THE SECRETARY: Mr. President, thank you so much for that kind introduction.

Good morning, everyone, and I hope you'll bear with me as I struggle with the height of this podium. Those of you who wear bifocals will understand. Mr. President, I not only thank you for that fine introduction but I also thank you for your leadership of my alma mater, Jackson State University, that oasis of scholarship in the South in the capital city of Mississippi.

I also want to thank you for your service as one of the President's advisors on the HBCU Advisory Commission. That's an important commission and thank you for your leadership there.

I want to thank Dr. Humphreys, too, President of NABSE. I'm not sure he's here but I'd like to congratulate him on his leadership. I'm sure that Bill Gray is not here but I also would like to mention him because his leadership is important to our progress as well.

And finally I want to thank each of you for your service in leading our institutions of higher education. Leadership matters. Who is better to design the future for us than our great colleges and universities? You have an awesome responsibility. I won't do that now because this is not a part of my speech but I can make the case that you are the designers of our well-being.

So I want to welcome you and thank you for your leadership, thank you for visiting the capital city, and I hope you have a chance to go around and see some of the historical spots in this town. This is an amazing place. It's a place like none other. Here you see the past and the future coming together in historical spots, literature documents, and in many cases even people.

It's a fascinating place. I'm having a real ball just dealing with the history. History is one of my favorite subjects. But every day I'm reminded what an honor it is to serve as Secretary of Education for the United States of America, and to serve our great President George W. Bush because it's good to work with a person who is so determined in his mission to improve the quality of education for every child. Even while dealing with this international situation, listen, he talks all the time about education.

As a matter of fact sometimes I think that the war on terrorism is a detraction from his need to provide a quality education for all Americans and especially those Americans who have barriers to overcome.

You see, education is a passion of this President because he truly believes, as I do, that every child has a fundamental right to a good education. In fact he believes that education is a civil right just like our other civil rights, like the right to vote, the right to speak our minds, and the right to worship as we please.

In fact he goes even further and believes that low expectation of a child based primarily on their disadvantaged circumstances is a form of bigotry, maybe unintentional bigotry, we'll give them that much, but it's bigotry nonetheless to look at any child and put limits there. I thought it was courageous of him to say that.

Now, I know few of you have had the opportunity to know this President personally as I have and consequently you can only view him through a political lens because he is the President of the United States and that's what they write about. I understand that and I want to say as earnestly as I can that this President is a person who is highly principled, led by solid Christian convictions, and who is very committed to the education of all children. That's why his bill is called "No Child Left Behind."

Now, I just want to put that in because I want you to understand how I feel about it. That's really not a part of my presentation this morning. That's not why I'm here. But at some point I'd like to make that case because I think he's deserving of your support and your respect. And I think if you get to know him better that that would be the result. And I'm going to do everything I can to see that that happened because I think that's in our collective best interests.

But that's not what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about HBCUs and our place in history. Allow me to begin by resorting to a sense of history. In preparation for my visit with you today I took a few moments to review my history of HBCUs and it seems that there are three institutions who have a legitimate claim for being the very first HBCU. Legitimate claims. Each was founded before the Civil War. We have Cheyney, Wilberforce, and Lincoln.

According to our best research in 1837 Richard Humphreys founded the Institute for Colored Youth. Through most of its history it offered elementary and secondary education. The Institute finally became Cheyney University. Lincoln University in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania was chartered in 1854. It was noted as the first institution founded anywhere in the world to provide higher education in the arts and sciences for "male youth of African descent." The institute was renamed in 1866 after our great President Abraham Lincoln. About that same time Wilberforce was founded by the African Methodist Episcopal Church to provide higher education for African-American students.

Now, although we could enjoy our little dispute about who came first there are some things that are indisputable. There are some things that we could all agree on.

First, we can agree that their mission was clear. There was no wobbliness in the mission of these institutions. They knew why they existed. There's awesome power in purpose. You've got to have a real clear sense of what it's all about.

One of the first things I did when I became superintendent of Houston Independent School District is deal with this issue until we made a point, why this institution exists, and everybody who was affiliated with it bought into it and became part of it. We said Houston Independent School District exists to provide furtherance of the economic and social well-being of the citizens of Houston. And everybody thought I was nuts when I slowed down there but then I added through providing them a world-class education. But our ultimate purpose was the furtherance of the economic and social well-being of the citizens that we served. There's big power in purpose.

Second, we can agree that their mission had missionary zeal in it. I mean a giving of self for a higher purpose, a sense of virtue, doing some good for mankind. These institutions came into being with this in mind, a dogged determination to elevate the circumstances of African-Americans. There was nothing casual about their intent but when I coached football I used to say excellence is associated not with casualness. Excellence is not associated with casualness in moderation.

Excellence is associated with obsessiveness. Can you see the Williams sisters saying we think we'll go out for a casual practice? It just won't work like that. And, third, we can all agree that historical black colleges and universities have persevered in the face of many obstacles and yet succeeded. Because admissions for African-American youth was not considered possible historical black colleges and universities opened their doors expressly for that purpose and succeeded against all kinds of odds.

Look at the records. Almost 300,000 African-Americans students are currently enrolled in HBCUs and we count among your graduates hundreds of elected officials, including members of Congress.

It's well known and widely appreciated that HBCUs have graduated many military officers, physicians, teachers, attorneys, judges, ambassadors, business executives. In fact reports show that an impressive percentage of black college graduates in America come from historical black colleges and universities; 35 percent of all black lawyers, 50 percent of the black engineers, 65 percent of the physicians, 80 percent of the black judges, and more than 80 percent of the black teachers are graduates of historical black colleges and universities.

It's indisputable about the value of these great universities. America needs to ask itself what would this country be like if your graduates had not been provided with the quality of education that they got. So it's undisputed that HBCUs have a proud and distinguished history. And we owe this honor to the men and women who preceded us and who provided this leadership and this success. They fought the battles of their day. They faced up to the circumstances that confronted them and they didn't moan and groan and whine and say we will succeed if situations differ. Succeeded given the circumstances that exist. They faced off the hardship of their day and paid the price, whatever it was, stayed the course, won the battle.

And now they've handed off the baton to a new generation of leaders who will face new problems and new obstacles and new challenges and new questions. And so the question today is not is there a proud history of HBCUs. The big question is what is our future. That's the big question.

But the trump card we have is you. You are the answer to that question, you and I. We can answer that question. And so those who meet here 50 years from now will look back at our history and we will not have defaulted on the great challenges that our predecessors handed us.

But we have to do things differently. We can't go speeding into the future looking through a rearview mirror. I quote Walter Lippmann here. "Those born today are born into a world in which the foundations of the old order survived only as habits are about to fall. Scientific invention and blind social currents have made the past authority impossible."

I'm going to reinforce that with a statement from Woodrow Wilson in 1912: "There is one great fact which underlies all the questions that are discussed in the political platform of the present moment. The single fact is nothing is done in this country as it was done 20 years ago. We are in the presence of a new organization of society. Our lives have broken away from the past. The life of America is not the life it was 20 years ago. We've changed our economic conditions absolutely from the past, from bottom to top, and with our economic society the organization of life now is different. The old political formulas don't fit the present problems. They read like a document taken from a forgotten age."

The proposition I put before you today is leadership matters and you are the leaders. You are the designers of our well-being at a time when we need it, at a time when African-American students are at a disadvantage in terms of their performance on every standardized measure in education you can name. ACT, SAT, all the state-mandated examinations, Stanford 9, you name it.

This is a time for great leadership to deal with a doable problem, one that can be fixed by persistence and work. The proposition I put today is leadership matters and the question I put is what is our future?

Allow me to make a suggestion. I believe our future can be found in our past. The great business book by Jim Collins entitled Good to Great points out a question that every successful enterprise has put before themselves and answered. And that question is what can we do to be the best in the world at? What is it that we can lead the world in? Now, I know that some people don't like to ask questions like that. They'd rather just be good and you are good.

But I take my religion from Mr. Collins and did it some time ago and I think good is the enemy of great. Good is satisfying, good is comfortable, restful even. But to be great is painful and it hurts. That's why so few great things. But we can be great. You know what I think that we can be the best in the world at? I think we could be best in the world at preparing teachers to teach children who need the greatest teachers. We can be the best in the world at that.

And we've already got a head start. This is an area where black colleges and universities can lead the world and that is in preparing teachers who can excel in teaching children who need great teachers.

So I would argue that our future is in our past. This is not an argument about doing all those other things. I know some of you are going to be great in technology. But you're never going to be an MIT. This one the world can match you in. Be good in engineering. Be great in preparing teachers.

HBCUs are the top producers of African American prospective teachers, make up two-thirds of all colleges and universities awarding baccalaureate degrees and almost half of the institutions awarded the greatest number of masters degrees for teachers in this whole United States of America.

HBCUs lead the production of African American prospective teachers in the South. In nine southern states HBCUs produce more than half of all the African American baccalaureate degree recipients in 1998.

In DC almost 90 percent of all African American prospective teachers in the period '98 to 2000 were produced by just two HBCUs. And I could go on and on and on. But there's a problem. There's a problem. Here's the problem. Many HBCUs, and I think a good decision that they made, decided to take open admissions which means that they're taking many students who are disadvantaged or who have not yet caught up or who need the best.

But listen to this very carefully. Here's the problem. That's good to take that point of view but that is to say that if they're behind when they come in there are no degrees of freedom of being accountable and a way to compare with all the rest of the people when they get out.

So if you say I'm going to take students in who are disadvantaged and who need more help and I'm going to take for granted you are saying concomitantly when they graduate they're going to be able to stand and compare with anybody and I just finished saying they're going to be greater than everybody then this gap is a problem that you've got to address.

And you're not going to do that with willy-nilly teaching because if you take this point of view you also say I've got to find the very best at teaching teachers. I've got to find the greatest research there is. I've got to make sure that everything is aligned to the purpose that we've adopted.

There are no degrees of freedom for mediocrity. If you take this position you cannot take the other position that they're going to meet standards and exceed standards at the end unless you're going to do something magical in the middle.

So my suggestion is as president of the institution take a look at your teacher preparation program. Own it. Don't hand this off to the dean and say are youthe dean; you're going to do your thing. You say you're the person I'm selecting to run my most treasured program. You're the person I'm counting on to take us to the pinnacle. And then go back and put an hour in every once in a while and take a look yourself. And make sure the rest of the people in the institution know about this.

Let the arts and science people know they're not off the hook. They've got a role to play here as well.

Now, I'm going to end this by dealing with a very sensitive kind of topic. This is going to be a kind of dressing down.

Do you think I ought to go at this point? All right, that's what he said. Our President has adopted the idea that we can educate all of our children. Now, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to figure out where the problem is here. The disadvantaged children are going to need it most. And you can understand that this whole legislation has targeted disadvantaged children.

Do you know any of the disadvantaged children? Who do you think they are? On the front of this bill, the No Child Left Behind bill, there's a great big word that says, "An Act." And then it defines the act on the first page "to close the achievement gap."

In other words I could make the case that the whole $22 billion in here is about closing the achievement gap. Who is at the disadvantaged end of the achievement gap? Come on, now. Who else has stood up and said that before?

But in order to educate all of our children and, by the way, no society has ever tried this. It's never been done in the history of the world. Everybody's been happy with just educating part of their populations. Along comes this man and says we're going to educate all our kids.

Part of my purpose is self-serving here. It's self-serving in the sense that I need HBCUs to be good in order for me to accomplish this goal because he looks at me and says I want to educate all of our children.

I need teachers who would excel in this noble profession and I know where I can get them. You've got them. How could I help? Here's how I can help. Since, first of all, we have no time to waste and, by the way, let me just put another thing out. Get this now. You might as well deal with this now. George W. Bush is going to be President of the United States for another full term, finish this one and another one, too. That's the world we're going to live in.

And so in this 8-year period, which is a very short time, we've got to get an education system organized that educates all of our kids. So I need you to be a soldier. Give us teachers who can excel in this noble profession. Start with reading, the one skill upon which all others are based. If your reading teachers in the causes of education can teach reading then you've made an enormous contribution.

If they're willing to base their efforts on scientifically-based principles that research says works, not on hit or miss or guess work, if they're willing to have the discipline to read the literature of the National Institute for Health and NICHD and other places where there is great research, and align that teaching to those principles then I can help.

Why? Because time is short and because our intent is strong to do what we've got to do. We do not deviate from this path. There's no reason to talk to us about other issues. This is one-track mind at the apex, okay? But if somebody comes around and says I want to make my teacher education program a strong plank upon which the No Child Left Behind goal can rest, I want my teacher education program to have a reading component in it that is top of the line based on great research, then I'd like to talk to those kinds of individuals.

I think I've gone far enough. But I hope I have a chance for us to have some more dialogue. There's a need for us to talk about these issues. There's a need for us to sit down as colleagues and address some important issues. We've got miles to go before we sleep but I'm comfortable we can get it done.

Thank you so much.

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