Contact: Lindsey Kozberg
(202) 401-3026

Speaker Frequently Deviates from Prepared Text

I want to thank the Association of American Publishers for hosting this summit.

I would like to talk for a few minutes about our progress in improving student performance and then comment on the role that math and math publishers can play in these efforts.

Back in January, President Bush made education his highest priority and laid out a plan to change the culture of education in America. His plan was based on four pillars: accountability for results, local control and flexibility, expanded parental choice, and doing what works based on scientific research.

Under his leadership, the members of Congress came together in a bipartisan spirit, and passed his bill by large majorities. The vote totals were the kind you normally see on resolutions honoring Mother's Day: 91-8 in the Senate, and 384-45 in the House. Now the bills have gone to a conference, where Members of the House and Senate are working to resolve their differences and produce a final bill to send to President Bush.

While it horrified all of us, the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon did not make any of the work that all of us do for America's children less important.

We should not feel bad about pressing forward with our reforms at every level. Indeed, since the attacks, President Bush, Senator Kennedy, Mr. Boehner, Senator Gregg, Mr. Miller, and the other education leaders in Congress have reaffirmed their determination to finish the bill this year. Just last week, the conference committee made substantial progress.

The four pillars of the president's plan have many implications, but I want to focus on the fourth pillar, because it affects what you do so directly: doing what works based on scientific research.

As we have talked about this fourth pillar, our focus to date has been on reading.

For years, two camps fought each other over the best way to teach reading. The phonics camp and the whole language camp exchanged criticism that often focused on the motives of the other side, rather than the substance in question. In this administration, we weren't interested in demonizing people, so we turned to the recent discoveries of science as a guide.

Scientists have done extensive work on studying how children learn to read. They've taught us that even very young children can begin to develop pre-reading skills. They showed us the value of phonemic awareness in developing language skills. They discovered the cognitive shelf, which makes it much easier to learn to read before the third grade than after.

President dent Bush's reforms are based on this research. For example, President Bush's Reading First program offers $5 billion over five years to school districts with the goal of ensuring that every child learns to read by the third grade. Reading First promotes teaching methods scientifically proven to be effective. The conference committee has agreed to include Reading First, which is great news for America's children.

We'd like to do something similar for mathematics. The exception is that we're hoping to avoid another bitter battle. Star Wars had a great sequel, but the Reading Wars doesn't need one.

To make this progress quickly and without a battle, we need to engage our best researchers in research on how children learn math, and how instruction can be improved. We need to study how young children learn arithmetic and simple mathematical concepts, as well as how older children learn more rigorous math. And we need to take the next step to make sure teachers are trained in the best methods we find, that materials support those methods, and that our classrooms are used to bring these proven methods to students.

Where young children are concerned, their parents and other adults should introduce early math skills like counting and simple concepts like "more," "less," and "half."

Parents can integrate these lessons in their daily routine. For example, cut a stick of butter in half, and show how two halves make a whole. Making children comfortable with these concepts prepares them to learn arithmetic. Facility with numbers is a key part of early childhood cognitive development. Early practice with numbers prepares children for success in school.

ond thing we need to do is to adjust our expectations for what is taught to whom.

Right now, our schools presume that algebra, geometry, and trigonometry are courses for high school students bound for four-year colleges. We need to expand this franchise.

These math courses are essential to being an informed consumer and a productive worker in our knowledge economy.

We need to develop effective strategies for helping all students to learn these subjects successfully. This will require research as well, because our teaching methods have been developed through years of practice with college-bound students. We cannot assume that doing what we have always done will be the best approach.

Our success in teaching algebra, geometry, and trigonometry to more students will depend on the quality of our teachers' knowledge and training, and the quality of materials they use in the classroom.

Publishers, of course, are critical to the quality of materials. You should also work with the researchers. In fact, we should all work together to develop a rigorous understanding of how children learn math and optimal methods for teaching it. We need a dialogue in which teachers tell publishers and researchers which parts of textbooks are easiest to use, researchers tell teachers and publishers which methods will help students retain material, and publishers use this information to improve each edition of a textbook.

Math lessons in each grade should build on the lessons of the last one and prepare students for the next grade.

In many American schools, a student can essentially study arithmetic for eight years in a row, and then arrive at high school unprepared to learn high school math. As publishers, you can work with the Office of Educational Research and Improvement at the Department of Education and other researchers to ensure that middle school math courses build on arithmetic and fully prepare students for high school.

Using research and doing what works will prepare schools for accountability. The president's plan calls for each state to create clear and rigorous standards for what students should know and be able to do. Each state would design tests aligned with these standards to measure student achievement.

For math, states would test students annually in grades 3 through 8. This will help to ensure that students are making progress in elementary and middle school, and that they are well prepared for a challenging program of high school math.

The new knowledge economy can be unsettling for some people. It certainly changes the way Americans work. But our response to it should be to raise our standards, improve student performance, and give every high school graduate the ability to read, write, reason, and calculate at a proficient level.

We should prepare every graduate for a world of more choices, more thinking, and more engagement-at work, at home, and at play.

Every member of the education community, including educators, researchers, and publishers, has a role to play in helping our nation to adjust to these new challenges.

We are improving reading instruction and we can do the same with math. By working together, we can offer schools real, proven ways to teach math skills so that students will understand them, retain them, and be prepared to use them for the rest of their lives. That, after all, is why we are in this business. Just as technology constantly improves to make people's lives easier, education should constantly improve so people can make sense of their world and participate more fully. Each of us has a role to play, and the time to start is now.

Thank you.

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