Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee:

Thank you for this opportunity to testify today on President Bush's fiscal year 2006 budget proposals for high school reform and high-quality teaching. President Bush and Secretary Spellings have said that our highest priority for fiscal year 2006 is to build on No Child Left Behind by expanding its impact in America's high schools. This also means building on the No Child Left Behind commitment to teacher quality by giving teachers new tools to succeed. This is what the President's High School Initiative is all about: helping principals and teachers improve the quality of instruction at the high school level so that every student graduates well-prepared for either postsecondary education or the work force.

FOCUS ON HIGH SCHOOL REFLECTS GROWING CONSENSUS

Three years after launching No Child Left Behind, there is strong agreement on the need to turn our attention to high school. President Bush's High School Initiative echoes the rising chorus from business leaders, governors, and educators calling for new efforts to improve the quality of high school education. It's not hard to see why.

Currently just 68 out of every 100 ninth-graders will graduate from high school on time, and two-thirds of students leave high school without the skills to succeed in college. As a result, just 18 of those original 100 ninth-graders graduate from college, and American companies and universities currently spend as much as $16 billion annually on remedial education to teach employees and students the basic skills they should have mastered in high school.

Clearly our high schools are not getting the job done. With governors and educators beginning to consider various reform options, the President's High School Initiative is essential to jump-start nationwide efforts to transform our high schools.

A COMPREHENSIVE APPROACH TO HIGH SCHOOL REFORM

The uncoordinated array of Federal programs now supporting high schools does not provide the Nation's governors and school superintendents the tools they need to improve high school education. While many of the existing Federal programs have laudable goals that the President supports, most have failed to demonstrate measurable results despite decades of Federal investment. It is time for a new approach.

The President's budget shifts decision-making power to the States by consolidating seven narrow-purpose programs supporting particular high school intervention strategies, and enabling States to allocate the funds to high-quality programs that will bring results. At the core of the President's High School Initiative is a $1.24 billion High School Intervention program, which would give States, school districts, and schools the flexibility to support a wide range of locally determined reforms aimed at increasing student achievement, eliminating achievement gaps, and ensuring that every student graduates with a meaningful high school diploma. Schools would implement targeted interventions designed to meet the specific needs of at-risk students, which would be determined by individual performance plans based on eighth-grade assessment data and student interests. Interventions could include dropout prevention, integration of rigorous academic courses with vocational and technical training, and efforts to increase college awareness and preparation. They would focus, in particular, on the students who are most at risk of dropping out or leaving school without the skills and knowledge necessary for further education or employment.

The second component of the President's Initiative is $250 million for High School Assessments to increase accountability for high school achievement and give principals and teachers new tools and data to guide instruction and improve student performance.

Overall, the High School Initiative would give States, districts, and principals more flexible, effective tools for improving high schools than they have under the existing array of uncoordinated, narrow-purpose programs that would be replace by the initiative.

Our 2006 request also contains a set of proposals that would complement the High School Initiative, including a $175 million expansion of the new Striving Readers program, which supports the development and implementation of research-based strategies for improving the skills of teenage students who are reading below grade level. A $120 million Secondary Education Mathematics Initiative under the Mathematics and Science Partnerships program would train teachers to raise mathematics achievement for low-performing secondary students. And we would help strengthen high school curricula by increasing funding for the Advanced Placement program and greatly expanding support for the State Scholars initiative, which encourages students to complete a rigorous high school curriculum.

HIGH-QUALITY SCHOOL LEADERSHIP AND TEACHING

Each element of our high school reform agenda supports the same goal: building on No Child Left Behind by giving principals and teachers more tools to improve the performance of our high schools, especially for students at risk of dropping out.

The teacher quality requirements of No Child Left Behind were based on the simple reality that a talented teacher has a tremendous impact on student achievement, with the difference between good instruction and poor instruction resulting in as much as one grade level in academic achievement over the course of a year. Unfortunately, another reality is that the less-qualified teachers tend to be concentrated in the high-poverty schools that have the greatest need for high-quality instruction.

This is why No Child Left Behind requires a highly qualified teacher in every classroom, so that all students have the opportunity to achieve at grade level or above. All teachers must have the combination of teaching skills and strong content knowledge that will result in gains in student achievement.

The 2006 budget supports this goal through our request of $2.9 billion for the Improving Teacher Quality State Grants program, which has required school districts to (1) demonstrate annual progress toward ensuring that all teachers are highly qualified by the end of the 2005-2006 school year and (2) show annual increases in the percentage of teachers receiving high-quality professional development. School districts receiving Title I funds also must use 5 percent of their Part A allocations to ensure that all teachers are highly qualified.

TECHNICAL ASSISTANCE

In addition to funding for States and school districts, the Department of Education has worked hard to provide the technical assistance and training needed to meet No Child Left Behind teacher quality requirements. In 2003, the Department created a Teacher Assistance Corps—a team of 45 education experts, researchers, and practitioners who traveled with Department staff to all 50 States, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico to help flesh out State and local plans for ensuring that all teachers are highly qualified.

A direct result of these State visits was the development of additional guidance—issued in March 2004—offering new flexibility for rural teachers, science teachers, and multi-subject teachers to demonstrate that they are highly qualified.

Also in 2004, the Department began shifting its emphasis toward helping teachers identify and employ concrete methods of improving student achievement. For example, we launched a Teacher-to-Teacher initiative aimed at providing training directly to teachers on research-based practices for closing the achievement gap. Roughly 2,000 teachers have participated in our Teacher-to-Teacher workshops, and thousands more continue to participate through an e-Learning course based on the workshops. Our Teacher-to-Teacher e-Learning site has received more than 80,000 visitors since it was launched in October 2004, and 19 States have determined that they will accept the Teacher-to-Teacher e-Learning course as credit toward recertification.

Last fall, the Department hosted a 2-day workshop on helping principals use data more effectively and become better instructional leaders—keys to successful implementation of No Child Left Behind and a critical element of our proposed High School Initiative. We expect data-driven instruction, especially in the high school setting, to be a key theme of our Teacher-to-Teacher and principal workshops scheduled for this summer.

CREATING NEW INCENTIVES FOR HIGH-QUALITY TEACHING

We have made considerable progress—with substantial financial support from Title II Improving Teacher Quality State Grants and Title I Grants to Local Educational Agencies—toward putting a highly qualified teacher in every classroom. We know, however, that more needs to be done, particularly in those high-poverty elementary and secondary schools that continue to struggle to attract and retain skilled, experienced teachers. This is why our 2006 request includes a new $500 million Teacher Incentive Fund that would help stimulate closer alignment of teacher compensation systems with student achievement and with the needs of high-poverty schools.

The need for this proposed new program is clear. The compensation and employment practices of public school systems typically provide no incentive for the best teachers to enter or remain in the most challenging schools; high-poverty schools are thus forced to rely on the least qualified faculty, including those hired with only emergency or other temporary credentials. For example, recent data from the Department's Schools and Staffing Survey show that secondary school students in high-poverty schools are twice as likely as those in low-poverty schools to have a teacher who is not certified in the subject taught. To overcome this problem, we want to encourage and support teacher compensation systems that are based on performance rather than credentials and seniority, and that provide incentives for effective teachers to enter and remain in the schools where their talents are most needed.

The Teacher Incentive Fund would build on successful local experiments by providing significant Federal support for rewarding teachers for strong performance, encouraging highly qualified teachers to enter classrooms with concentrations of low-income students, and developing and implementing performance-based teacher compensation systems.

As an example of how this can be successful, a 4-year pay-for-performance demonstration project in the Denver Public Schools led to both higher student achievement and a willingness on the part of Denver teachers to embrace performance-based compensation for the entire school system.

The Teacher Incentive Fund would help transform incentives for teachers by giving States $450 million in formula grants to reward and retain effective teachers and encourage highly qualified teachers to teach in high-poverty schools. And it would support efforts like those in Denver through a separate, $50 million competitive grant program to encourage the development and implementation of performance-based compensation systems.

CONCLUSION

Teacher quality is integral to the success of No Child Left Behind, and improving the quality of instruction is the key strategy of the President's High School Initiative. This means the Department will continue to sharpen its focus on ensuring that principals and teachers have the skills, data, and research-based methods needed to raise student achievement and implement rigorous curricula. The President's 2006 request fully reflects this focus, and I sincerely hope your final 2006 appropriation does the same.

I will be happy to take any questions you may have.

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