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Education Divide Challenges Nation

Two years ago San Francisco's Thurgood Marshall High School graduated only 10 college-ready students out of a class of 600. "This is to me an affront to everything that we claim we are," said Cory Booker, the Stanford-, Yale-, and Oxford-educated mayor of Newark, N.J., at a recent Goldman Sachs/Stanford University Global Education Conference. "I may not be called to be on a beach in Normandy. I may not be called to be on a bus in a freedom ride. But I will not allow this to happen in the United States of America on my watch."

Being poor is not synonymous with low educational achievement, Booker added, since the highest-performing school in New Jersey's Essex County is in Newark, where more than 80% of the student body is low income. "Don't tell me what our nation can't do," he said. "I sit back every day in wide-eyed wonder at the collective achievements of our larger American community."

Booker described the effort to "heal the racial gap in education" as "the determining factor of the destiny of this generation. … You cannot lead as a country when your education system is failing."

American education is at an inflection point, agreed an alumni weekend panel in a discussion on education that also included Booker. Another panelist was Kim Smith, MBA '98, cofounder and CEO of Bellwether Education Partners and a founding team member of Teach For America. She called for reforms that make education "non-ideological and very pragmatic."

"To be pragmatic, we need data. The ideology is part of what's held us back."