Thank you.

I am honored to meet with an organization I have admired for many years, the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies. I want to thank your president, Eddie Williams, for his long-standing dedicated service to the Joint Center, and for inviting me to speak tonight.

Our community is blessed to have a think tank that takes social and economic research so seriously--a think tank that is willing to reexamine comfortable assumptions and to follow the facts wherever they lead.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a problem in our great country. A problem that will hurt every part of our nation every year if we fail to solve it. A problem that must become the concern of every caring American citizen.

When President Bush took office, solving this problem was his number one priority. His first legislative initiative was aimed at bring a solution to this most stubborn of American problems. Even the events of Sept. 11 didn't derail this priority; in many ways it made it more urgent. The problem is that our education system is not performing at a level adequate to sustain our nation's global leadership.

Look at the evidence. Two-thirds of American fourth-graders cannot read at grade level. Our students rank poorly among industrialized nations on international math and science tests. Almost two thirds of low-income eighth-graders cannot multiply or divide two-digit numbers.

Our education failures are a public health problem, an economic problem, and a national security problem. More than a year ago, the U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century, co chaired by former senators Warren Rudman and Gary Hart issued its Phase III Report, which said, in part, "Second only to a weapon of mass destruction detonating in an American city, we can think of nothing more dangerous than a failure to manage properly science, technology, and education for the common good over the next quarter century."

The commission also said, "The capacity of America's education system to create a 21st-century workforce second to none in the world is a national security issue of the first order. As things stand, this country is forfeiting that capacity."

Instead of improving education to create the twenty-first-century workforce, we have been relying on the education other countries provide to their citizens.

In 1999, the Immigration and Naturalization Service granted 115,000 H-1B visas to foreign workers. In 2000, to meet the demands of our high-tech industry, Congress increased that visa cap to 195,000 workers.

There is nothing wrong with the H-1B program, but there is something wrong when American schools cannot produce enough good workers for valuable American jobs. There's something wrong when foreign workers are getting jobs in America because we failed to teach our own American graduates the skills they needed.

We are educating some of our children well. But educating some of our children well is not our goal. Our goal is to educate all of our children well.

Some see this as a problem for our schools to fix. They are only partially right. Others see it as a problem for our government to fix. But the problem is broader than that too.

It is an American problem. It is a problem for all of us to fix. Part of the problem of the public schools is the public's neglect. An example would be the paltry turnout for school board elections. But tonight I want to focus on a more acute problem.

Tucked inside our substandard American education performance is a sub-problem that contributes to the larger problem. This problem is of special interest to the African American community, but it is a problem that affects the whole country. This problem is the stubborn academic achievement gap between the races.

Consider the evidence.

On the National Assessment of Educational Progress or NAEP fourth-grade reading test in 1992, African American scores were 15 percent below white scores. Eight years later, neither score has improved.

On the 2000 NAEP reading assessment, 73 percent of white fourth-graders scored at or above the basic level, compared to only 37 percent of their black peers. The racial achievement gap is real, and, unfortunately, it is not shrinking.

As the National Center for Educational Statistics put it, "While white students outperform black students in reading, the gaps decreased between the early 1970s and the late 1980s. Since then, however, the gaps have remained relatively stable or increased."

The results in math are similar.

Think about that. During the whole decade of the 1990s, despite all the talk about racial progress, and huge increases in spending on education, the gaps remained stable or got worse. Is that good enough? Are we even going in the right direction?

This gap is un-American and totally unacceptable. We must commit ourselves to closing it. But how?

The goal is closing the achievement gap; we can agree on that, but how we react to this reality depends entirely upon our explanation on why the gap exists in the first place. Thinking about the causes of the gap is not pleasant, but it is necessary if we are to help our children escape it.

If you read the literature on the achievement gap, you discover three general theories. A physicist named Mano Singham calls them the socioeconomic explanation, the sociopathological explanation, and the genetic explanation.

The socioeconomic explanation says that the average black parents have lower income than the average white parents, and that this income gap causes an academic achievement gap in their children, who grow up to perpetuate the same income gap as their parents.

This socioeconomic explanation is generally advanced by liberals. The point here is that we can't do anything about the achievement gap until we close the poverty gap. Where does that leave us? Does that mean that we have to close the poverty gap before we can close the achievement gap?

The sociopathological culture explanation says poverty cannot explain the achievement gap because Asian immigrants regularly work their way out of poverty and do very well in school. Instead, it argues that the achievement gap is caused by social pathologies among parents, such as children born out of wedlock, poor or absent parents, negative peer pressure, and drug addiction.

This sociopathological explanation is often advanced by conservatives. The point here is that we can't do anything about the achievement gap until we fix the social ills from which it springs.

The genetic explanation explains the achievement gap by saying that achievement is strongly determined by intelligence, and that average intelligence is different for every race.

The most famous proponents of this explanation were Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein in their 1996 book on intelligence, The Bell Curve. They said that instead of trying to find a cause for the achievement gap, society should accept it as a given and focus on diminishing its consequences. The point here is, "Get over it; these kids can't learn."

I reject all three of these explanations for different reasons. Not only do they not explain the main cause of the gap, they also don't show us the way out.

I would like to put forward a different model to explain the achievement gap--a pedagogical explanation. Everything I have seen suggests that the main cause of the achievement gap is educational. The children have not been taught well. The cause is the problems in teaching, curriculum, parental discipline, and community expectations. I don't mean to put all of our teachers on the spot, but I do mean to indicate that the schools can make the difference.

I know that research links poverty and learning, but I also know that even children in poverty can learn--and learn well. In city after city, you can find dozens of schools in poor neighborhoods that are failing--but one or two schools in the same poor neighborhoods, with the same budgets, that are succeeding. They are closing the achievement gap, and they provide models for everyone.

An example is Mabel B. Wesley Elementary in Houston. Its students are 92 percent black and 7%Hispanic and all poor. In 1998, 100% of its third-graders passed the state reading test. The fact that it has happened anywhere proves that it can happen everywhere. The fact that it has not yet happened everywhere proves that we haven't gone about it the right way. We haven't paid attention. We haven't taken these schools seriously.

Many of our schools subject our children to what President Bush calls the "soft bigotry of low expectations," and in fact we subject many of our schools to the same low expectations.

If we don't take action on education, we will give the appearance of believing in the genetic explanation--that action on education would be wasted effort. If we don't take action, we will be guilty of the soft bigotry of low expectations ourselves.

The solution is to turn every school into a "no excuses" school. The solution is to take education seriously as a mission--not as a welfare program to write a check to once a year and forget but as a sacred trust that deserves our constant attention and stewardship from the whole community. It's not like our leaders haven't been urging us to do this for ages.

Malcolm X said, "Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today."

Mary McLeod Bethune wrote, "I leave you a thirst for education. Knowledge is the prime need of the hour."

W.E.B. DuBois said, "We must insist upon [the right to learn] to give our children the fairness of a start which will equip them with such an array of facts and such an attitude toward truth that they can have a real chance to judge what the world is and what its greater minds have thought it might be."

Frederick Douglass said, "[T]he want of learning is a calamity to any people."

Our predecessors kept telling us about the central importance of education, and we kept being satisfied to have our kids in desegregated schools.

They kept telling us about the thirst for knowledge and the right to learn, we kept being satisfied with kids getting diplomas they couldn't read. It's time for us to listen to Malcolm and Mary and Frederick and generations of people who had to struggle to teach themselves and knew the value of a good education.

And when we hear people talk about a "lost generation" of children unprepared for employment, our hearts should break. If we don't change course soon, history will report that, if there was a lost generation, we lost them. How many times do we have to be told?

Another leader said, "More and more, we are divided into two nations, separate and unequal. One that reads, and one that can't. One that dreams, and one that doesn't. All children can learn, and no child should be left behind."

That leader is George W. Bush. He knows that a major part of this divide is the achievement gap, and he believes that a good education is the new civil right. The best way to honor the legacy of our leaders is to take them at their word and give our kids that new civil right.

President Bush has been committed to closing the achievement gap since he was governor in Texas. He has committed major resources to closing the gap. In his budget last year, he gave the Education Department the largest percentage budget increase of any domestic agency. It's more than double the education budget from 1996.

In his budget this year, despite our war on terrorism, President Bush asked Congress for even more money for education, including an additional billion dollars for Title I, which goes to schools that serve disadvantaged students; a billion dollars for his Reading First program to ensure every student can read by third grade; more than half a billion dollars more for Pell Grants, to help our poor and middle class kids afford college.

But the President knows that money alone will not improve student performance. The last three decades have proved that. We need more than money.

Let me show you how money correlates with student performance.

We need more than money. That's why President Bush's No Child Left Behind law demands results for the money. He built the law on four common sense principles: accountability for results, local control and flexibility, expanded parental options, and doing what works based on scientific research.

Most important, his law holds all students to the same high standards, regardless of race, regardless of wealth, regardless of disability.

That's because they all can learn. That's what it means to treat children equally--not putting them all in a classroom, but holding them all to the same high standards. The text of the bill says that one of its goals is "to close the achievement gap with accountability, flexibility, and choice, so that no child is left behind." This is the federal response to the achievement gap.

Turning this plan into a law was not easy, but we did so with strong bipartisan support. The President worked well with Senators Kennedy and Gregg and Representatives Boehner and Miller. Thanks to them, No Child Left Behind is not a Republican law, or a Democratic law, it is an American law.

The President and I made these principles work for our children in Texas when he was governor and I was superintendent in Houston. The Education Trust did a study of our success in closing the achievement gap.

Let me quote one sentence from the report: "If African American [eighth-graders] in Arkansas, Hawaii, Louisiana, Mississippi, Maryland, and West Virginia could swap... writing scores with their counterparts in Texas, the African American-white achievement gap in all of those states would disappear."

Now, with the new law, Congress and the President have given these proven principles to the whole country. For the first time, we will hold our schools accountable. The law shifts the federal role from spending to investing. It turns Title I from a blanket of sympathy into a tool for success. It asks States to set clear standards and it measures progress through tests aligned to those standards.

The new law brings visibility to the process through reporting of state, district, and school results to the public. Under No Child Left Behind, failure cannot be swept under the rug.

The President has asked this nation to commit itself to the challenge of building an education system that educates all children well--a system that leaves no child behind. Obviously, such a system will not tolerate schools that fail to teach our children. H.R. 1, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, is the first step, and the President has called on the whole country to take up the challenge. Our community must answer his call.

One group has already accepted the challenge. Last week, I was honored to join Dr. Dorothy Height in announcing the Partnership for Academic Achievement--a partnership between the National Council of Negro Women and the U.S. Department of Education. Using the resources of the Department of Education and the network of the National Council of Negro Women, we can reach parents, teachers, and communities in new ways.

We will harness the power of 60,000 committed, motivated, influential women to close the achievement gap. And I know they are a powerful force.

I have great confidence in the leadership of Dr. Height, who joins me in launching and overseeing the partnership. She is a titan of civil rights, and I was honored to join many of you in celebrating her 90th birthday last week.

Last week, we summoned our sororities to the task. I want you to help me summon our entire community. Teachers are critical, but this job is too important to leave just to the teachers. Every one of us has a role to play, and many of us just need to find our roles: as mentors, as tutors, as parents, as school board members, as community leaders, as charter school sponsors--even as neighbors who persist in holding the highest of expectations for the children of the neighborhood.

Because when every last one of our children can read, that won't be reason to stop. We will have much more to teach them, and if we teach them well they will discover more knowledge to teach their children than we every imagined existed.

President Bush summed up the goal better than I could, so I leave you with his words:

"The final object of education reform is not just to shun mediocrity; it is to seek excellence. It is not just to avoid failure; it is to reward achievement. Our nation has a moral duty to ensure that no child is left behind. And we also, at this moment, have a great national opportunity, to ensure that every child, in every public school, is challenged by high standards that meet the high hopes of parents. To build a culture of achievement that matches the optimism and aspirations of our country."

Thank you.

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