More Resources  No Child Left Behind Act of 2001  Biography—Secretary Paige

SECRETARY PAIGE: Thank you, Elaine.

Allow me to begin by thanking the leadership of this great organization for this opportunity to meet with all of you today. At this important time of challenge and change in American education, the opportunity to meet with an organization which—it can be argued—holds the most important lever for effective change in American public education is deeply appreciated. That lever, of course is the lever of preparing the teacher workforce for America's schools.

For it is unarguable that teacher training is central to the effectiveness of school. And it is unarguable that you, the AACTE, hold that lever. For, after all: AACTE is the principal professional association for college and university leaders with responsibility for educator preparation. AACTE is the sole national organization representing the institutional interests of college-based teacher education. You are the major voice, nationally and internationally, for American colleges, schools, and departments of education. You have a tradition of more than a century and a half of professional service to the teacher education community.

AACTE is, without question, a major determinant of the degree to which American public education succeeds or fails. It is on this basis that I reach out to you and call on you to join President Bush, the Congress of the United States, the U.S. Department of Education, and many other Americans in the glorious pursuit of creating in America an education system worthy of our great nation. A system that leaves no child behind.

I have reviewed your strategic plan and priority goals. I was pleased to see your focus on looking at the impact your graduates have on PK-12 student learning. It is good to see that AACTE is promoting a "results-based" form of teacher preparation.

I applaud your theme for this conference, "Accountability in Teacher Education." Accepting accountability for results is the first step in the journey to excellence. America needs your excellence, it needs your skill, we need your experience, and most of all your continued commitment to an educational system in America that educates all of its children and leaves no child behind.

Clearly, the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education is a powerful force for American education excellence and we are fully aware of the good work you do. In that regard, the President and I thank you. We thank you for all the good work you do.

Yet, there is still so much more to do. So, even as I thank you for what you have done, I must ask you to do even more. Our battle is yet to be won, our task is still undone, and we have miles to go before we sleep.

Although there are many excellent schools in America, and they are excellent because of the excellence of the teachers, principals, and other school personnel who work in these schools.

The problem is that these schools don't represent the norm. They exist as islands of excellence in a sea of under-achievement. We are educating some of the children very well. But educating some of the children very well is not our goal.

Our goal is to educate all of the children well. With some great schools we move some of the students forward, but we leave many children behind. And the children most likely to be left behind are the children most in need.

It must be said, that while we have many good schools, and even some great schools, our current public school system, on the whole, has failed America's poor and disadvantaged children and, therefore, failed America. For example, consider a few examples from our current situation: Almost two-thirds of American 4th graders cannot read at grade level.

Reading failure, in the view of leaders at the National Institute of Child Heath and Human Development, constitutes not only an urgent challenge in our schools, but a public health problem with major consequences and costs. Fewer than one child in eight who cannot read by the end of first grade ever catches up to grade level. Almost two-thirds of low-income eighth graders cannot multiply or divide two-digit numbers. There is a wide and growing achievement gap between ethnic groups. Thirty percent of college freshmen arrive at their colleges and universities unprepared for rigorous college studies and must be enrolled in remedial courses.

Our education failures are considered by many to be a national security issue. On February 15, 2001, the U.S. Commission on National Security, 21st Century, co-chaired by former senators Warren Rudman and Gary Hart, and made up of 14 outstanding bipartisan commissioners, issued its Phase III Report entitled Road Map for National Security: Imperative for Change.

The commission was chartered to conduct a comprehensive examination of the structures and processes of the United States national security apparatus and to make appropriate recommendations. Although several of the Commission's recommendations have particular relevance to educational organizations, two stand out.

First, the commission said, "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."

Second, the commission said, "The capacity of America's education system to create a 21st 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."

Some argue that inadequate resources are the explanation for these failures. There is no doubt that additional resources are needed. That is why the President's 2002 budget gave the Department of Education the largest percentage increase of any federal domestic agency. And that is also why, despite our slowed economic circumstances, and despite our war against terrorism, the President's 2003 budget contains even further increases in resources for education. But the facts don't support the proposition that a lack of resources fully explains our education failures.

Between 1996 and 2002, federal discretionary appropriation for the Department of Education increased 113 percent, from $23 billion to $48.9 billion. In the past 3.5 decades, the federal government has spent more than $200 billion on the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) alone, while student achievement has remained relatively flat. Student performance in reading today is not substantially different from that of 1984. Spending increased sharply, yet student achievement remained flat.

Notwithstanding the current situation, educational excellence is within our reach. Our problems are difficult, but not insurmountable.

Our solutions start with the most important change in the federal role in PK-12 education since 1965. It is the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. This public law is different. It is the vision of a President who is willing to stand by it. It is the product of a bipartisan Congressional effort. Both Democrats and Republicans support this bill. Senators Kennedy and Gregg, Representatives Boehner and Miller. This is not a Republican law, and not a Democratic law; it is an American law.

It shifts the federal role from spending to investing. It requires clear standards and aligned assessment against those standards. It not only requires progress, it has a mechanism designed to enforce progress called adequate yearly progress (AYP).

It brings visibility to the process through required reporting of state, district, and school results to the public. Under No Child Left Behind, failure cannot be hidden any more.

It has consequences for failure through requiring schools that fail to meet AYP for two or more years to provide other options for parents and students. In other words, this law has punch and colleges of education as well as school districts will feel this punch. When President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act into law on January 8, he ushered in a new way of during business in American Education. He brought to the public a new demand.

A demand that says: All students—regardless of race, all students, without regard to their socioeconomic status—all students, not withstanding their LEP status, must be held to the same high academic standards.

And a demand that the idea that "all students can learn," which we hear all too often without heartfelt and deep belief, is be converted from an educational slogan to an expectation. H.R. 1 established that their academic progress must be measured annually and evaluated by the use of a newly-refined concept called "Adequate Yearly Progress."

Given the current educational failures, and the new law, it is clear that public schooling must change. After all, as Einstein said, "The definition of insanity is the belief that one can get different results by doing the same thing." But the other big questions are:

• Does teacher training play a role in our current educational failures?

• Is current teacher preparation adequate to meet the demands of No Child Left Behind?

I will leave these questions for your thoughts.

You are all familiar with the Sanders research that shows how after three years, the quality of teaching makes a 50-70 percent difference in student performance. Three years of bad teaching in a row can practically doom a child. But excellent teaching can make up for many disadvantages that children bring to school.

I've met with the state education chiefs, superintendents, and policy people of various kinds. I think it's only fair to tell you what they feel: the answer to the second question is no, and education schools in this country must become more effective if no child is to be left behind. This is an issue that will not go away on its own. The only way to address this issue is to confront it squarely.

This is not intended to be confrontational or difficult, but to put the issue on the table. When I walked in your shoes, I thought I knew everything about teacher quality, but working as a superintendent changed my mind. I wish I had known then what I know now.

Only you can make the decision to confront this issue. Please know that I offer my support, and that is why I wanted to speak to you today.

The No Child Left Behind law provides for clear and high standards, for both student performance and teachers.

As schools move toward a focus on standards, so must you. One of the requirements is that every state will ensure there is a qualified teacher in every classroom by the 2005-06 school year. Notice I did not say "certified." States are going to demand qualified teachers.

No Child Left Behind also provides new resources for improving teacher quality. 2.8 billion dollars will go for professional development for teachers and principals, based on good research about what works in the classroom. This money will not be set-asides any more; it will go to school districts. If your school of education does not already have good relations with local school districts, this would be a good time to develop them.

I am telling high schools they need to make sure their goal is not a graduate with a diploma, but an American with a good education.

I will say something similar to you: make sure your goal is not a graduate with certification, but a qualified teacher who has the right content knowledge and knows how to succeed in conveying that knowledge to students.

We must move from producing education majors toward producing teachers. Teachers who are taught how to teach, but, just as important, teachers who have mastered the subjects they teach.

As the Commission on National Security in the 21st Century indicates, we particularly need your help in math and science. Let me use math as an example. The Condition of Education report showed that only 41 percent of our math teachers majored in mathematics in college or graduate school, compared to 71 percent of math teachers worldwide.

Despite the objective data that American students are less likely than their foreign counterparts to have a teacher with a degree in math, we know that American math teachers perform better than the world average in saying they are well prepared. That's not the ranking we want to win.

According to NAEP, we know that math majors teach math better than education majors. So our math teachers should be mathematicians who have been trained to teach, not generic "teachers" who have taken some math courses.

Research has taught us how children can best learn to read, and how to identify teaching methods that really work.

But too many colleges of education are not teaching research-based teaching strategies. It won't do any good to hide a faulty method behind "academic freedom." In this century, teachers will be judged on results.

That's why the President signed an appropriation that triples funding for reading to 900 million dollars, and why his recent budget proposal would increase that another 11 percent to 1 billion dollars for next year. Reading is the foundation of all learning, and all reading teachers—and all parents—should understand what works.

Now that we have so much objective information about how children learn to read, ignoring the information when training teachers amounts to misconduct.

Now that we have learned so much about reading, we have asked researchers to discover more about how children learn math and science and other subjects. We want to do for them what we are doing for reading.

I would like to offer a suggestion that I hope some of you will take. If you are confident in the way you train teachers, put it to the test. Start a charter school and run it. Show the world that you are willing to have your skill and knowledge tested in the real world. Medical school professors practice medicine to stay involved in the real world. Running a school could help you, too.

We face a choice today. We can ignore the lack of confidence many have in current teacher training, or we can work together to meet the challenge of making sure no child is left behind.

I repeat, you hold the lever. You can make the difference. That's why I call on all of you to join me, join President Bush, join Congress, and join many other Americans in making sure every child in America gets an excellent education.

I know many of you personally, and I know others by reputation. I know you want to achieve this goal. I know you have the skills to achieve this goal. Through H.R. 1, the President and Congress have just given us the tools and laid out the roadmap. The next few years will be exciting for all of us, and the difference in our children's lives will be immense.

A few weeks, ago, we celebrated the birthday of Abraham Lincoln, and his words about the judgment of history often remind me of the significance of our task. As he said, "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass, will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation... We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility... We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth."

We cannot recover the years that were wasted on an education system that has failed so many children, but we can recast the future of that system. The No Child Left Behind law shows us the way. If we earnestly enact its reforms and vigorously pursue its goals, we will create schools worthy of the next generation of Americans. It is our charge. It is our responsibility. It is our honor. And it is within our power. If we set our minds and our hearts to it, we shall nobly save the last best hope of earth.

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