Thank you.

I want to thank the speakers from Jordan, Egypt, Pakistan, France and the United Kingdom for your testimony and dedication.

And I want to thank His Majesty King Abdullah, Education Minister Dr. Khaled Toukan, and the Jordanian people for their graciousness and commitment to education. I would also like to recognize and thank the first lady of the United States, Laura Bush, for attending the World Economic Forum. Her knowledge and passion are invaluable.

I also want to thank all of our G8 and regional partners for their dedication and foresight.

Jordan has become a true leader in education in the Middle East, implementing some of the region's most ambitious reforms. Your experience and counsel will be extremely valuable as this initiative moves forward.

This is the first meeting between the ministers of education of the Broader Middle East and North Africa region (BMENA) and the G8 countries. I am the first U.S. secretary of education to travel to Jordan. And I believe today's meaningful dialogue is a first step toward greater cooperation and progress in achieving educational opportunity for all.

Although we come from many nations, we share some things in common. We all share a passion for education and understand its critical importance. Not everyone is so blessed. In my own country, over one-third of American fourth-graders and one-quarter of our eighth-graders are not reading at what we have defined as the "basic" level on our most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. We also face a large educational achievement gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots." It's a challenge we all face in the global community.

It is because of the children that we are gathered here today. Education is a shared value among all our nations. And it is the key to progress and development—the development of a region, a nation and an individual life. We all want the very best future for our children and ourselves, and the very best way to do that is through literacy and education.

These lands of rich culture and ancient history are home to some of the fastest-growing populations of young people. Their ability to learn and succeed will determine not only your nations' economic success today but for future generations as well. One of the fruits of education is prosperity—having the ability to seize opportunities to excel in the global marketplace and thus to become prosperous.

Another benefit of education is political reform. Momentum for change is building in the region, as we have seen in the free and fair elections in the Palestinian territories, Iraq and Afghanistan. As President Bush has said, "Freedom is the only reliable path to peace and no one's liberty is expendable. Ultimately, human rights and human development depend on human liberty."

Recently I visited Afghanistan with first lady Laura Bush. We visited schools that are now teaching literacy, mathematics and history, reclaiming a nation's legacy. We toured the Women's Teacher Training Institute in Kabul and spoke to its students and teachers. They are quickly adapting to a freedom they thought they might never see.

A quality education provides citizens with the tools to participate fully in their society, to embrace its unique culture—and to appreciate the worth of other cultures, contributing to peace. A hopeful heart is one of the best antidotes to hatred and extremism.

The United States shares your commitment to support reform efforts that will bring about a brighter future for all children. That is why last June at Sea Island, we joined our G8 partners in committing to help the countries of the BMENA region implement education reforms and expand the reach of literacy to 20 million more people over the next decade. This must be a region-led effort, each individual nation determining its own priorities and needs. We're here at this ministerial to share ideas and set goals. I would note that UNESCO and the World Bank are already helping individual nations measure their progress.

At the Forum for the Future last December in Morocco, we reaffirmed our commitment to accomplish these ambitious goals. Last month, we participated in the rich discussion in Algiers that produced the literacy framework that is before us today.

And BMENA countries are actively involved in the global Education for All Initiative, which, like my country's No Child Left Behind law, seeks to extend the promise of education to all citizens.

Today, at this ministerial, we take the next step. We are addressing the critical success factors for reform, focusing on literacy and access, promoting equity and social inclusion, and ensuring education's quality and relevance.

I believe America's experiences can prove useful to this effort. Three-and-a-half years ago, President Bush signed our education reform effort, the No Child Left Behind Act. It is restoring high standards and accountability for teaching and learning to our classrooms.

These are critical success factors for reform. The ministerial's first roundtable topic is a vital step in this process. Without high standards for student learning, we cannot challenge our students to reach their potential. And without accountability, we cannot count on our education systems to encourage students to reach high standards. Accountability means using assessments to measure student progress and holding schools responsible for what students learn, and providing incentives and consequences for school success and failure.

The second topic is literacy and access. We applaud Algeria and Afghanistan's leadership on the Literacy Initiative to bring us a proposed Framework for Literacy Action upon which countries can develop action plans to meet the goal of ensuring that 20 million more people in the region become literate by 2015. In the U.S., we are using research to find out how children read and learn, then teaching them accordingly under our Reading First program. To date, nearly 100,000 Reading First teachers are helping more than 1.5 million children across my country become better readers. We understand that literacy is the fundamental skill on which all other learning depends.

The third topic focuses on equity and inclusion. In my country, we are making a special effort to teach those who were often left behind in the past, such as children from minority groups, children with disabilities and children from families with few financial resources. We are disaggregating their test scores—meaning separating them out by groups of students based on demographic and other characteristics—so we can follow their progress and get them the help they need. As a nation, we have come to terms with the fact that our education system has done a good job educating some students, but not others. Our reform efforts have been focused on helping them.

Like many of your countries, my nation faces a shortage of qualified teachers, especially in the most challenging neighborhoods and schools. We know from research that a good teacher, qualified in the subject he or she teaches, is one of the most critical factors in student achievement. So, that is what we have focused on. Under our Department of Education's Teacher-to-Teacher Initiative, educators learn the latest research and education technologies. And they learn from one another. We have set a goal for a qualified teacher in every classroom by the end of the next school year. Our schools are well on their way to reaching it.

Finally, to ensure education's relevance, discussed in the fourth roundtable, we are helping secondary students take advanced coursework so they get the skills they need to succeed at the next level, in college or the workforce. We are using technology to bring the world into our classrooms and to offer educational opportunities to help children overcome geographic isolation. For example, about one-third of our school districts offer distance learning. And we are taking steps to address the problem of students who quit school without graduating.

That we agree on education's importance is, in itself, a sign of progress. Decades ago education might have been viewed as a luxury or a privilege. Today, it is an imperative. Learning and literacy are critical to fostering cultural understanding among nations. And they are critical to economic growth and trade between nations.

Those who complete school will enjoy more opportunity in their lifetimes than those who do not, including the opportunity to give back to the country and region that made it possible. Here in Jordan, His Majesty King Abdullah saw that Jordanians were having trouble getting jobs because they lacked information technology skills. So he set out to solve the problem. The result was the Education Reform for a Knowledge Economy Initiative, which the U.S. government also is supporting.

The U.S. government's commitment in the BMENA region focuses on increasing equitable access to educational opportunities, improving the quality and relevance of education, improving literacy and strengthening workforce skills through an integrated approach.

The U.S. Agency for International Development supports scholarship programs; non-formal education activities; school construction and rehabilitation; early childhood programs; and programs in literacy, numeracy, and life skills. Our approach is to work on replicable pilot programs that model best practices in education on a small scale. These positive experiences tend to galvanize support for broader change and have the potential to impact the education system beyond the local environments in which the projects operate. Egypt's New School Program in Upper Egypt was a pilot that proved effective in increasing girls' enrollment. The lessons learned are being used by the ministry of education to scale up models of quality primary education with an emphasis on girls and learner-centered teaching methodologies.

The U.S. State Department's Middle East Partnership Initiative, or MEPI, and a South Asian regional pilot initiative work to improve access to education for all, as well as the quality of that education, by funding programs that provide the skills to succeed. Here in Jordan, MEPI partners with the Jordanian government in the development of Jordan Education Initiative (JEI) curricula. In other countries throughout the region, MEPI provides literacy training and internships to enable young women to develop skills, and it even offers an Arabic-translated library for elementary school students to develop independent reading skills.

Reaching out to the younger generation through the Partnerships for Learning Initiative, the Department of State's Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs has launched the first-ever high school exchange program for young men and women from broader Middle East countries, and it provided increased scholarship opportunities for undergraduates from under-served communities throughout the region.

President Bush's Millennium Challenge Account is also encouraging change across the region. This account links U.S. assistance to a nation's progress in education and other areas. To apply, for instance, a country must demonstrate that two-thirds of its young girls are completing primary school.

And my Department supports the teaching of Arabic and other languages of the BMENA region within the United States, to increase opportunities for Americans to learn about and understand the rich history and cultures of your countries. In addition, my Department launched a "Friendship Through Education" program to bridge understanding between students in Arabic nations and students in the United States. The program, made up of 10 non-profit organizations, such as the Peace Corps and UNICEF, works to build strong and lasting relationships between American children and those from other countries by helping them form "pen pals" online through e-mail and by establishing cultural exchanges.

Outside assistance and programs are helpful. But they are no substitute for day-to-day leadership in our own nations, America included. For many years, my own country looked the other way as education quality slipped and equality suffered. Yes, all American children were given a seat in the classroom. But many graduated without the skills to succeed in this challenging, fast-paced world, to live what my ancestors who immigrated to the shores of America a century ago called the "American Dream."

We continue to work hard, as you do, to turn it around, to broaden education's reach and deepen its impact, to teach young minds so they may one day lead free nations and lift them into the future.

Again, I thank you for this opportunity to be a part of this important exchange of ideas. We share more than just a respect for the transforming power of education. We also share a common purpose and values—the values of human dignity, democracy, economic opportunity and social justice.

The challenges of reform are great. But I am optimistic, and I can tell you that our president is as well.

By this work we are paying tribute to the rich literary, intellectual and cultural history of this region—its extraordinary inheritance of poetry, philosophy and the sciences, venerable history and sacred scripture.

And by this work we are helping to ensure that every woman, child and man in the BMENA region has the opportunity to tap into a rich legacy of learning and achieve his or her greatest potential.

Their success will be the region's success as well. Thank you.

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