Well, we have to provide the world's best schools. We certainly don't have them, but that's our objective.
We need people from all around the world. We need entrepreneurs, we need students that we're educating in our schools that we then throw out and we should make sure they can stay here. If we don't have the new flux of immigrants, nobody's going to create the jobs for the Americans who are currently out of work.
Our goal here in New York is to ensure that every child who graduates high school is ready to start a career or start college and to dramatically increase the number of students that graduate from college.
If you really believe that you're making a difference and that you can leave a legacy of better schools and jobs and safer streets, why would you not spend the money? The objective is to improve the schools, bring down crime, build affordable housing, clean the streets - not to have a fair fight.
The mistake that was made in the '70s is we stopped policing the streets, we stopped cleaning the streets, we stopped cleaning the graffiti off buildings, we stopped supporting our cultural institutions and building parks and schools and all those kinds of things.
When it comes to public school education, we have been unwilling to measure our results. We've been unwilling to pay based on performance. We have tenure where, even if you can't teach, you can't get fired. We've been unwilling to invest in new schools.
