Thank you, Sen. Allard, for those kind words. You do a great job for the people of Colorado. I've had the privilege of working with you as you served on the Senate HELP Committee. I don't know if it's your veterinary training, but you're great at "herding cats"!

I want to take a moment to offer my condolences on the loss of your friend and neighbor, Sen. Craig Thomas. He was a good man and a great senator.

To all you Centennial Staters in the audience: soon you'll hear me say a few words about how your government works. Thanks for coming out anyway!

Colorado is 1,500 miles from Washington, D.C. But the decisions we make here have an immediate impact on your state and 49 others. So we better get it right.

We tried to get it right five years ago. That's when President Bush joined with a bipartisan Congress to enact the No Child Left Behind Act. Sen. Allard was one of the "yes" votes, I'm proud to say.

NCLB is not a mandate on the states. It is a contract with them, a partnership to solve a very real problem: the fact that we were not giving every child a quality education in the Information Age. The law calls on schools to teach all students to grade level or better by 2014.

As a parent, I don't believe grade level is too much to ask for. In fact, it's the very purpose of a public education.

Five years later, we now are able to answer the question: is NCLB working? Is it delivering on its promises? I believe it is. And I'm not the only one.

This week a report came out by the nonpartisan Center on Education Policy. It found that student achievement in reading and math has improved in the majority of states since the law was passed. It also found that achievement gaps between disadvantaged and minority students and their peers have narrowed considerably.

This resulted in something rare in Washington—good press! It was even front page news in the Washington Post.

It's not just one report either. In addition to the CEP study, we have the results from the Nation's Report Card, or NAEP. More reading progress was made by nine-year-olds in five years (1999-2004) than in the previous 28 years combined. Math scores for young students have reached record highs across-the-board. Scores in history have improved in all three grade levels tested—4th, 8th, and 12th.

This represents a victory for accountability. Before NCLB, we were investing billions of dollars in our schools and, basically, just hoping for the best. We weren't educating all of our children because we weren't measuring them. As I like to say, what gets measured, gets done. So No Child Left Behind called for annual assessments based in reading and math on state-not federal—academic standards.

Just as important—it called for those scores to be broken down by race, ethnicity, income level, and disability status. We saw that many disadvantaged and minority students were being "hidden" behind the overall averages. Some were misdiagnosed as learning disabled; others were shuffled from grade to grade without learning. "Out of sight, out of mind."

Today, it's a different story. After widening in the 1990s, achievement gaps between minority and white nine-year-olds in math have narrowed to all-time lows. Achievement gaps are closing in Colorado as well. We're doing a far better job of identifying students who've fallen behind, so we can help them catch up.

Now, this positive change is happening against an interesting backdrop. Congress is debating the renewal of No Child Left Behind.

On one side you have the "opt outs," who want to exempt their states from annual testing. Of course, they still want to receive their full amount of federal funding—a 41 percent increase since 2001.

This makes no sense to me. We cannot "opt out" of our responsibility to measure student progress.

It's the key to improvement—especially now when a quality education opens the door to opportunity in the global economy.

Then there is the "national standards" crew. They want the federal government to create and mandate a national test. I believe this is the wrong approach for several reasons.

First, it goes against two centuries of tradition. Under the Constitution, states and localities have the primary leadership role in public education. They make the curriculum. They pay 90 percent of the bills.

Neighborhood schools deserve neighborhood leadership, not dictates from bureaucrats thousands of miles away.

Second, a debate over national standards would become an exercise in lowest-common denominator politics. We've seen it before in Washington, most recently during the divisive fight over national history standards in the 1990s. We don't need a replay.

Change must be driven by the states themselves. We are committed to helping Colorado raise its standards. I believe the best way is to strengthen accountability, not weaken or water it down.

President Bush's reauthorization plan would offer new flexibilities to qualified states. It would give families more choices and options, including intensive tutoring and scholarships for children in chronically underperforming schools. But it also sticks to what I call the "bright lines" of the law—including annual assessments and the 2014 deadline.

How has Colorado done? Your state has been a leader in many respects. It's got a good, transparent school report card. It's aligning high school standards to college and employer expectations. That's good. It's also building a state-of-the-art longitudinal data system to follow student progress. That's important. We cannot make good decisions without good data.

Three-fourths of Colorado's schools have made adequate yearly progress toward the 2014 goal—better than the national average of 70 percent. Eighteen percent of their students scored a 3 or higher on AP exams, one of the best rates in the nation. And your teacher quality plan has won approval from the Department.

I would add that just this week the Department awarded a $3.7 million grant to help Colorado reward teachers and principals who make great progress in raising student achievement and closing achievement gaps in high-poverty schools.

But there is still room to improve. I want to mention another study that was released this week, this one by the Department. It compared state proficiency standards to the tough NAEP standards. The good news: Colorado ranked in the top 10 in reading achievement for grade 4 and the top half for grade 8. The bad news: it ranked in the bottom quarter of states when comparing its proficiency standards to NAEP's.

We want a system that is fully transparent and responsive to parents, one that paints an accurate picture of student performance. The President has asked all states to publish their test scores side-by-side with the NAEP results. This will help drive up the political will to raise standards.

Now, why are we so focused on accountability and high standards? Because a high school education is no longer enough in the 21st Century. It is becoming more difficult to make a good living off the sweat of your brow. Let me share a few facts:

• Ninety percent of the fastest-growing jobs require postsecondary education or training. And yet, only 17 percent of our high school freshmen will get bachelor's degrees within ten years. Just nine percent of low-income kids will earn a degree by age 24.
• Math and science are the new currencies of the global economy. And yet, about two-thirds of our students will graduate high school unprepared for college-level math and science.
• The United States has the largest gap in earnings between for high school dropouts and high school graduates in the world. And yet, nearly half of our African-American and Hispanic ninth-graders will drop out before graduation day.

This concerns me. We must make higher education a top priority.

My Commission on the Future of Higher Education found that tuition costs were outpacing family income and even health care costs.

It found that access to college was limited by a lack of information and preparation. And it found that we could not answer the critical question of how college students have performed.

I look forward to working with Congress to make higher education more accessible, affordable, and accountable to its customers—the students and parents.

The Higher Education Act is up for renewal this year. It's been up for renewal since 2003. Congress must finally act. In the meantime, we've taken a few steps on our own. We're fixing the broken student loan system. We created a new FAFSA Forecaster tool to give high school juniors early notification of eligibility. And we have proposed the largest increase in Pell Grants in 30 years. Let's get it done.

I want to emphasize again, however, that real change must be led by the colleges and universities themselves. We cannot sacrifice the independence and innovation that have made our higher education system the envy of the world.

In reforming K-12 and higher education, I believe we're on the right track. But we're not out of the woods just yet. The answer in both cases is higher standards and greater accountability.

Our children are counting on schools to prepare them to succeed in life. So are their parents. They know that a quality education is key to the American Dream, now more than ever. We've come too far to let them down now.

Thank you. I'll be happy to take questions.

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