SECRETARY ROD PAIGE: Senator, thank you for that warm introduction. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's a great pleasure to be here. Governor, thank you for coming. I know you have a lot of things on your schedule today, but to stop by is very special, thank you.

Governor Hickel or should I say Secretary Hickel, I want to thank you for being out today. You've done a lot of good things for this great state. And thank you for the support of our President.

I'd like to thank Carol Comeau for her leadership as Superintendent of Anchorage School District. (Applause) She and I have a special bond. We know about this superintendent business, you know, you're going to heaven, Carol. All superintendents are going to heaven. They've had their share of bad luck. Thank you for the good job you're doing. And it's really quite in some the roughest job in America, but you do it proud.

Is Ramey Brooks here? Stand up, Ramey. You are America's hero. Let's give this young man a real big round of applause. (Applause) Of course I've heard a lot about you. I've read a lot in my briefing papers about you, but the Governor last night gave me more insight, much deeper insight into you. And I have even a greater appreciation now. You may have come in second in the Iditarod, but you are first in our heart. You're first in our heart for caring a message of No Child Left Behind all across that race. Thank you for that. (Applause)

Joe, thank you for hosting us. We really appreciate the is opportunity to get together and have some dialogue and to meet each other.

It's a great pleasure to be back in the last frontier. You know I'm from Houston, Texas. I confess with you that it was a great pride for Texans to say they were the largest state. And then along comes Alaska, five times as big as the Lone Star State. We're just going to have to adjust to that and we will. You wear that banner well, so congratulations.

I've had occasion to visit Alaska a couple of times before. And I know this truly wonderful part of America a little bit. In fact, I still remember my first visit. I wrote a card back to a friend on that card I said you can't believe how clear the sky is and how clear the water is here. And the air, you can even breathe air by seeing it. I said this must be what God meant the world to be like before we messed it up. So thank you for the great stuff that you're doing here.

We Texans live by some fast rules. And I'll share a couple of them with you. First one is don't squat if you got your spurs on. Another one is never kick a cow chip on a hot day. And the third one is never miss a good chance to shut up. And this is the one I'm going to use today, okay, so I'll be brief. But there are a couple of things I do want to share with you.

First of all, I want you to know more about the President of the United States of America. This gentleman is passionately committed to educating every child in America. This is not new for him. This is not something he dreamed up when he decided to run for the Presidency. If you look at me now you can tell that I'm more a part of his father's generation than his, so I've known him for years even when he was not quite a presidential as he is right now. And even then education was a passion for them. The first group that he met with expressing his interest to run for the governor's chair in Texas was with teachers. And his first commitment as Governor of Texas was to work on the Texas Accountable System and Education System of Texas.

It would surprise no one who knew him when he became President that the first activity from the second day in office was an educational proposal that he put before the Congress and asked the Congress to undergo a vigorous and bipartisan debate over the principles contained in that proposal. Congress did and the result was the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.

Now this act is an expression of the idea that since 1965 the original ESEA of which No Child Left Behind is a reauthorization of. The original SEA and the subsequent reauthorization have brought us to where we are now. And where we are now is that two out of three of our fourth graders can't read proficiently. Thirty percent of our college freshmen arrive on their campuses of universities in need of remediations, and universities are spending money remediating. About a third of our fourth rural and urban fourth graders can't read even at the basic level. So the President knew something had to be done. So this act, the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 is an expression by the Congress and by the President that what we've done so far isn't sufficient.

Now there's much to celebrate about America's education, because there's hours of excellence all across our nation. And these hours of excellence are great schools because you have great principals and great teachers and great superintendents and PTO and PTA people there. But it is insufficient for us to go around now celebrating some of our children getting a great education. That may have been sufficient sometime ago in an agrarian age, but now with our ability to deliver satellites to the skies easily as our newspaper boy used to deliver newspapers to our front door in the morning that's insufficient. We've got elevate the level of literacy in this country. And we can.

And so the President asks for a big shift, and this is a simple shift, let us shift from educating some of the children well to educating all of the children well. And when we say no child is to be left behind this is not a statement of power of sentimentality, this is a expectation of a great nation. And focus on that, no child, whether this child is in Alaska or in New York, whether this child is an honor student or an IDEA student, whether this child speaks English or Spanish. No child.

Now did the Congress write a law that could take into consideration every particular idiosyncratic circumstance in the United States of America? Of course not. We have to adjust and balance and flex and move to make sure that we can cover all this because have a very diverse country. Fifty states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. They all have got their own idea of how to do things. So when we meet with each state our job is to work with the state, respect the great work that they've done realizing that the people in that want to have an excellent education system just as well as we do. And so our job is to together bring to bear the congressional intent, merge it with the great work of the various states, and develop a plan that educates all of our children, that leave no children behind, and that creates an education system in America that is worthy of a great nation. That's our job.

Now if you've got in mind the bureaucratic stilts uncaring Department of Education and federal Agency that you might have in your mind forget that. This is the new United States Department of Education. Our role is to be partners with the states, not to dictate and micromanage. This does not mean we don't have a federal law to obey. I took a pledge to obey the law. And there is a law called No Child Left Behind Act. My job is to make it a just and make it worth with the various states respecting what is going on in the various states.

And so with that I accept this great honor of visiting your great state. I'm sorry Senator Ted Stevens couldn't be here because he gave me some great insight into how things are here. I'm deeply appreciative of the invitation. And, Senator, thank you for being with me and kind of keeping me on track and giving me more insight into the various details that we have here. And I look forward to seeing and experiencing the challenges that you face here that are peculiar to your state just as we look forward to dealing with some other states that have various situations that were specific to them.

The whole answer is problem solving. This is what this is about. And the reason we've got to work together to solve these problems is because the children that we have in our great states need us to be mature about this. The No Child Left Behind Act is a wonderful opportunity for us together to solve some of these problems. It provides the framework for change and it provides a ton of money. If Congress approves the President's proposal for budget it would raise the discretionary spending for the Department of Education to $53.1 billion, that would be at historic levels.

Ladies and gentlemen, that would be $11 billion more than was available for this purpose before the President became President of the United States, so he's done two things. And that is funded these proposals with historical levels of funding. And secondly, provided the framework.

Now Congress has kind of given us a model on how to conduct ourselves. Four leaders in this were Senator Kennedy and Mr. Miller who were both Democrats, Senator Grey and Congressman Bainer (ph) who are both Republicans. Now before this bill they rarely spoke to each other kindly. But they found ways to overcome their political ideologies and to work together. And Congress wrote a bipartisan bill. The vote was pretty much like what you'd expect only if you had a proposal on Mother's Day. So then if they can get together and work this out I'm sure the rest of us can get together and work this out. And that's exactly what we intend to do. Thank you very much.