Mrs. Laura Bush today paid tribute to a national commemoration of "Education For All Week," which began this week, the annual celebration of the United Nation's Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization's (UNESCO) initiative to make quality education and literacy universal. The celebration is a joint-effort of the U.S. Departments of State and Education.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings joined Mrs. Bush, who currently serves as the Honorary Ambassador for the Decade of Literacy, in heralding the importance of universal education for all, and called on the public and private sectors to become global partners in accelerating progress toward the goal. They noted that there are still more than 100 million children out of school around the world, of whom 58 million are girls.

Education for All Week is celebrated each year around the anniversary of the 2000 World Education Forum, known as the Dakar Framework, which set out six goals for achieving universal education around the globe. These are:

• Expanding early childhood care and education.
• Ensure free and compulsory primary education of high quality by 2015.
• Eliminating gender disparities in access to primary and secondary education by 2005 and achieving gender equality by 2015.
• Enhancing educational quality.
• Promoting learning and life skills programs for young people and adults.
• Expanding adult literacy by 50 percent by 2015.

In February, both Mrs. Bush and Secretary Spellings addressed UNESCO's Education for All conference held at Georgetown University. In her remarks, Mrs. Bush noted, "UNESCO members and partners are helping millions of children realize the advantages of education. The United States is proud to join 189 other UNESCO members in the mission of making education a reality for all the world's people."

At the same forum, Spellings cited the similarities between the No Child Left Behind Act and the Education For All campaign. "The No Child Left Behind Act and UNESCO's Education for All campaign complement each other—both place a special emphasis on opportunity for 'excluded and marginalized' populations, goals that all Americans can endorse," she said.

"Like freedom, education is worth fighting for," Spellings said. "Many of these efforts were once dismissed as unachievable—like the dream of Education for All. Today, 100 million more children attend school than in 1990, the year Education for All began. We cannot let up. We still have much work to do to reach the millions of children still denied access to schools."

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