I believe that a strong military is our nation's best defense our nation's best
offense is a world class is a great great educational system and I think
this for so many different reasons the only way I know how to end cycles of
poverty is by giving children who happen to be born in poverty which is never
their fault a chance to get a great education if we want to have upper
mobility if we want to have a growing middle class the only way I know how to
do that is through education and quite honestly these days I'm starting to
worry about our democracy in our democracy fraying at the edges and if
we're gonna have a civically engaged a citizenry we're gonna have an active
participatory democracy the only way I know how to do that is through education
so just as we have a military this led at the national level I think it's
important the national level we'd be clear about how important education is
where we are now today quite candidly isn't good enough if you look at early
childhood we ranked 30th in terms of access to pre-k it's a dismal record if
you look at math and reading science scores at the high school level we're
somewhere usually between 15th and 30th internationally if you look at college
completion rates we're about 16th to sum all that up we're top ten and nothing
and we live now in a flat world in a globally competitive economy in good
jobs high wage high skill jobs are gonna go to the nation that does the best job
of educating their citizens and I desperately want those jobs to be here
in America I'd rather than be here than in China or
you know India or Singapore or wherever else in South Korea wherever else I
might you might talk about for us to do that we use a nation have to embrace the
opportunity I would say the imperative of having a great great education system
and we should be very tight on what I call goals and as a nation we should
have a goal to lead the world in access to high quality pre-k we were very proud
during the Obama administration to get high school graduation rates to 84
percent I desperately wish the current
administration set a goal for themselves giving that of raising that increasing
that from maybe four percent to ninety percent and so I think we should be as a
nation very clear and I would say tight on goals but we should be very loose and
give lots of flexibility lots of room to to innovate at the local level on the
best strategies to achieve those goals and what works best in Harlem here in
New York might be very different than what works in Montana might be very
different than what works in California but we're all striving to those goals
and again let me reiterate for me those goals aren't R or D or left or right
those are nation-building goals those are paths to the middle class and upward
mobility and so being tight on goals but very loose on the strategies and have
lots of again honest debate there's no one has all the right answers are the
best way to achieve those goals and let's scale what works and let's stop
doing what doesn't work so that's from a policy perspective that's how I view it
at the individual child the image real student-led level for me this is always
always about what we call personalizing instruction in the goal of great
teachers today is not to teach to the to the mean to the average of a class of 25
or 30 students it's to help every single child flourish and every single
individuals child has different strengths and weaknesses and how we help
them fly where they can fly how we help them get additional help when they need
help that's what great teachers are doing every single day today and while
there are amazing bright spots there's stuff that's so inspiring that I use
traveled the country and was lucky enough to see every day we have to get
better faster and we have to do it with a real sense of urgency
you