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Thank you, David Salisbury, for that introduction. You’ve done a wonderful job editing this book and organizing this forum to mark such a historic anniversary. Educational freedom is indeed an important topic. In just 25 years, Cato has become a remarkable institution with that important philosophy at its core: freedom. Cato has helped advance the fight for educational freedom through the work of Ed Crane, David Boaz and Casey Lartigue, who is now helping to lead the charge at Fight for Children. I’m even told Derrick Max, one of your former staffers, started a school in the District for low-income families and that some of the D.C. opportunity scholarship children will attend it. Thank you for all your work.

I am also privileged to share the stage today with Howard Fuller, Clint Bollick and Gerard Robinson. What a great group of individuals, all motivated with one goal: to make education more equitable in our nation.

Fifty years ago, it might have been inconceivable that an African American man would be standing before you today as the secretary of education of the United States of America. America might have been one country back then, but for those of us with a skin color other than white, we lived in a union of states that formed a country, but one that was hardly united.

When I was a child growing up in rural Mississippi, I went to school with other blacks. The white school was about three miles from ours. But somehow I felt I knew those white students, probably because the only textbooks we had were the hand-me-downs from that school. I used to read the notes in the margins, try to understand why pages were ripped out, and think about how those children’s lives were different from mine.

It was hardly an environment that inspired many of my friends to dream of college or the full American dream—a promise that seemed denied to us. But I was one of the lucky ones. I had parents who were both educators and who instilled in my four siblings and me a deep belief that education was the ticket to freedom. It would lift our souls, enlighten our minds, give us the keys to a better life. Education would emancipate us, prove to the world that we were as smart as whites, that we could achieve. I also came from a generation of African Americans who were taught to value education.

I attended Jackson State, a Historically Black College, and it was a great university. But I really had no choice. I couldn't attend Ol' Miss or Mississippi Southern or Mississippi State. And like many African Americans in Mississippi I went north for my graduate studies, to Indiana University. In fact, the state paid me to leave Mississippi to further my education.

I was a junior at Jackson State when I heard the news that the Supreme Court exposed the lie of segregation in its Brown v. Board of Education decision. The case sent seismic shock waves throughout the country. I watched it firsthand. There was a real sense of jubilation on campus. Justice was truly blind. But we were naïve. We thought the world would change for the better … the next day. Racism would be eradicated and the world would open its arms to us, outstretched, color-blind. But it took decades for the legacy of Brown to take shape and for segregation to end in our schools.

In his oral argument before the court, Brown v. Board of Education, Thurgood Marshall stated that it was impossible to take race out of the case. And he was right. This wasn't about states rights or about other ways of cloaking the debate. Segregation was about genetic arguments, about skin color and about perceptions, period. And about race, period. Finally, the doctrine of "separate but equal" was exposed as unconstitutional. Loudly and clearly, the court said it was simply a policy that, almost a century after the end of the Civil War, was wrong and needed to be abolished.

But segregation didn't just disappear right away because of the court's action. The pace of change was slow. And it remains slow, measured in decades, maybe in generations. Many studies show that Brown didn't trickle down into some states for more than 20 years, and some even later. In other words, well into the 1970s there were still some states that practiced a form of legal, reasoned segregation in defiance of the Brown decision.

The Supreme Court went to great lengths to note the role of education in daily lives and its importance to our country. The court said that equality of opportunity must be more than just a statement of law. It must be a matter of fact.

We have indeed made great strides since the Brown decision. But I believe our work is far from over. Factually speaking, this country does not yet provide the equal opportunities for millions of children that would fulfill the Brown promise. President Bush recognized this problem and decided to take action. He saw a well-documented, if silent, problem: a two-tiered education system in our nation. Some fortunate students receive a world-class education. Others, by accident of street address, skin color or spoken accent, do not.

The Brown decision gave all students access to the schoolhouse, but the question we need to ask ourselves now is: what do they get once they get inside the school?

It’s clear that after 50 years, we still have a lot of work to do. Our education system does not provide a quality education to all. Some sobering statistics in addition to what was already mentioned in the introduction: today, only one in six African Americans can read proficiently upon leaving high school. The achievement gap in reading between blacks and white is staggering—nationally, it’s 28 percentage points in the fourth grade at the "at or above proficient" level, and in the District of Columbia it is more than double that. Other education indicators show similar trends: black students in the K–12 system have almost triple the rate of disciplinary problems (as measured by suspensions) as their white peers. And looking at higher education, blacks earn about half the number of college degrees as whites.

That is why the No Child Left Behind Act is so important. It goes beyond Brown and says that every child deserves a quality education. Every child can learn. Every child deserves to be treated with respect and dignity, and no child deserves to be pushed aside and ignored. The law says parents and taxpayers have a right to information about their local schools and how they compare to other schools. Empowered with this information, parents can vote with their feet and make choices.

Choice fosters competition. It injects market forces into an education system that has been a virtual monopoly and stagnant. But I don’t need to sing the praises of the free market to this crowd.

Although there are many schools in America—in cities, suburbs, rural areas—with fine teachers, great administrators and tremendous parental support, it’s not the whole story. There are also millions of students mired in mediocrity, denied a high-quality education. We know who these children are. You can guess yourself.

Teachers are also very important, of course. They can make a huge difference in a child’s life. I have the utmost respect for teachers and the work that they do, day in and day out. But the problem is that if you put good people into a bad system, you are bound to fail. The results simply won’t be there.

Albert Shanker, the late president of the American Federation of Teachers, the nation’s second largest teachers union, once said: "Public education operates like a planned economy, a bureaucratic system ... there are few incentives for innovation and productivity. It's no surprise that our school system doesn't improve: It more resembles the communist economy than our own market economy."

No Child Left Behind challenges that monopoly. It aims to make the system more accountable for results on a national scale. More transparency will force the system to change, to improve.

Some say the system will improve merely if we pump more money into it. But lack of money is not the problem. It’s the way we spend it. We currently dispense more per pupil than any other nation in the world on K–12 education, except Switzerland. Just to give you some perspective, in 2003, this nation spent over half a trillion dollars at the federal, state and local levels on K–12 education. Is it unreasonable to ask that a third-grade child be able to read on a third-grade level after that kind of national commitment? Yet, in spite of these vast sums, millions of students do not receive the quality education that they deserve.

That lack of progress is the source of my impatience. The children at the bottom—the minorities, the special education students—have stayed at the bottom. We have to help them. It is in the national interest to empower them with the tools to learn, to achieve and to better their lives.

The ancient Greeks used to say education is freedom. Yes, it is. And the No Child Left Behind Act is about freedom and it is about equity. It is about justice. It is about the way we learn about life.

Now I know I’m taking a chance talking at the Cato Institute, the premiere libertarian think tank in the nation and the world, about the federal government’s role in education policy. Many of you believe there is no role for the federal government. Some of you probably would like to eliminate my job and my department completely.

Well, I do believe there is a role for the federal government in education. Brown proves it. The nation’s first federally funded voucher program also proves it. Of course, elementary and secondary education is the traditional province of state and local governments. But there is a compelling national interest in education, which is why the federal government is involved and has been for some time. The federal government has stepped in to correct overt unfairness or inequality, starting with measures to enforce civil rights and dismantle segregation in the wake of the Brown decision.

The federal government’s first major legislative involvement in education goes back to 1965 with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which marked the first federal aid given to school districts with large percentages of children living in poverty. Again, the intent was to even out the playing field—to give extra aid to children most in need. The difference under No Child Left Behind is that we have put some teeth into federal education law. If you take federal funds—IF you take taxpayer dollars … this is not a mandate—you will be measured by your results.

And we mean business. When President Bush took office, only 11 states were in compliance with the prior federal education law. That’s right, three-quarters of the states were ignoring the law and simply taking the federal largesse without having to account for whether their children were learning.

Now, the days of free money are over. We take our stewardship of taxpayer dollars quite seriously.

What NCLB says is that if you take federal education dollars, we will ask you to be accountable for that investment in terms of raising student achievement—for all students, not just some. And we expect you to stop using teaching fads, and to start utilizing programs that are scientifically based. In other words, use what we know works.

This law is not a one-size-fits-all federal approach, though. This administration has worked hard to create a climate of cooperation and trust with the states, and we have listened.

This administration also believes that there needs to be multiple delivery systems for education—healthy market competition. Those options include private schools, home schools, cyber schools, parochial schools. And those options should be available to all parents. That’s why President Bush and I and leaders in Congress have fought hard to bring opportunity scholarships to students in the District of Columbia. The federal government again has a role: we are helping to plant the seeds of choice in the nation’s capital in an education system that is ailing, crushing the dreams of thousands of inner-city students who are denied a quality education. It is the nation’s first federally funded voucher program, but the president has set aside additional monies for other school districts in other cities to set up their own program. And several are interested.

But the public schools will always be the heavy lifter, which is why No Child Left Behind is so important—we cannot let another generation of children down.

Why is the government "interfering" in the market? Because it has to. We stand on the side of the education consumers—children and parents—not the producers in the educational bureaucracy. Currently, nobody represents them. Education needs to enter the 21st century. As Milton Friedman, the father of the voucher movement, said (in a Cato briefing paper, I might add): "There is enormous room for improvement in our educational system. Hardly any activity in the United States is technically more backward. We essentially teach children in the same way that we did 200 years ago: one teacher in front of a bunch of kids in a closed room."

In other words, my experience in the pre-Brown classroom may not be all that different from what a lot of children experience today. Although mandatory segregation is illegal, many schools today have a racial makeup, as if the Brown decision never happened. And for those children and their parents, they have no recourse. They are constantly given the poorest quality teachers, their schools are unsafe, and achievement levels are low. But there has been little they can do about it. Until now.

No Child Left Behind will improve the quality of education for all our children and all our schools, no matter where they are. Parents are empowered with information and options. There is also a healthy charter school movement. Cyber schools and home schools continue to grow. There are voucher programs in several cities, including the District. The system will be forced to improve.

The Brown chapter is now closed. The age of accountability and choice is just beginning. We have truly turned the corner. We will look back on this moment years from now and realize that we were all present at the start of a new era in education, one where all children counted, where all children were given a chance, where all parents could understand and penetrate the system, and where they were treated like customers. And we will be a better society for it.

Thank you.