The factory model of education is the wrong model for the 21st century. Today, our schools must prepare all students for college and careers-and do far more to personalize instruction and employ the smart use of technology.

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.

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

The factory model of education is the wrong model for the 21st century. Today, our schools must prepare all students for college and careers-and do far more to personalize instruction and employ the smart use of technology.

To be clear, we the Department of Education want curriculum to be driven by the local level. We are by law prohibited from directing curriculum. We don't have a curriculum department.

The jobs of the future, as you know so well, are knowledge-based. You need college-educated folks to do this work. And so the consequences for our country are absolutely devastating if we don't start to behave in very different ways.

I worry when athletes are simply used by their universities to produce revenue, to make money for them, nothing to show at the back end. I grew up with a lot of players who had very, very tough lives after the ball started bouncing for them. And that's why I'm going to continue to fight.