More Resources Photos

Washington, DC - Today, U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings continued her national dialogue with top education officials to promote the successes of No Child Left Behind and Building on Results: A Blueprint for Strengthening the No Child Left Behind Act. The Secretary's speech comes on the heels of President Bush's call in his State of the Union Address for Congress to reauthorize the law.

"No Child Left Behind has transformed the education enterprise. Before this law, we took for granted that our education system was meeting the needs of our students," Secretary Spellings said. "No Child Left Behind changed all that. The law brought standards, data-driven decision making and accountability to the system. And it set a historic goal of every child performing at grade-level by 2014."

Secretary Spellings noted that No Child Left Behind has helped create a solid foundation of accountability and produced firm data about student performance to guide our efforts, including:

• More reading progress by nine-year-olds in five years (1999-2004) than in the previous 28 years combined, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP);
• Math scores for fourth- and eighth-graders and nine- and 13-year-olds reaching new heights; and
• Achievement gaps in reading and math between African-American and Hispanic nine-year-olds and their white peers falling to all-time lows.

"None of this would have been possible without strong support from parents, educators, and government leaders - on both sides of the aisle - determined to make our education system serve every child equally and well," she said.

The Secretary has taken her message on the road, with a recent stop in Chicago and future stops in North Carolina and Atlanta, to mobilize Americans on the grassroots level in support of reauthorization. While there, she will meet with educators who are on the front lines of implementing this important law, hear from students who are benefiting from it, and meet with community and business leaders who have a stake in ensuring that today's graduates become tomorrow's innovators.

For the full text of Building on Results, please follow this link: http://www.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/nclb/buildingonresults.html.

A fact sheet is available here: http://www.ed.gov/news/opeds/factsheets/index.html?src=gu

###

Top

Back to January 2007