Excerpt from remarks by U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings

Georgia Public Policy Foundation luncheon January 30, 2007

The Commerce Club - Atlanta, Georgia

In Atlanta, I very much appreciate the fact that you’ve made education a priority with your companies like IBM and Lockheed Martin. You know better than anyone that our schools have not really kept pace with the needs of this global marketplace and of your businesses. Across America … I hear this message from business leaders, from policy makers, and most especially from Moms and Dads.

I just recently had the chance to meet in Washington with another one of your great thinkers, our mutual friend Newt Gingrich, who has been speaking out for years about the role that education must play if we are to confront issues like poverty, crime, unemployment – in fact, Governor Bush used to say the same thing: the best criminal justice program was a sound educational system, the best juvenile justice program was a quality education system, and especially in our cities, we know that education is the way forward, absolutely. We agree that making America competitive is the most important thing our nation has before it.

Today, 90% of the fastest-growing jobs require post-secondary education. This is in a day and time when we nationally get about half of our African American students out of high school on time. So our workforce is very challenging. As you all know, this is not just an education issue; it is an economic development issue, a civic issue, a social issue, a national security issue, and it’s everybody’s issue. And that’s why I was so pleased when the President spoke of education in the State of the Union...

You all are already doing the things that are so important to improve our schools, like inventing and chartering new schools like Tech High – a charter school based on a proven model that works, whose motto is “No Excuses.” I love that. I think we all have to adopt the attitude that every child is worthy and can get a high quality education – not only can they, but they must. In building that charter school there, you thought about the needs of those students, and you thought about the needs of your community, and that’s why you all focus on those critical skills like math, science, technology, and leadership. Your students there take courses at the college level as well as high school work, and they will be well served, having had that kind of background. Tech High’s principal, Elisa Falco is here with us today. Where are you? There you are - so young! When she first became a teacher, Elisa noticed that a lot of good ideas were stifled within the education bureaucracy. She says, “You’d be voting and voting and voting, and totally losing sight of students.” But now as the charter school principal, she has the freedom to devote time, to devote personnel and resources to meet the students’ needs there at the Tech High charter.

The approach absolutely is working. At her school, nine out of ten are African-American, three out of four are from low income families. At the start of the school year only ten percent of ninth graders met minimum math standards, less than a third met minimum reading standards - but today, the school ranks first in the Atlanta school system, so let’s give Elisa a well-deserved hand.