11:00 A.M. EDT 
Real Audio of Briefing
MR. PRINCE: Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Washington Foreign Press Center. We are pleased to be able to welcome today on our podium four guests who will discuss the work of the Third Inter-American Education Ministerial, which will take place in Mexico City August 11th through 13th.
Our guests today are Ambassador John Maisto, United States Permanent Representative to the Organization of American States and U.S. Coordinator for the Special Summit of the Americas; Lenore Yaffee Garcia, Director of the United States Department of Education's International Affairs Staff; John Gibbons, Director of Public Affairs, Department of Education; and David Evans, Chief of the Education Team for Latin America and the Caribbean, United States Agency for International Development.
Ambassador Maisto and Ms. Garcia will have opening statements, and after that all four will be glad to take your questions. I would ask that you limit your questions to the subject of education in the America.
Ambassador Maisto.
AMBASSADOR MAISTO: Thank you very much. Good morning. First of all, thank you for coming today. The reason that we are here is to inform you about the Education Ministerial in Mexico. Secretary of Education Rod Paige will lead the U.S. delegation to this Third OAS Inter-American Education Ministerial, which takes place in Mexico City from the 11th to the 13th.
This is particularly significant. This is the first time a U.S. Secretary of Education attends one of the hemispheric ministerial meetings on education. And it is important to point out that there are other very -- that the other members of the delegation include Jose Fourquet, the U.S. Executive Director to the Inter-American Development Bank -- he will cover the multilateral side in the inter-American system; Adolfo Franco, the USAID Assistant Administrator for Latin America and the Caribbean, who handles the bilateral side, as it were; and George Atkinson, the Secretary of State's Advisor on Science and Technology.
As the newly appointed U.S. Government Representative to the Organization of American States, I am really very honored to serve on this delegation. Secretary Paige's presence really reflects the very high priority that the Bush Administration places on education and our relationship with Latin America and the Caribbean.
This meeting is a follow-up to the 2001 Quebec City Summit of the Americas where leaders of the hemisphere made a commitment to improve education throughout the region. Since then, we have continued to share the best practices and have worked together on programs to improve education achievement.
President Bush has made education a priority through his "No Child Left Behind" initiative. He shares this commitment to education with many leaders of Latin America and the Caribbean who truly understand that education is critical to our hemisphere's prosperity, in addition to addressing the real world needs of people.
So we are very much looking forward with all our neighbors to delving into the education issues in Mexico City. And I want to point out that this conference is going to focus on the educational challenges facing the hemisphere, on how to improve access to quality education and how to ensure funding for education. Every government has a budget for education. The issue isn't amount of money. The issue is using money in the best way to achieve the result that you want, to achieve quality education.
There are some very ambitious goals in the education area that we have set forth for ourselves through the summit processes. These include achieving universal literacy and access to primary education by the year 2010, along with achieving 100 percent primary school completion rate by that date, 75 percent secondary school education rate, and elimination of gender disparities in primary and secondary education by the year 2005. That is quite an agenda.
The big question is how do you take the resources that you have available and really utilize them to their utmost. The issue is quality.
And to meet these goals, these ministerials have created action plans that identify education priorities and summit initiatives for the hemisphere. So how do you deal with quality education? In a variety of ways. There's the area of improving teacher training; improving science education and access to technology, especially information technology; making education relevant to the labor market; improving access and quality of higher education; supporting greater decentralization of the education system; supporting education indicator projects to measure progress; expanding opportunities for teacher and student and administrator exchanges; increasing availability of teaching materials; and strengthening education management skills.
A lot of work has already been done, and I would leave it to others to elaborate on that, both multilaterally and bilaterally. President Bush launched in Quebec something called "The Centers for Teachers' Excellence," which with U.S. economic assistance money to the tune of some $16 million have already begun in three areas of Latin America.
There is a center for retraining teachers and providing them with the most modern skills: one in the Caribbean, in Jamaica; one in Central America, in Honduras; and the third in the Andes, in Peru. They're up and running, and it's really quite exciting.
There is also something called Civitas that focuses on civil education. It's a civic education exchange program and it runs out of California and it's a Department of Education project, and I'll leave it to the Department of Education to get into. But it's really quite exciting because it flows both ways: civic education for democracy is very, very important work. It's grassroots work. And it doesn't go just one way. We're learning things from Latin Americans at the same time through the Civitas project.
Then there's a program called the E-Business Fellowship Program that the U.S. Department of Commerce runs that focuses on information technology training, bringing people from Latin America and the Caribbean to the United States to participate in learning the best practices in the IT area.
So it's an exciting time. I'm looking forward to it. And I will turn the podium over to Lenore Garcia, who is the Director of the International Affairs Staff of the U.S. Department of Education.
MS. GARCIA: Thank you, Ambassador Maisto. Good morning. It's a pleasure to be here on behalf of the U.S. Department of Education.
Secretary Paige is very pleased that he will lead the U.S. delegation to the Third Education Ministerial Meeting in Mexico City next week. Leading this delegation is a part of the Secretary's commitment to a broader international role for the U.S. Department of Education so that we in the United States can learn from the experiences and education of others, and so that our students learn more about the rest of the world.
In the United States, as in other countries of the Americas, we face major challenges in educating all of our children. In the U.S., despite very significant increases in spending on education in recent decades, tests show that student achievement in critical subjects like mathematics and reading remain flat; that is, there has not been significant improvement in what students know in these areas.
The gap between the performance of low-income students and those who are more well-off persist in the United States, as it does in many other parts of the world. And this is despite the fact that every child in our country is guaranteed access to a free education through the secondary level.
In early 2002, to close this achievement gap, President Bush signed into law a sweeping education reform law called "No Child Left Behind." And for those of you who are interested, we have press kits that include materials on No Child Left Behind in English, a parent guide, and also materials in Spanish.
No Child Left Behind, the law, has these fundamental principles. First, school systems should be held accountable for results, and in education the results that matter are whether students are learning or not. And I might add that to know whether students are learning, we need data, we need test scores, we need information that we believe about how they are doing. One of the things that we expect to discuss with our colleagues from other hemispheric countries next week at the ministerial meeting is how we can get better data on the results of education in all of our countries.
A second principle of No Child Left Behind is that parents and local communities need to have a say in schooling. Governments are important, but governments are not enough in education. And since we have a decentralized education system in the United States, this is an area in which we have a lot of experience that we can share with our colleagues in the hemisphere.
Third principle, we need to invest in quality. As Ambassador Maisto said just a moment ago, money is important but it's not enough; we need to invest our money in quality. That means we invest in methods that research has proven work to raise student achievement, and we need to make sure that we have a qualified teacher in every classroom.
If you look at educational improvement programs in other countries of the Americas, you will see many of the same challenges and ideas for change. This is why it is helpful for ministers of education and other key policymakers to have the chance to compare challenges and compare solutions. As the Americas come closer together, it is in our interest to see the prosperity and quality of life of our neighbors improve.
Education is primarily a domestic endeavor, so it is up to individual countries to make wise policy decisions and investments, but we can learn from one another. Coming together also helps us to marshal the political will to keep a spotlight focused on education, to keep the resources appropriated, and to marshal public support for change.
We are looking forward to the ministerial meeting and to your questions. Thank you.
MR. PRINCE: Thank you. Please remember to wait for the microphone to come to you and please state your name and the name of your news organization.
QUESTION: Thank you. Sonia Schott, Globovision Venezuela.
The Venezuelan Government is going to introduce also reform in the educational system with the help of the Government of Cuba. How to deal with that? Is this going to be an issue in the next meeting in Mexico, or are you going to work together in the education system in Venezuela with the Cuban system too?
Thank you.
AMBASSADOR MAISTO: This ministerial that flows from the Quebec Summit is going to focus on quality education in the democratic setting that was set forth in Quebec and was codified, if you choose, in the Inter-American Democratic Charter -- this.
All of these issues are covered in the Inter-American Democratic Charter. That is the, if you choose, the political infrastructure for dealing with these issues in the hemispheric setting. And the ministerial will focus on quality in education and it will focus on democratic values and democratic principles and decentralization and freedom of expression, and I think the educational term is we're talking about critical -- what is it in education that they always talk about? Critical -- oh, there's a term. Teaching children to think, developing options.
MS. GARCIA: Critical thinking.
AMBASSADOR MAISTO: Pardon? Critical -- critical thinking in education, which is, in primary/secondary education full participation not only in democratic systems but also in the modern society. This is what the ministerial in Mexico is all about.
QUESTION: Ruben Barrera, Notimex, Mexico.
Ambassador, you said that one of the focuses of this meeting isn't going to be about money, how much money governments can spend on education, but rather on quality. I wonder, since I guess you're going to look, among other things, at those education systems or program that have proved to be a success -- the fact that Cuba has one of the highest literacy rates across the continent, doesn't that preclude in some way the governments gathering in Mexico from the opportunity to look at examples from Cuba and trying to apply those systems or those programs in other countries and have maybe better stories than the one that we have?
AMBASSADOR MAISTO: If you're going to talk about the Cuban system of education, you have to talk about the political system that exists in Cuba. It's a Marxist-Leninist system and it's every -- all the institutions in Cuba, as far as I understand, are geared to that political-philosophical approach.
In the Western Hemisphere, we have focused on democracy, democracy and free, credible institutions, on education systems that develop free thinking, critically -- critical thinking students to participate in democratic societies. We believe in the democratic system. We believe it can be perfected. And that's what this ministerial is all about, for perfecting, making better, the educational systems that we have.
So the philosophical -- the political-philosophical basis for education, as summed up in the Inter-American Democratic Charter, is really the point of departure. We stand by it and we really don't believe that a Marxist-Leninist type of educational system is what people in the hemisphere are really interested in.
So it's our job, everybody's job, to do better in education, and we're all committed to it. And there is an awful lot of success to point to. For example, there is a program in Chile that has really done quite remarkable work. Mexico has a system of satellites that is being used in education that is doing a very good job. All of these are going to be explored and experiences are going to be interchanged, but the basis is going to remain exactly the same.
QUESTION: Jesus Esquivel, Proceso, a Mexican magazine.
Ambassador Maisto, I want to follow up the question on Cuba even though that you said the meeting in Mexico is going to focus on democracy, too. But doesn't it call the attention of other leaders in Latin America that Cuba has so far the best education quality system in the hemisphere, even though you say that it's more important to have another way of thinking in education.
But you mentioned the case of Mexico, for example, and President Fox has been pursuing in the last two years his education system. This week, in the Technology Institute of Mexico City, students called his attention to the fact that professionals in Mexico are very poor and they don't have jobs, so it seems that this democratic education system, different than Marxist system in Cuba, is not giving the results in the case of Mexico that President Fox was expecting it to.
So is it wrong to take a look at the Cuban education system, just as an example of better quality education?
AMBASSADOR MAISTO: I think that the performance of the Cuban economy speaks for itself. And the performance of the Mexican economy, all the economies, speak for themselves. I would venture to say that the Mexican economy is doing much, much, much, much better than the Cuban economy across the board.
QUESTION: (Off mike) to have an excellent education system in Cuba, for example?
AMBASSADOR MAISTO: It depends upon your definition of excellence. If your definition of excellence is a system that has a political-philosophical background of Marxism-Leninism that produces people who, yes, they can read and write, but what do they read and write?
QUESTION: There are some Americans who prefer to go to Cuba to have a medical procedure because they know that doctors are well-prepared, than to go to Mexico, for example, the case where you're talking about.
AMBASSADOR MAISTO: We're talking about education.
QUESTION: Education. Education for medical schools.
AMBASSADOR MAISTO: No, no. Today we're talking about education. And I will go back to the very basic point that the main issue of what we are dealing with in this ministerial is quality education. No one is satisfied in this hemisphere, no one is satisfied in this country, that we have achieved the type of quality in education that we want.
But let me ask you this: How many of you would like to have your children educated in the Cuban education system?
QUESTION: (Off mike.)
AMBASSADOR MAISTO: Well, I ask you that question. And if you ask -- ask the average Latin American that question. Ask the average American.
So I think that the focus has to be on quality education in a democratic setting, and I submit to you that a democratic setting is very, very important in education as opposed to a totalitarian approach to education.
QUESTION: I just want to make something clear. Is it possible to say that the goal of this meeting is to find a particular solution for every country, or one solution for all the Latin American countries?
Thank you.
AMBASSADOR MAISTO: The objective of the -- and I think I'll say something and then I'll turn it over to you, Lenore. The objective is to proceed in the process of advancing the quality of education throughout the hemisphere, the quality of education across the board, and using resources, education resources, in a better way, in a more productive way, than we have been -- than we have been using.
And, Lenore, can I turn it over to you?
MS. GARCIA: Yes. The objective of this meeting is not to develop one standard of education or one curriculum or one approach for the entire hemisphere. We don't do that here in our country. We don't have one curriculum for the entire nation, that we expect that there will be innovation and methods of education that are appropriate to particular communities or states or, in this case, nations. And just as we in the United States would not expect to adopt the education system of any other country, because we have our own particular needs, we wouldn't expect any other country to adopt ours.
So the purpose is more to look at the successful experiences and the not-so-successful experiences of specific policies, specific programs, that different governments have attempted, look at the results of those policies and programs, and see if we can each learn something that we can incorporate into our own system.
MR. PRINCE: If there are no more questions, then we are finished. I would like to remind you that we have information materials in English and Spanish at the registration desk. Thank you very much for coming.
