The president marked the seventh anniversary of No Child Left Behind on Thursday with remarks at General Philip Kearny School in Philadelphia. It was his final policy address as president.
Beforehand, he and first lady Laura Bush visited a second-grade classroom where kids presented him with a flower bouquet and asked questions about his new home in Texas and about the number of bathrooms in the White House.
No Child Left Behind remains one of Bush's top domestic achievements, and he considers it vital to his legacy. Approved with strong bipartisan support in 2001, the school accountability law still has support from key Democrats, but it has grown deeply unpopular, and Obama has pledged to revamp it.
Bush said those who control its fate should "stay strong in the face of criticism."
"Because in weakening the law, you weaken a chance for a child to succeed in America," he said.
The law prods schools to improve test scores each year, so that every student can read and do math on grade level by the year 2014. Critics say the law's annual reading and math tests have forced other subjects like music and art from the classroom and that schools were promised billions of dollars that never showed up.
And they say the law is too punitive toward struggling schools; nearly 36 percent of schools failed to meet yearly progress goals in 2008, according to the Education Week newspaper.
That means millions of children are still a long way from reaching the law's ambitious goals.
Undeterred, Bush said the country will "absolutely" meet the goals. He spoke most strongly about keeping the law's testing requirements, and he dismissed the idea that teachers are forced to "teach to the test" at the expense of true learning.
His education secretary, Margaret Spellings, issued a report Thursday citing record test scores in several areas and gains across the board.
"No Child Left Behind is working for all kinds of students in all kinds of schools in every part of the country," Bush declared. "That is a fact."
In fact, students generally have made modest gains in reading and math under the law. And the high school dropout rate, a dismal one in four children, has not budged.
However, achievement gains were bigger among lower-achieving students, most of them minority kids, who now are getting unprecedented attention.
"That's not an accident," Spellings said in a recent interview. "It is because for the last eight years, we have forced a focus around poor and minority kids."
Spellings said she had mixed feelings about No Child Left Behind as the administration comes to an end.
"I'm really of two minds; on the one hand, I feel like No Child Left Behind has been a historic, game-changing endeavor," she said.
"However, now we have adequately framed the problem, which is, we're in a world of hurt. And we've got to be much more committed and pick up the pace if we're going to close the achievement gap," Spellings said.
Spellings, a key player when the law was written, joined Bush in Philadelphia for the anniversary.
The occasion prompted a scuffle with critics of No Child Left Behind.
"No Child Left Behind is firmly cemented as President Bush's failed education experiment," said Dennis Van Roekel, president of the National Education Association, the nation's biggest teachers' union.
Obama has pledged to overhaul the No Child Left Behind, although he has been vague about how far he would go. The testing requirements at the heart of the law likely will remain, although Obama agrees with critics that exams are emphasized at the expense of other subjects and that it is too punitive.
Obama's nominee for education secretary, Chicago schools chief Arne Duncan, appears for his confirmation hearing Tuesday before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. No Child Left Behind was due for a rewrite in 2007, but the effort stalled in Congress, and the law remains in effect.
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Associated Press writer Ben Feller in Philadelphia contributed to this report.
