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Thank you so much to the Governor, to the resident Commissioner, to all our distinguished
speakers, to everyone here. Thank you so much for inviting me to the Island. I’m going
to keep my remarks fairly brief. We’ve heard a couple of longer speeches. I’ll talk longer
tonight, but I think we are going to have a dialogue here soon. I’m really here to
listen and learn. I’ll say a couple of things now and I’ll do more at the end of the day.
This is my second visit to the Island. I came when I led the Chicago Public Schools, had
a great visit with teachers and principals and mayors at that time, my first time, obviously,
coming back as Secretary, and it won’t be my last. I promise you that. I think it has
been about 18 years since the Secretary was here before, and I don’t need much of an
excuse to come to a beautiful place like this, and I’m thrilled to be here. Obviously,
you have hear repeatedly this is a large district, it would be the third largest , but it is
a manageable district and not as big as LA, not as big as New York, a little bit bigger
than what I had in Chicago. I had about 400,000 students in Chicago, so I think I understand
the challenges of scale and scope and taking the best practices to scale and replicating
what works. Relative to the states, we’re a large funder here. Most states were only
8, 9, 10 percent of funding. Here we’re a much bigger partner and we want to be a
much better partner and President Obama challenged us to be a better partner from day one. Better
support, better technical assistance, less “just focus” around compliance and bureaucracy.
Please challenge us. The Governor and his team have worked extraordinarily hard. Please
hold us accountable for being a great partner and keep trying to elevate the quality of
education here. My team has worked extraordinarily hard in building better relationships and
better partnerships and actually makes me optimistic about where we’re trying to go.
Let me be very, very clear why I’m here today and tomorrow. I’m here like all of
you, I think, because we think the children of Puerto Rico deserve better than what they’ve
had and we’ve heard some of the success stories and some of the progress. We have
also heard some of the challenges. I’ll just give you one more number. As I travel
the country it’s not exact measure dropout rates but I always look at how many 9th graders
are in a state and territory and how many 12th graders and here in Puerto Rico you have
about 42,000 9th graders, but when it comes to 12th grade, just a couple of years later,
you have 30,000. So somewhere between 9th and 10th, 11th, and 12th grade you are losing
12,000 young people and so my question is what hope do they have to be successful in
life? Our high school dropouts today how many good jobs are out there for them in the legal
economy? We know there are none. So for the progress for all the hard work we’ve done
collectively to this point we have to get better faster than ever before. We can’t
be here for incremental change for tinkering around the edges. This has to be about transformational
change, and I love when we have so many adults in a packed room – people standing along
the walls. I know the hard work, I know the passion, and I know the commitment of everyone
in this room. Folks from many different walks of life, many different sectors, many different
opinions and we need that debate and we need discourse and that conversation. But we can’t
be here to perpetuate the status quo. I see education through two very simple lenses.
The first, as I am absolutely convinced, education is the civil rights issue of our generation
and I was so honored yesterday to be there when they – back in DC – when they dedicated
the monument to Martin Luther King, and I absolutely see our collective work is built
upon his legacy. When we provide a great education to young people, we give them a chance to
fulfill their dreams, their true academic and social potential. When we fail to educate
young people, when we let 12,000 of our young people leave our schools between 9t grade
and 12th grade, we actually perpetuate poverty and we perpetuate social failure despite our
best intentions. We’re part of the problem and we have to look ourselves in the mirror
and be very self-critical and be willing to do some things very, very differently. Secondly,
this is absolutely economic imperative we know we have a drop-off – sorry – an unemployment
rate that is far too high. What’s amazing to me as I travel the country and talk to
leading CEO’s from many different – different types of sectors in the business community.
Many are trying to hire today and can’t find the workers they need – the high skilled
workers to work in high wage jobs and even in these tough economic times there are two
million high skilled highway jobs in the country that we can’t fill, and we, as educators,
have to look ourselves in the mirror and say we’re not doing enough to help young people
succeed in this globally competitive knowledge-based economy. So the challenges are real, the challenges
are urgent. Things have changed. I’m not that old, I’m getting older every single
day but when I was in high school in the South side of Chicago it was actually okay. My friends
actually could drop out of high school, they could drop out and get a job in the stock
yards and steel mills and make a pretty good living and support their family and own their
own home. They were going to be okay. Those jobs are just a memory from a bye gone era.
There’s nothing out there for our young people who don’t, as a minimum, graduate
from high school as a minimum. The real goal has to be some form of higher education beyond
that – four-year universities, two-year community colleges, trade technical, vocational
training. And so our collective goal and everyone here has to be to make sure that every young
person has the opportunity to fulfill their dreams, has the opportunity to take the next
step on the education journey. We have a lot of hard work to do here in Puerto Rico. What
we’re doing today is simply not good enough. We have to face that brutal truth openly and
honestly, and we have to work together – move outside our comfort zones in ways we have
been reluctant to do historically to make sure children have a much better chance to
be the next generation of leaders. I look forward to a great summit, a great conference
– I look forward to a great conversation. I want to listen to you, want to learn from
you. But at the end of the day we have to do better for our young people. Thank you
so much.