Thank you, Eli. It is great to be in California and great to talk with you about that portion of world affairs closest to my heart: American education.

For America's children, the turn of the century came on January 8, 2002. On that day, President Bush signed the No Child Left Behind Act into law, putting the capstone on a year of outstanding bipartisan cooperation, and opening a new century of accountability and student achievement.

In signing the law, the President also began a year of dramatic change. A river that had wandered sluggishly east has suddenly shifted and begun to flow west. Everyone involved in education—teachers and administrators, students and parents, business and community leaders—will notice the change, and the more we understand it, the more it will help us. The westward current will flow swiftly, and it will carry everyone along. Boats that had run aground or been caught in the shallows will be shaken loose and brought back to midstream. Most important, the river and everyone on it will flow toward success.

No Child Left Behind helps us look at schools, governance and the federal role in education the right way. It reminds us that the goal of schools is not diplomas but educated citizens, and it assures us that the responsibility for student performance lies not just with educators but also with communities. Most important, it changes the federal role in education from funding failure to investing in success. It gives the federal government leverage to demand results.

President Bush made education his highest priority in the first week of his administration, when he laid out the No Child Left Behind plan. He continued that commitment last week when he requested a budget of $56.5 billion for the Department. This includes $11.4 billion for Title I. Because the President believes that reading is the foundation of all learning, he tripled federal reading funds last year to create his Reading First program, and gave it an additional 11 percent increase this year. If Congress approves his budget, next year Reading First will get $1 billion.

There is no doubt that our education system urgently needs repair. Half a century ago, had we known that America would make astonishing improvements in technology, put an end to government—enforced segregation, and spend more than $8 trillion on schools, we would have expected that America would finish the century with all of its citizens —from business leaders to busboys— able to read, calculate, and understand American history. Instead, though our nation is blessed with many excellent schools and many excellent educators, our system is still failing too many children. According to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress, only 32 percent of fourth— graders can read proficiently at grade level. If Americans in 1952 had known they would spend $8 trillion, and that after 50 years less than a third of children could read, they might have questioned that investment.

With the No Child Left Behind law, education reform grows up. Reform is no longer about access or money. It is no longer about compliance or excuses. It is about improving student achievement by improving the quality of the education we offer American students. It is once again focused on the student, not the system.

Researching, writing, and passing the law was a challenge. But we have now moved into the implementation stage, and I am focused on showing the American people the importance of the four principles of No Child Left Behind. The four principles are: accountability for results, local control and flexibility, expanded parental options, and doing what works.

Accountability means making sure no child is left behind by keeping track of every child's progress. It means demanding a return on our investment. Accountability has several components, including clear and high standards for what students should know and be able to do, reporting schools' progress to parents and communities, celebrating schools that make real progress, and directing changes in schools that need help.

But the central component of accountability, the one that fuels all of the others, is information. Accountability requires specific, objective data. And specific, objective data on students' progress toward state standards comes from statewide assessment aligned with those standards: in other words, testing.

No Child Left Behind calls for each State to set clear and high standards for students in each grade. It further asks each State to measure student progress toward those standards by testing every child every year in reading and math from grades 3—8.

Some States already have clear and high curriculum standards. Some already test in reading and math in some grades, and some test in other subjects as well. The federal law does not discourage testing in other subjects, but it does acknowledge that reading and math are the central subjects for learning, working and citizenship.

As my gift to you, I have brought with me a new booklet on testing. Don't read it now, but take it home, read it, and share it with your neighbors. I recently saw a letter to the editor that said "Tests are trying to tell us something," and that's true. That's why I want to talk about testing today.

Data from tests are useful at every level. They will tell every teacher the strengths and weaknesses of each child—even at the beginning of the year. Armed with this information, teachers can teach children instead of classrooms. Test data will also reveal any classroom—wide weak spots so teachers can improve their instruction accordingly. Tests also tell principals how each teacher is performing so they can make decisions about teacher training and make class assignments. They tell districts, communities and parents which schools are making progress, which are doing best and which need attention.

In fact, we have created a database that shows us that high—poverty schools can be high—achieving schools. We know this because tests told us. If there were no tests, we wouldn't know.

Let me give you two examples from Houston that show how tests can create accountability in schools. The first example was a teacher who was not doing well. I won't give her name. This teacher's students consistently did poorly on an assessment in several objectives year after year. The principal developed a growth plan with that teacher to help her learn the concepts she was to teach the students. She then had a choice of completing the growth plan and helping students learn, or ignoring the growth plan and being processed out of the system. The non—negotiable demand was teaching students the concepts they needed to move forward successfully.

The other example was a teacher who was doing much better. While she was a successful teacher, an analysis of her students' tests showed that all of them missed one particular question. When the math supervisor asked her about it, the teacher discovered that she had misunderstood the concept and taught the wrong thing. Once she understood the concept, she taught the students successfully.

Every child's education should be a voyage of discovery, and the No Child Left Behind law is all about discovering and disseminating the information about student performance that assessments will provide.

Test scores will be disaggregated by poverty, race, ethnicity, disability and limited English proficiency so that we can see where the achievement gap exists and attack it so that no group is neglected. School districts and schools that fail to make adequate progress toward statewide goals will, over time, be subject to improvement, corrective action and restructuring measures aimed at getting them back on course to meet State standards. Schools that meet or exceed adequate yearly progress objectives or close achievement gaps will be eligible for State Academic Achievement Awards.

Test scores give us the information we need to find out what works and who needs help, and they give more information and control to the people closest to the action: the parents, teachers, administrators and communities. Too often, the reason that schools have trouble is because the people who are the most invested in them are not the people in control. It is time to recognize that the people who know and care the most about neighborhood schools are the people of the neighborhood: the teachers, parents, administrators, and business and community leaders.

You may remember President Bush talking about a young girl in New York City. The girl said, "I don't even remember taking exams. They just kept passing me along. I ended up dropping out in 7th grade. I basically felt that nobody cared."

I often visit schools around the country to hear their concerns and questions. One teacher I met in Nashville last week had a perfect reason to support testing her students. She said, "In order to teach them, I have to know what they don't know. So I must test them. We test to know."

In the mystery of who is failing children, teachers blame parents, and parents blame teachers. Assessment will give us the evidence to solve this mystery.

When we test our children, it is critical that we test all of our children. In order to eliminate the achievement gap and improve student performance across the board, we must hold educators accountable to the bold proposition that every child can learn.

This is a belief that President Bush takes very seriously. It does not mean that after you siphon off the children who have disabilities, the children who were never properly taught how to read, the children who never learned English, and the children who disrupted their classrooms, that most of the rest can learn. He means that all of our kids, even the ones our system calls "hard to teach," can learn.

Either educators believe that every child can learn, or they do not. When they begin to make excuses for children based on race or socioeconomics, those who make excuses—and our children—fall prey to what the President calls the soft bigotry of low expectations.

This year, the federal government will spend $387 million to assist States with the cost of developing a system of assessments, and the Department of Education will work with them to put solid, viable accountability systems in place. We will be vigilant in support of States as they set clear and high standards and develop assessments aligned with those standards.

When the newspapers cover assessment, they often mention an anti—testing movement. But the number of people who don't want to know what students are learning is very small. Some people have some anxieties about testing, but for most of them, the more they learn about the new law, the more they like it.

Some say that testing narrows the curriculum. They warn of schools canceling field trips to focus on the subjects of standardized tests. But nothing narrows a curriculum more than a child who can't read.

Some say teachers will "teach to the test." President Bush had the perfect answer for that one when he said, "If you test a child on basic math and reading skills, and you're teaching to the test, you're teaching math and reading. And that's the whole idea."

I would add that the curricula and tests are designed for public schools. The public created these schools. The public pays taxes to run the schools. Public officials oversee the schools. And the public, the investors and overseers, have a right to decide what the schools will teach and measure how well they are teaching it. Tests are trying to tell us something, and we have a right to know.

Some say testing is too expensive. I ask them how much of their investment they would allocate to make sure the rest of their investment was worthwhile. In Texas, testing cost less than one percent of the total.

Some say testing is unfair to poor children. Others say it is unfair to children with disabilities. But these are the children who need help the most. These are precisely the children whose teachers and parents need objective information in order to make informed decisions.

If my answers to these objections are starting to sound the same, that's because most of the objections share the same flaw. They oppose the gathering and dissemination of objective information. Most people find it difficult to imagine why anyone could oppose gathering information—especially on a topic as fundamental as our children's education. Most people have common sense, and that is why testing—and our children—will succeed.

I've spoken at length about what testing will do. Now let me tell you what it has already done. I give you the example of my home state of Texas, which implemented a very similar set of tests in the 1990s.

Between 1995 and 2000, the portion of children in Houston who passed the Texas exit—level exam almost doubled—from 37 percent to 73 percent. Teachers used the test results every year to tailor their teaching to each student's needs. The whole system was designed to identify and then help the children in danger of being left behind.

The impact of then—Governor Bush's education reforms extended way beyond Houston.

A report by a liberal think tank, the Education Trust, discovered that reforms in Texas dramatically improved education for all Texas students.

Just as important, the report concluded that the reforms in Texas have worked to close the achievement gap. According to the numbers, white Texans are improving, black Texans are improving, and Hispanic Texans are improving. All children are improving.

The report says the Texas reforms "have made a positive difference for students overall, particularly low—income and minority children." The large achievement gaps of 1994 have shrunk substantially, from 36 to 21 percentage points for African American students.

"If African American fourth—graders everywhere scored as well as those in Texas, the national achievement gap between white and African American fourth—graders in math would shrink by a third."

"If African American eighth—graders everywhere wrote as well as their peers in Texas, the national achievement gap between white and African American eighth—graders would be cut in half."

With the No Child Left Behind law, we take what we learned and proved about testing and extend its benefits to every child in America. Tests are trying to tell us something, and for our children's sake, we must listen. Whether the news is good or bad, we must not shoot the messenger, but receive the message.

Information is a form of power, and so is freedom. Everything government does shows this. No Child Left Behind will give more information and more choices to our children's most committed advocates: their parents. Testing will give parents objective data. Federal and state legislation and local innovation is giving parents more choices than ever before: public school choice, private schools, parochial schools, magnet schools, charter schools, home schools and Internet schools.

Many families are even combining several types of schools at the same time. As a former practitioner, I can assure you there is no more powerful advocate for children than a parent armed with information and options. There is no substitute for knowledge and leverage.

Context changes things. When you put raw data in context, they become knowledge. When you put choices in context, they become liberty. As technology floods us with more data and more choices, putting them in context will be a great challenge and a great achievement. Parents can put test data in context to know their children better. They can put their choices in the context of this knowledge to guide their children more wisely.

And all of us can turn the greatest amount of data and choices ever gathered in history into the greatest heritage any generation ever gave another.

With enough liberty, our children can use their knowledge. With enough knowledge, they can defend their liberty. And as Americans, we owe it to them, as our parents owed it to us, to give them more prosperity, more security, more health, more peace, more wisdom, more liberty and more knowledge than we had ourselves.

Thank you.

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