In the midst of the worst economic crisis in modern U.S. history, our political leadership has decided to exempt the very wealthy from sacrifice while tragically weakening the one avenue our society has identified for reducing inequality in the nation—our public schools.
 
Not only is it profoundly immoral to impose hardship on the weakest and most vulnerable members of our society, targeting schools for such huge cuts does violence to the very ideal of equality of opportunity which once used to unite liberals and conservatives.
 
If the only schools that can function well are in communities where parents have the resources to compensate for the budget cuts, then we are basically creating a social order where children will remain in the social position of their parents into the next generation, and where poor and working-class children are doomed by inferior training to be a servant class for the rich, if they are lucky enough to find jobs at all.

We can no longer afford an academic calendar designed for when America was a nation of farmers.

Too often we get into the problem that the business world says college graduates aren’t prepared for the real world. And college says, well they’re not prepared for the real world because they weren’t prepared for college — and high school says they weren’t prepared for college because they weren’t prepared for high school. It’s really easy just to keep pointing downward, and I think that’s detrimental overall to our success as a nation. We have to have a common, national idea of what it means to be an educated 12th-grader, and work from that point.