Bush Addresses Education in State of the Union Address

Forgive me for sending you this so late. Blogger.com was on the fiz.

Boy, was last week's State of the Union Address long. And Bush didn't talk about education until (nearly) the very end. Those of you who grew tired of the speech and changed the channel at about halfway point-or those who need a refresher course on Bush's future plans for our country's education-can read this transcript from the Washington Post.


BUSH: This is a dynamic world. Whether people want to recognize it or not, we're in a competitive world. Some will say, "It's so competitive, let's withdraw and protect ourselves."
That's not my attitude. My attitude is, it's competitive; let's get in a position where we can outcompete the rest of the world. And the most important place is going to be to make sure our kids have got the skills to fill the jobs of the 21st century. If our kids don't have those skills, those jobs will go somewhere else. And so, this is the initiative that I praised Lamar about. It's called the American Competitiveness Initiative. It basically says that we're going to focus on research, both in the public and private sector, to make sure that the technologies and skill base of our science and engineering community leads the world.

BUSH: It also recognizes that we've got to make sure our children have got math and science skills. By the way, that starts with making sure children can read. One of Laura's most important initiatives, inherent in the No Child Left Behind Act, is the absolute demand by our government that schools teach every single child how to read by third grade and remain at grade level throughout their entire public school career.

(APPLAUSE)

One of the ways to make sure that our children have got math and science skills that will give them the basis on which to compete -- and by the way, when you test our scores relative to other children, we're doing just fine in elementary school and we start slipping off in middle school and we're not doing worth a darn in high school.

And so one way to reverse that trend is to make sure our high school teachers have got the necessary skills to teach kids the skill sets to be able to compete.

And so we believe that we can help train 70,000 high school teachers to lead advanced placement courses in math and science. Advanced placement works. AP is a vital program. If you study your AP results here in Tennessee schools, you'll see it makes a lot of sense. We want AP programs to be available to children from all walks of life so that they have the skills necessary to compete.

We've got a plan to get 30,000 math and science professionals to teach in our classrooms. And we want to make sure, just like we do on No Child Left Behind, that we focus on math as well and we find math deficiencies early, we provide money to correct them. See, if you diagnose and don't correct, you're doing a child a disservice. If you don't diagnose, you're doing a child a disservice.

The best thing to do is what we're doing, is diagnose and solve problems early before they're too late. And that's what we're going to do in this very exciting initiative.

For those who want a transcript for the entire State of the Union Address, go to washingtonpost.com

Let's hope that Bush's plans for 2006 will work.