For 25 years it has been my privilege to represent the city of San Francisco and the great state of California to work to strengthen our vibrant middle class to secure opportunity and equality.
The wave of new productive enterprises would provide opportunities to remedy the unjust distribution of environmental hazards among economic classes and racial and ethnic communities.
Teachers say their schools of education did not adequately prepare them for the classroom. They would have welcomed more mentoring and feedback in their early years.
Too many vital education dollars that should be spent in the classroom are bouncing around in the federal bureaucracy.
What the mayors care about is 'How can I get money to invest in the infrastructure in my city? How do we put people back to work lower the unemployment rate provide for job training programs? How do we make class sizes smaller and make investments in our children from an education standpoint?'
In Philadelphia our public safety poverty reduction health and economic development all start with education. We can't grow the middle class if we don't give our kids the tools they need to innovate and invent.
We must ensure our system of higher education offers world-class quality for a world-class economy.
My father was an autodidact. It wasn't a middle-class house. Shopkeepers are aspirant. He paid for me to go to private school. He was denied an education - he had a horrible childhood. He got a place at a grammar school and wasn't allowed to go.
I'm sure everything has a bearing on what I'm doing. My family is a lower-middle-class family there's lots of children seven brothers two sisters grew up together fighting with each other went to school. My mother went to school up to 4th grade. My father went to school up to 8th grade. So that's about the education level we had in the family.
When I enrolled in college at age 19 I had a total of eight years of formal classroom education. As a result I was not comfortable with formal lectures and receiving regular homework assignments.