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Thank you, Phil Truluck, for that introduction.

As is typical of this town, I have come to the point in time here where I feel as if I am being pinned with that inevitable "L" word...legacy. Usually the word is said like it's an epitaph. But despite my age, I am very much alive and intend to carry on my life's work: helping to improve the lives of America's youths. I will be working toward that mission from a different vantage point, but it is still a cause near and dear to my heart.

Now, Washington is one of the few places where what you say going out is as important as what you say coming in. We've done some great work here over the last four years, and it will be up to my very able successor to continue our reforms. But first I'd like to describe what I believe is a nascent educational revolution.

This is a revolution to bring about higher standards and great expectations. And I don't just mean in our schools—the expectations revolution has hit Washington, too.

For too long, our policy-makers—reformers and status-quo defenders, crusaders and bureaucrats, liberals and conservatives—held back. Oh, there were studies illustrating public education's shortcomings, such as A Nation at Risk. And there were speeches decrying those shortcomings. But the studies gathered dust and the speeches were soon forgotten.

Meanwhile, education went on. Millions of children went through our schools. Many graduated, some dropped out, and others were just passed through without learning. And we let it all happen—simply let it happen.

President Bush broke the ice of this comfortable consensus. He told the reformers that it was time to get busy. He told the status-quo defenders to either embrace change or step aside. He told the civil rights leaders that education is a civil right, too and to please join us. Because he acted, our schools are working harder than ever before to reach and to teach every child—to leave no child behind.

I've seen the change up close. I've spent a lot of time on the road in this job, visiting some 160 schools in 46 states. I've visited schools in the heart of Harlem and amid the magnolias of Mississippi. I've taken a seaplane to a Savoonga, a remote island in Alaska. Come to think of it, though, I never made it to Hawaii!!

What has struck me about these diverse schools is the students' universal hunger to learn, the teachers' passion to teach, and the administrators' desire to make it all work. I remember meeting a teacher who actually lived in his classroom closet because there was no other housing available to him in that remote rural setting. Talk about an easy commute!

I have been heartened by these visits. They have been the part of the job I have enjoyed the most. I have been an educator and a practitioner my whole life. That's why I accepted the job of secretary of education. I had been frustrated by the fact that so many of our nation's students have been relinquished to the back of the educational bus.

Nevertheless, we knew the system of education in our nation was withering at its roots. "Some children just can't learn" was the unofficial, unspoken mantra. We let the adults in the system drive the decisions, not the concerns of the children and their parents.

The results? Forty-two percent of entering freshmen at public two-year colleges and 20 percent at four-year universities were enrolled in a remedial course in 2000. Colleges and universities spend approximately $2 billion annually on remediation. And what the higher education system couldn't fix, employers have had to: businesses are spending over $3 billion a year on correcting their workers' writing skills alone.

So, that's what the system has not been getting done. And it wasn't for lack of money, either. The most recent Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) study found that America is spending more on education—and getting less—than any other country, including economically developed nations. Stanford University economist Rick Hanushek estimates that our lag in high school math alone may reduce U.S. economic growth by as much as half a percentage point a year—that's $54 billion dollars. It's a domino effect.

We had to stop the dominos from falling. When President Bush took office four years ago, he immediately realized that the education system needed an overhaul. He and I came to Washington to effect change.

Now, I am not an economist, but it seems obvious to me that in a free-market society, any enterprise that ignores its customers does so at its own peril. The system is a virtual monopoly, and we know from history that monopolies are unhealthy.

So that's what we did. We set out to improve the system—to make it more accountable to its customers: children and their parents. That accountability came in the form of the No Child Left Behind Act.

No Child Left Behind preserves local control—states and school districts drive the standards and determine what is expected of their schoolchildren. At the same time, this Department became more vigilant about ensuring that states, districts, and schools are doing what is right for those children. In the interest of federalism, we lit a fire under the states to fulfill their Constitutional responsibility and lead—truly lead—on education.

And they are. Today, for the first time, all 50 states have accountability plans in place. Now, the first principle of accountability is to let the sunshine in. Under the law, we have empowered parents—AND taxpayers—with timely and accurate information. Armed with this data, parents can make the right choices.

Let me underscore that word: choice. It is an integral part of No Child Left Behind. It is now an indelible part of the education lexicon. That couldn't have been said four years ago. This administration has put school choice on the books.

• It can be seen in the supplemental services part of the law: students can choose free after-school tutoring with federal Title I dollars.
• It can be seen in the form of school transfers: parents in underperforming schools can move their child to another public school that better suits his or her needs.
• And, of course, there is "the jewel in the crown": the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship program. It represents the first time the federal government has directly helped students in underperforming schools attend the private school of their choice using a tuition voucher. Now over 1,000 children here have a whole new world of opportunity opened up to them.

This administration has also steadfastly supported choice in the form of charter schools. Charters tend to attract students who were left behind years ago. Schools often have to work twice as hard to help them catch up. Yet there are some who root for their failure. Shame on them.

Charters are even more accountable than other public schools since they can be closed down and, just as important, because they are accountable to their customers, the parents. We know from studies, surveys and—especially—long waiting lists that parents are wildly satisfied with charters. And they see the larger picture too: that once you empower people with choice, the system as a whole will improve. Choice in and of itself is a valuable commodity.

I feel good about how we have taken a stand against the monopoly and injected a healthy dose of freedom into education. As Teddy Roosevelt understood, sometimes the government, in the best interests of the consumer, must intervene.

Has this stand caused some heartache? Of course. Those who believe some children "just can't learn" also believe some schools can do no wrong, despite years and years of widely publicized mediocrity. It all adds up to what President Bush refers to as "the soft bigotry of low expectations."

I can tell you firsthand that this exists. It is an attitude born from slavery and Jim Crow, nourished by well-meaning educators, and tolerated by the civil rights establishment. And it has been one of the biggest stumbling blocks in the battle to close the appalling achievement gap in this country. It's a hardy stain that has survived 40 years of righteous speeches and empty empathy.

Let me drill down to some specifics. By 12th grade, African Americans are typically four years behind white and Asian students. Hispanics are doing only slightly better. In other words, many of these students are finishing high school with a junior high school education. Last week, the 44-nation Program for International Student Assessment, or PISA, showed our white 15-year-olds beating the international OECD average; our black and Hispanic students, by contrast, scored some 100 points below them.

Blacks earn about half the number of college degrees as whites. And even those who "make it" have problems: a recent study found that nearly half of first-year black law students were in the bottom 10th of their class.

What kind of message does this send?

This year, we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education decision that outlawed racial segregation in schools. The schoolhouse doors were ordered open to students regardless of their race or ethnic background. But 50 years later, we are still struggling. Access has not always meant achievement. Equality requires quality—a quality education for all.

Of course, parents and the larger community have a role. But schools must—must—make a difference. It can be done. Just go to the KIPP Academies and the many, many others that simply do not accept the excuses.

If we ever hope to eliminate racism in this society, we must confront the vast educational divide between the haves and the have-nots. No Child Left Behind is doing just that. It will eliminate the need for race-based quotas and preferences because it will ensure that each and every child—regardless of race, creed or color—is taught. And taught well.

Now, the government cannot do it alone. The civil rights leaders in particular need to see the achievement gap for what it is: a crisis. They need to put aside their partisanship and face this problem head-on. Forget party affiliations for one moment and focus on No Child Left Behind as something that is already making a real difference in our communities.

How is it making a difference? Consider this: according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the Council of Great City Schools and reliable studies, children traditionally left behind—African American, Hispanic, low-income students—have been the driving force behind our recent gains in test scores. The percentage of African American and Hispanic fourth-graders who know their reading and math basics increased substantially more between 2000 and 2003 than in the previous administration's eight years combined. And they will continue to improve as we move away from learning fads and toward scientifically proven instructional programs, such as our Reading First program.

Today, we had some more confirmation of our efforts. The 2003 TIMSS international math and science study shows a nation of young learners significantly improving their skills over time AND compared to the rest of the world, with black and Hispanic students making big gains and closing the gap.

Still, there is much more to do, as the new PISA results indicate. Our 15-year-olds lag behind the rest of the world in mathematics and problem-solving skills. The principles of No Child Left Behind are working for our fourth- and eighth-graders and should be applied to our ninth-, 10th- and 11th-graders as soon as possible, as the president has proposed.

My friends, we are winning the battle of ideas. When the nation was declared "at risk" two decades ago, concepts like true parental choice, charter schools and accountability for results were barely conceived and rarely advocated. But thanks to the work of scholars and activists, educators and parents, dreamers and doers—people like you—these ideas are now embedded in the law of the land, changing America even as our ideas change the world.

But you can win the battle and lose the war. We are at a pivotal point. To keep reform moving forward, we must take the leap from ideas to the hard work of implementation. What do I mean?

• We have fought too hard to create excellent charter schools and opportunity scholarships to ignore the bad apples and fly-by-night operators in the lot. We must get serious about shutting down failing charter schools. And we must embrace fiscal accountability in voucher programs and the schools they fund.

• We must also move all states' information systems out of the punch-card era and into the 21st century.

• And we must work to advance merit hiring and promotion so that our neediest schools do not lose their most talented people.

Together we have changed expectations and the conversation in education. Now we must make these ideas work in practice. For that, I am confident that my successor, Margaret Spellings, is more than up to the task.

Let me close with a few last thoughts about reform. You know there are those who will remain opposed to reform in the face of any and all evidence to the contrary. We've collected a few examples that we have labeled the "Sour Grapes Awards."

First is the National Conference of State Legislatures, whose leaders said that recent gains are "not really a result of an increase in student performance."

The president of the Ohio Education Association said, "We are thrilled with the results we heard in lieu of the fact that we have NCLB being imposed on Ohio from the federal government."

And finally, there's the Center on Education Policy, whose director said No Child Left Behind is "a flawed strategy that will lead to greater student achievement."

That's the old argument: it works in practice but not in theory!

In my lifetime, I have been witness to or participated in the major education milestones of the 20th century and now the 21st. I attended segregated elementary and secondary schools where the only textbooks I ever saw were hand-me-downs from the all-white school down the road. I went on to attend an Historically Black College in part because no other higher educational institutions were open to me. I had no choice. There's that word again.

And I was a junior at Jackson State in 1954 when the Brown decision came down. We greeted it with naïve jubilation—we thought that a new world of opportunity would greet us. But Brown was not enough.

A decade later the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 tried to pick up where Brown left off. But the law, while well-intentioned, had few if any teeth. We kept reauthorizing it anyway, year after year, on schedule and unchallenged.

It was as if nobody was hearing those trees falling in the forest about which A Nation at Risk had warned us.

The problem was that the system was unaccountable to taxpayers and parents, until No Child Left Behind passed in 2002. No Child Left Behind opened the system, set concrete expectations, and set about achieving them. It sent a strong message: if you take federal education dollars, we will ask you to be accountable for that investment—to raise student achievement for all, not just some.

And I am proud to say that the law is here to stay. Even Education Week, the voice of the education establishment, admitted as much in a recent article titled "Taking Root." Look at that. I might even frame this one.

The roots have stopped withering. Now they must grow into trees of knowledge. It will take time. By the year 2035, Professor Hanushek estimates, the added GDP from a well-educated citizenry could pay for our entire education system. But only if we stay the course.

So, let me get back to my epitaph. Have I learned a few lessons about how Washington works? You bet. But I know we are on the right path, and I will be watching our progress, beaming from ear to ear, as our children show the world it can be done.

As Abraham Lincoln said in his farewell address in Springfield on his way to Washington: "To this place, and the kindness of these people, I owe everything. ... I now leave, not knowing when, or whether ever, I may return, with a task before me greater than that which rested upon Washington."

As I make the opposite trip—the trip home—allow me to finish Lincoln's heartfelt words: "Let us confidently hope that all will yet be well. To His care commending you, as I hope in your prayers you will commend me, I bid you an affectionate farewell."

Thank you for inviting me to speak here today.

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