A postsecondary education is the ticket to economic success in America.

I believe that education is the civil rights issue of our generation. And if you care about promoting opportunity and reducing inequality, the classroom is the place to start. Great teaching is about so much more than education; it is a daily fight for social justice.

This is a devastating problem, is, the longer our children are in school, the worse they do. Year after year after year, our children in America are falling further behind. Our 3- and 4-year-olds enter kindergarten OK, and they fall further and further behind. Each year, children in other countries are learning more than children in this country. And so the gap between American student performance in Singapore and Finland and South Korea and Canada and these other countries, the gap widens year after year after year.

Teachers support evaluations based on multiple measures: student growth, classroom observation and feedback from peers and parents.

In America, your zip code or your socioeconomic status should never determine the quality of your education.

We have had this massive effort on K-12 reform, raising standards, great teachers, great principals, turning around chronically failing schools, raising the bar, huge amount of progress. Let's continue that.

We need to invest in very different ways. Get the students the support they need, get them the best principals, get them the great teachers, and I promise you those students would do extraordinarily well. I have seen it all my life.