.

"Like freedom, education is worth fighting for," said Secretary Spellings. "Many of these efforts were once dismissed as unachievable—like the dream of Education For All. Today, one hundred million more children attend school than in 1990, the year Education For All began. We cannot let up. We still have much work to do to reach the millions of children still denied access to school—and to teach the 800 million adults, one in seven worldwide, who still cannot read and write.

"In the end, we measure success by the gleam in a young girl's eyes as she learns how to spell, or by the intensity of a young boy so lost in his studies that he momentarily forgets his troubles."

The complete text of the secretary's remarks is available at http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/2005/02/02282005.html

###

Top

Back to February 2005