Living on $6 a day means you have a refrigerator, a TV, a cell phone, your children can go to school. That's not possible on $1 a day.
Your school may have done away with winners and losers, but life has not.
My dream is that every child has enough food to eat, good medical care, and the chance to go to school and even attend college.
If I had a dollar for every time someone made fun of me in high school-oh wait, I do!
Research shows that there is only half as much variation in student achievement between schools as there is among classrooms in the same school. If you want your child to get the best education possible, it is actually more important to get him assigned to a great teacher than to a great school.
Even though I only have a high-school degree, I'm a professional student.
I went to a public school through sixth grade, and being good at tests wasn't cool.
My parents are very successful, and I went to the nicest private school in the Seattle area. I was lucky. But I never had any trust funds of any kind, though my dad did pay my tuition at Harvard, which was quite expensive.
Americans want students to get the best education possible. We want schools to prepare children to become good citizens and members of a prosperous American economy.
Our current expectations for what our students should learn in school were set fifty years ago to meet the needs of an economy based on manufacturing and agriculture. We now have an economy based on knowledge and technology.
Like many others, I have deep misgivings about the state of education in the United States. Too many of our students fail to graduate from high school with the basic skills they will need to succeed in the 21st Century economy, much less prepared for the rigors of college and career. Although our top universities continue to rank among the best in the world, too few American students are pursuing degrees in science and technology. Compounding this problem is our failure to provide sufficient training for those already in the workforce.
Training the workforce of tomorrow with today's high schools is like trying to teach kids about today's computers on a 50-year-old mainframe.
You will NOT make $60,000 a year right out of high school. You won't be a vice-president with a car phone until you earn both.
By 2018, an estimated 63 percent of all new U.S. jobs will require workers with an education beyond high school. For our young people to get those jobs, they first need to graduate from high school ready to start a postsecondary education.
The only role other than paying their taxes, whatever those are, the only role for philanthropy broadly - of which the rich should give disproportionately - the more, the better - and I think there is a positive trend in that direction - there are certain risk-taking things, like trying out a new type of charter school or funding a new kind of medicine.
America's high schools are obsolete. By obsolete, I don't just mean that they're broken, flawed, or underfunded, though a case could be made for every one of those points. By obsolete, I mean our high schools-even when they're working as designed-cannot teach all our students what they need to know today.
In K-12, almost everybody goes to local schools. Universities are a bit different because kids actually do pick the university. The bizarre thing, though, is that the merit of university is actually how good the students going in are: the SAT scores of the kids going in.
What's amazing is, if young people understood how doing well in school makes the rest of their life so much interesting, they would be more motivated. It's so far away in time that they can't appreciate what it means for their whole life.
If empathy channels our optimism, we will see the empathy and the diseases and the poor school. We will answer with our innovations and we will surprise the pessimists.
