So with these four measures; saving Social Security, strengthening Medicare, establishing the USA accounts, supporting long-term care, we can begin to meet our generation’s historic responsibility to establish true security for 21st century seniors.

Now, there are more children, from more diverse backgrounds, in our public schools that any time in our history.  Their education must provide the knowledge and nurture the creativity that will allow our entire nation to thrive in the new economy.

Today we can say something we couldn’t say six years ago.  With tax credits and more affordable student loans, with more work-study grants and more Pell Grants, with education IRAs, the new hope Scholarship tax cut that more than five million Americans will receive this year, we have finally opened the doors of college to all Americans.

With our support, nearly every state has set higher academic standards for public schools and a voluntary national test is being developed to measure the progress of our students.  With over $1 billion in discounts available this year, we are well on our way to our goal of connecting every classroom and library to the Internet.

Last fall, you passed our proposal to start hiring 100,000 new teachers to reduce class size in the early grades.  Now I ask you to finish the job.

You know our children are doing better.  Sat scores are up.  Math scores have risen in nearly all grades.  But there’s a problem.  While our fourth-graders out performed their peers in other countries in math and science, our eighth-graders are around average, and our 12th-graders rank near the bottom.  We must do better.

Now each year the national government invests more than $15 billion in our public schools.  I believe we must change the way we invest that money to support what works and to stop supporting what does not work.

First, later this year I will send to Congress a plan that for the first time holds states and school districts accountable for progress and rewards them for results.  My Education Accountability Act will require every school district receiving federal help to take the following five steps: 

First, all schools must end social promotion.

Now, no child, no child should graduate from high school with a diploma he or she can’t read.  We do our children no favors when we allow them to pass from grade to grade without mastering the material.  But we can’t just hold students back because the system fails them.

So my balanced budget triples the funding for summer school and after-school programs to keep a million children learning.  Now, if—­if you doubt this will work, just look at Chicago, which ended social promotion and made summer school mandatory for those who don’t master the basics.  Math and reading scores are up three years running with some of the biggest gains in some of the poorest neighborhoods.  It will work, and we should do it.