Thank you Arne Duncan for your kind introduction. Arne is a real innovator, and I'm happy to celebrate back-to-school season with him. But as children in Chicago and across America get ready to start classes, our thoughts and prayers are with the children who are living along the Gulf Coast, who may not be able to return to their schools for weeks or months.

I'm working with the White House Task Force on Hurricane Katrina Response to find any way we can to help these children. We will stick with these communities for as long as it takes to get them back on their feet.

One of the things I love most about working in education is that everybody-Republicans and Democrats alike-cares about our children's futures. I'm thrilled to be here today with leaders in Congress like Sen. Mike Enzi of Wyoming, the chairman of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. And Sen. Dick Durbin, and Congressmen Danny Davis and Bobby Rush, and Mayor Richard Daley, and Arne Duncan, the CEO of Chicago Public Schools. Thank you all for being here today. I know Congressman John Boehner of Ohio wishes he were with us today. He's a stalwart as well.

No Child Left Behind passed in Congress by 87 - 10 votes in the Senate, and 435 - 82 in the House. And today, bipartisan support for this law is alive and well. The people who are here today demonstrate that our commitment to working together lives on, three and a half years after the act was signed into law.

With No Child Left Behind, Americans made a historic commitment to raise achievement for every child across our country. The law aims high and focuses on using what works. It holds schools accountable for student achievement, and it brings practical, research-based tools into the classroom while respecting local decisionmaking. It's providing states, schools, and teachers with the resources they need to help children learn.

Thanks to this law, families now have access to new services-like free after-school tutoring for their children and the ability to transfer them to better-performing schools. Scores are rising, the achievement gap is closing, and No Child Left Behind is working. We're seeing all-time highs in student achievement.

• The Nation's Report Card shows that, nationally, reading scores for 9-year-olds increased more over the last five years than in all the years between 1971 and 1999 combined!
  
  
• In math, 9- and 13-year-olds' scores also reached all-time highs. Hispanic 9-year-olds saw their scores rise by 17 points over the last five years.

These results show that we're on the right track. The law is working. But some parts of it need improvement. In the 2003-04 school year, about two million students across our country were eligible for free, high-quality tutoring, also known as "supplemental educational services." Unfortunately, only about 10-20 percent of them actually received the services-which is less than the current number of eligible students here in Chicago. That just doesn't add up. We need to try a new approach.

The bottom-line, most important thing we talk about in education is whether kids are learning. We will continue to abide by the bright-line principles of No Child Left Behind—annual testing, disaggregating data (that means reporting by each student group), and closing the achievement gap by 2013-14. But we are implementing the law in a sensible, workable way.

We worked with people on the front lines to come up with a terrific new approach that we will try here in Chicago. We listened to parents like Natosha, and we worked with others like Mike Casserly, executive director of the Council of the Great City Schools, and National PTA President Anna Weselak, and Sherwood's principal Charles McGehee, and Arne Duncan, and Mayor Daley.

You all are doing a great job on behalf of children and parents in Chicago. That's why I'm proud to be here to announce our plans to help more of Chicago's children receive free tutoring, as promised by No Child Left Behind. The Department of Education is partnering with the Chicago school district to start a pilot program that will give families more opportunities to help their children do better in school through after-school tutoring.

Here's the agreement we came up with together. The Department is allowing Chicago to provide supplemental services to families, even though the district has been identified as "needing improvement." Last week, we announced a slightly different agreement with some districts in Virginia. The point of all of these agreements is to give parents better information and more choices, and to help more children get the extra help they need to succeed in school and beyond. The Chicago school district believes it can help 20,000 new students right off the bat through this pilot program.

In return for this flexibility, Chicago will ensure that more families receive services-from the provider their parents feel most comfortable with. The district will give parents more opportunities and more choices. Our hope is that increased choices for parents will lead to increased achievement for children.

Parents will be notified early about the opportunities that are available to them, and they will be able to enroll their children in tutoring programs at multiple times throughout the year. Every parent knows that a child can be doing great in school, and then all of a sudden, he or she will hit a bump in the road and need extra help. These pilot programs allow for more than one enrollment window so that students can start getting help as soon as they need it.

Chicago will allow providers to access its school buildings at a fair, reasonable price. I hope other districts will do the same, so that tutoring occurs in the safest, most comfortable and, frequently, most convenient environment possible.

The Education Department sees these pilot districts as laboratories working on the answers to some very important questions-for example, how can we help even more parents take advantage of the choices available to them? And, are these after-school programs effective?

The supplemental services provisions of No Child Left Behind were a brand new option in federal education law. We've learned some valuable lessons in the law's first three years, and we want to learn even more about supplemental services by testing some new approaches this year.

At the end of this school year, we will collect data from these pilots that will help us understand what ingredients are necessary for student success. We will know a lot more than we know today-and after testing some theories with this pilot, we will have a much better idea of how we can best help the most students.

Going forward, we will continue to listen and learn, and I hope to announce more programs like this one. In fact, Senator Enzi and I are already looking at the unique challenges of providing supplemental services in rural areas.

No Child Left Behind is all about making sure that all students are learning-no matter what zip code they live in, what language they speak, or what special needs they may have. We hope that NCLB plus free tutoring equals the way to help parents and schools achieve that goal.

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