Hello Philadelphia! Hello HBCU family!

Thank you, Sierra, for the kind introduction. Let’s give it up for all the White House HBCU Scholars here today.

It’s great to be here in the City of Brotherly Love.

The 46th President of the United States is on his way, but first let me first thank our White House Initiative on HBCUs – led by the incomparable Dr. Dietra Trent – for assembling another stellar conference.

At the Department of Education, we love ourselves some Dr. Trent! She is a fierce fighter for HBCUs, and she is not so shy about telling me that Hampton is the place to be... is that true? Alright, I don’t want to start anything.

Dietra is a trusted partner to you, to me, and to our administration’s goal to lift up our amazing HBCUs.

To the college presidents in this room: you are some of the finest leaders in all of higher education.

I’ve gotten to know many of you over the past three and half years. Your partnership is deeply appreciated.

I’ve leaned on many of you, in good times and bad -like when we had to talk about the F-word. You know, FAFSA!

Some of you are even on my speed dial – and when i saw you today you didn’t even flinch! I appreciate that!

The theme of this year’s conference is Raising the Bar: Where Excellence and Opportunity Meet. As Secretary, I’ve thought a lot about what excellence in higher education means.

To me, excellence is about more than how big your endowment is, or where you stand in some arbitrary rankings, or how many applicants you turn away each year.

To me, excellence starts with how you show up for your students. I’ll give you an example.  Do we have any Clark Atlanta Panthers in the house?

Let me tell you a story about a former Clark Atlanta student, one of our distinguished HBCU scholars: Kemryn Lawrence.

Kemryn was in her senior year and excited to graduate. She had already completed her biology major and all the required core classes, except for one.

So, she signed up – only to find out she was the only student in the whole school to register for the course that semester.

This worried her. You see, Kemryn had a sister who went to a different college. A PWI. And when her sister was the only student to enroll in a class, it got canceled and she wasn’t able to graduate on time.

Kemryn was afraid the same thing was about to happen to her. But it didn’t happen.

Why? Because her HBCU had her back.

Instead of canceling the course, her professor offered to teach it one-on-one. They called it “tea-time.” Once a week, they met in a tiny faculty office and went through the material over cups of tea.

That May, when Kemryn walked across the graduation stage, she made a promise to herself.  

She promised that no matter where she went in life, she would strive to live by that professor’s example— to always go the extra mile for those around her.

Friends, I don’t know the name of the course, I don’t know the name of the professor.  But can we give it up for this extraordinary educator?

This story embodies what makes HBCUs excellent.

HBCUs go the extra mile for their students. And that’s why the Biden-Harris administration has gone the extra mile for our HBCUs!

HBCUs have produced 40% of all Black engineers, 50% of all Black teachers, 70% of Black doctors, 80% of Black judges in America. Not to mention 100% of our nation’s Black women vice presidents!

This administration has invested more in HBCUs and their students than any other in history – over $16 billion. That's 16 billion, with a B! 

The impact of these funds is far-reaching, from the emergency aid that helped 450,000 HBCU students stay enrolled during the pandemic, to a new federal grant for Research & Development infrastructures and facilities at HBCUs and MSIs, because we need you to get the big contracts!

There's also record funding for teacher preparation programs. I visited one with 50 Black male teachers at Bowie State!

And this President has elevated HBCUs with a slew of new partnerships across the federal government, from the Department of Commerce to the Pentagon to NASA and beyond.

When you compare that to the photo ops and pandering of another administration—we are reminded—they not like us!

But this administration isn’t just raising the bar for the students you serve today. We’re raising the bar for the students you’ll serve tomorrow.

President Biden asked me – a teacher who grew up speaking Spanish at home in an economically-disadvantaged community – to be Secretary of Education at a moment of crisis.

At the time, COVID was still claiming thousands of lives daily. More than half of the nation’s public schools were still closed. And the opportunity and achievement gaps that still plague our education system were growing even wider. 

President Biden responded with the largest single federal investment in public education, ever. We delivered $130 billion in American Rescue Plan funds to our K-12 schools, plus another $2 billion for high-poverty districts through maintenance of equity.

These funds helped make it possible to reopen all our schools for in-person learning in nine months.

But we didn’t just reopen. We made real gains.

We equipped schools not just with the funding – but with the best strategies – for accelerating learning.

Today, we know: those investments paid off.

After years of decline, in 2023 we saw the single greatest leap in student achievement since 2009. And in reading from 2022-2023, black students outperformed their white counterparts in growth.

Real commitment, real results!

This just goes to show you: we KNOW how to Raise the Bar in education if we can exercise the political will to do so!

We also know students do better when they’re fully supported by their schools.

A few weeks ago, I held a town hall with high schoolers in Detroit. The message was clear: this generation wants us to end the stigma around mental health in our Black and Brown communities!

For far too long, we’ve had a system that only responds to trauma after the damage is done.   I call that an emergency room model of mental health care support. It’s too late.  

This doesn’t help learning. All it does is accelerate the school-to-prison pipeline.

Here again, we've raised the bar. Thanks to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, we’re investing $2 billion to prevent violence, build positive school cultures, and prepare 14,000 new mental health providers to work in our schools.

This extends to more restorative justice practices and better trauma-informed care for our students.

We need HBCUs to help us meet this challenge –just as we need you to help us prepare more teachers of color. Our teaching profession should be as beautifully diverse as our classrooms.

The science is clear. Teachers of color have a positive impact in the classroom. Yet today, despite over half of American schoolchildren identifying as people of color, just one-in-five teachers do so. That’s unacceptable.

¡No puedes ser lo que no ves! You cannot be what you cannot see.

That’s why we’re creating new, affordable pathways into the teaching profession.

Name another profession where you have to work four months for free before you can work for pay? Well, we normalized that for teachers. And then we wonder why there is a shortage. We wonder why we don’t have enough Black and Brown educators.

In this administration, we want student teachers to earn while they learn. We call that teacher apprenticeships. And I’m proud that we’ve grown the number of states with teacher apprenticeship programs from 0 to 43 in less than four years!

Now we have a chance at better recruitment.

And after languishing unfunded since 2008, President Biden won the first-ever funding for the Hawkins program so our HBCUs and MSIs can train more teachers of color.

We also know that teachers make 26% less than people with similar degrees in other professions. That’s not right so we did something about it.

We worked with Governors, legislators and state and district leaders to elevate the profession.  And we also backed that with some money.

As a result, more than 30 states have increased salaries in the last three years. Since President Biden took office, teacher pay is up nearly 10 percent nationwide!

We also fixed the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, approving nearly $70 BILLION in debt relief for nearly one million teachers, social workers, and other public servants across America.

We’re making strides, but let’s be real. 

Educational opportunity remains far too tied to race, place, and income in this country.

This kind of educational redlining hurts our competitiveness at a time when our country is more diverse than ever, our world is more competitive than ever, and nurturing all our talent matters more than ever.

If overcoming these challenges weren’t tough enough, we have forces in this country trying to gut public education and take us backwards.

We see it in the efforts to ban books, silence educators, and whitewash history. We see it in elected officials that got over $1 million in debt relief working to block 10K in debt relief for their own constituents. We see it in those who would rather protect assault weapons than protect the lives of children.

We see it in the Supreme Court’s disastrous ruling on affirmative action. And we see it in this toxic effort to attack diversity, equity, and inclusion.

I remember speaking at a university for a commencement and the President had to scrub the word “equity” from my bio.  He didn’t want trouble with his Governor.  

What kind of nonsense is that? He was a great college President but faced a hostile environment.

Well, let me ask you a question.

If you don’t stand for D-E-I, if you don’t stand diversity, equity, and inclusion, then what DO you stand for?

You stand for division, inequity, and exclusion! That’s right – you stand for D-I-E.

And that actually makes sense, because this great experiment of American democracy will live or die according to our ability as a people to embrace the beauty of our diversity.

That beautiful diversity is the strength of our HBCUs.

That beautiful diversity is what makes us competitive as an economy, strong as a society, and exceptional as a nation on the world stage.

Despite our imperfections, or the shameful parts of our history, name another country where a goofy little Puerto Rican kid from a poor neighborhood can rise up to advise the President on how to Raise the Bar for 65 million students.

Better yet, name another country where the daughter of Black and Indian immigrants can graduate from an HBCU, a public law school, and rise up to serve as the first woman Vice President! 

The best of America is in this room! Let’s rise up! 

Let’s rise up like our brothers and sisters before us. Let’s rise up in honor of those who sacrificed for us. Let’s rise up and keep alive the dreams of those endured a hell of a lot more than us.

Let’s do like Bob Marley instructed us, and “get up, stand up, don’t give up the fight!”