U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings was expected to lay out in a speech Tuesday an action plan calling for the creation of a database to track college students' academic progress. The speech, to be given at the National Press Club, is in response to a report submitted last week by the Secretary's Commission on the Future of Higher Education. The report called for sweeping changes in higher education. Spellings told a Chronicle reporter Monday that she would seek federal funds to test a prototype system that would use student identification numbers rather than Social Security numbers to link students anonymously with their transcripts.