In my experience, durable progress must be fashioned out of more than obscured truth, slogans, and empty promises. You do it through hard work. By going everywhere. Listening to everyone. Being honest with people. Being ambitious without indulging in magical thinking.
A stable and affordable home is fundamental to economic security.
We need to work with the other countries in the hemisphere so that they also have refugee policies in place so that people have a place to go and can escape the violence in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala.
Ensuring all kids have access to an effective, talented teacher needs to be a national priority.
A student who has excelled in the classroom should have the opportunity to attend college and become a productive, taxpaying member of society.
Competitive programs such as Race to the Top provide incentives for communities to develop new solutions for old problems. Because of Race to the Top, states have raised their standards and committed to fixing schools that have persistently failed students.
Fixing our schools must begin with reforming the way we attract talent to teaching.
I've focused on making sure we have talented teachers and principals in our schools through proposals like the GREAT Teachers and Principals Act and the Presidential Teachers Corps.
Often times, political games prevent senators from even beginning to debate some of the most important issues.
Eviction often leads to a disruption in critical services like Medicaid and nutrition assistance when families need them most.
While NCLB drove important progress on transparency and data disaggregation, I think it's clear that the status quo in public education is not working for our kids or our country.
We've done a terrible job of hiring, supporting, and retaining the people tasked with the difficult responsibility of teaching our children.
I probably would have voted against Justice Thomas, and, and, and I've been disappointed by what Justice Roberts has done.
We have managed to acquire $13 trillion of debt on our balance sheet. In my view we have nothing to show for it. We haven't invested in our roads, our bridges, our waste-water systems, our sewer systems. We haven't even maintained the assets that our parents and grandparents built for us.
I say we have not even had the decency to maintain the assets that our parents and grandparents built for us - our roads, our bridges, our wastewater systems, our sewer systems; by the way, those weren't Bolsheviks, those weren't socialists that built those things for us - much less build the infrastructure we need for the 21st century.
As an urban school superintendent, I learned that hiring, training, and investing in professionals to support our children's social and emotional development, meeting academic expectations for students with special needs, and finding more minutes of instruction in the week, not fewer, mattered.
Social networking websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr provide an unparalleled ability for people to stay connected in new and unique ways.
