Today's report by the College Board provides more evidence that our educational system is leaving too many children behind, especially poor and minority students -- and that we have a long way to go to close the achievement gap among our students.

I'm heartened to see that more minority students are taking the SAT and setting their sights on college, but the achievement gap between white and minority students who took the SAT is both large and persistent. That kind of data cannot and must not be ignored.

The results announced today by the College Board also reveal troubling evidence of grade inflation in our nation's schools. Over the past 10 years, the percentage of high school seniors with A averages jumped 46 percent and high school grade point averages have increased steadily. Conversely, during the same period, SAT scores and 12^th grade performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress barely budged. If we want to prepare our young people to be active citizens, we must set high standards for them and measure their performance toward those standards -- not just move them along.

To prepare our children for their future and to close the achievement gap, we must have a strong, unbiased measure of the performance of every child every year. Although they present some interesting data for us to consider, SAT scores do not let us understand how students in each of our states are performing due to widely differing participation rates. They also cannot offer us an understanding of individual student growth and progress. Our children and our system deserve the benefit of tests that measure student achievement every year, and I look forward to passage of President Bush's education plan so we can begin working with the states to develop quality tests that will measure student performance in core subjects.

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