Albuquerque, New Mexico, August 15, 2001
Contact: Lindsey Kozberg(202) 401-3026
Speaker Frequently Deviates from Prepared Text
Back to School, Moving Forward Web site
Thank you, Congresswoman Wilson. It is great to be in Albuquerque.
It is also great to be in this school and at the most exciting time of the school year. Children get new shoes, new pencils, and new assignments, and meet new teachers and new friends. As everyone who works in a school knows, you never get tired of back-to-school energy. It's fresh and exciting every fall. You can feel it in this room.
This year, back to school is especially exciting because we are on the verge of enacting the most important reforms to our system of education in 35 years. In January, President Bush sent Congress his plan to make sure that no child is left behind by our education system. That bold plan has four basic principles: accountability, local control and flexibility, expanded parental choice, and doing what works.
Educators all around the country have been talking about how to bring this bold plan to life in our schools. Next year will be even more exciting because we will be turning No Child Left Behind into reality.
I am proud that President Bush is making a visit to a school a part of his Home to the Heartland tour. What better way for families to learn how they can play a bigger role in their children's education than to have the President tell them directly?
After our visit here today, I will visit many other schools around the country as part of a Back to School tour. I will talk with students, educators, and community and business leaders about how they can improve our schools. No Child Left Behind is larger than the Federal government—in fact, it's larger than all government. It is a national goal that will engage all of us.
I can't think of a better place to launch this tour than Griegos Elementary. Many students at Griegos face poverty and language barriers—the kind of conditions some schools would use as excuses for failure. But you don't hear excuses at Griegos—you see success instead. Griegos uses good teaching methods and focuses on helping every child to learn. The proof is in the pudding—your test scores have improved steadily for five years, and I congratulate you.
No Child Left Behind is all about celebrating successes like Griegos—and helping other schools to emulate your success. You've shown that it can be done, and you've shown how it can be done. To help every school succeed, we need to tell everyone what works.
You all have a copy of a brand new guide we're introducing today from the Department of Education. It's called Back to School, Moving Forward. In this guide, we help parents learn how they can join in the effort to make schools more successful. This guide tells parents what questions to ask their children's teachers, how to use test scores to track their school's progress, how to engage their children in learning, and how to develop cognitive skills in young children, long before they start school.
Another guide explains to teachers and principals what high standards mean and do, how to use test scores to tailor instruction to each student's strengths and weaknesses, and how to use recent research to improve reading instruction.
A third guide tells civic leaders and business leaders how to get involved in setting state standards and how communities can hold schools accountable for results in student performance. This community is on the right track, and Heather Wilson has done great work in Congress this year for America's children.
Following the principles of No Child Left Behind, all of us, working together, can create a culture in this country where parents have more choices, teachers have more resources, districts have more flexibility, everyone has more information, and, most important, no child is left behind.
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