The academic achievement gap between black youngsters and their white peers threatens to undo what black Americans have accomplished since the end of slavery, U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige said at the National Urban League conference yesterday.

Matt Freed/Post-Gazette
U.S. Education Secretary Rod Paige speaks yesterday at the Urban League conference -- "We have an educational emergency in the United States of America."

Paige, who is African American, said blacks had made great strides in many areas, even though "we were in slavery longer than we've been out of slavery."

"But all that we've accomplished is at risk if don't deal with this achievement gap," Paige said during a speech at the David L. Lawrence Convention Center, Downtown. "We have an educational emergency in the United States of America."

Paige's address followed that of President Bush at the Urban League conference. Both men hailed the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind legislation as being a key tool in helping to reduce the achievement gap between black and white students, a term that usually refers to the tendency of black youngsters to score lower overall on standardized tests than whites.

The federal law places new requirements on states for monitoring students' academic performance in public schools and establishes a series of consequences that schools face if they do not improve achievement. Also, school districts that do not comply with No Child Left Behind mandates face the loss of Title I funding.

Paige said he believed the increased accountability that the law places on states and school districts "is the best thing to happen to our children."

Bush and Paige also characterized the problem of black and low-income youngsters having lower scores on standardized tests as a civil rights issue, with the president laying part of the blame on the "soft bigotry" of low expectations.

"The un-American achievement gap is based on the premise that all children cannot learn," Paige said. "For me, it doesn't matter the child's ZIP code, their dialect or whether they have one parent or two. These children's achievement is not a product of their DNA. It's a product of our effort. ... Every child in American has a right to a quality education."

Paige made similar remarks during a meeting later yesterday with the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial board. But he was careful to point out that public education is primarily a state and local responsibility.

While federal officials are using federal funding as a carrot to influence public education policy, they don't plan to overstep the Constitution's limits on federal involvement, Paige told the editorial board.

Instead, Paige is promoting the act as a way of helping states and districts to set high academic standards, to determine what level of performance is acceptable and to assess student progress annually.

Paige maintained that people need to be able to measure what school districts are doing.

The No Child Left Behind Act is designed to make that possible, Paige told the editors.

"This is an accountability system," he said.