Each January, we have an opportunity to rededicate ourselves to advancing equality, as we honor the existence and legacy of the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Education is one particular of the biggest levers to advance equality and empowerment. Which is mainly because with excellent educators, superior expectations, and an great, equitable education, all learners, of all backgrounds, can do all matters they set out to achieve.
Giving all students entry to an education that allows them access their probable is a single of the biggest civil legal rights concerns of our time.
Each of our young children has limitless opportunity and exclusive benefit. Each and every day, we need to fight for them and their futures. And just about every of us included in that get the job done is element of the civil rights movement that Dr. King led.
I’m humbled to be in that motion with you.
And I’m happy that due to the fact the President’s 1st day in business, the Biden-Harris administration has been combating to dismantle disparities in our public guidelines, establishments, and communities that just take us further more from what our nation stands for: possibility for all.
In our initially two years, we have properly reopened our community faculties and taken vital techniques to address what I connect with “the ABCs of the training profession”—agency, superior operating ailments, and competitive salaries for our educators.
We’re offering important enhancements in infrastructure and university protection. We canceled $48 billion in college student financial debt for 1.9 million debtors, together with community servants, Individuals with disabilities, and students cheated by schools that promised them a much better existence, but failed to supply. We announced and carry on to fight for historic university student personal debt aid for 40 million low-and-middle-cash flow folks. In addition to supplying funding and calling for reimagined psychological overall health supports in our colleges, we’ve launched bold new community-private initiatives for recruiting and teaching new tutors and mentors to assist our learners sense witnessed and supported, and for erasing inequities in entry to afterschool and summer learning applications.
And we’re deliberately partnering with other federal businesses to reimagine superior faculty, so college students have extra pathways to get paid industry qualifications and college or university credits, and graduate far better prepared for professions and better instruction.
Through this system, we have proudly and unapologetically stood up for learners whose rights to an education absolutely free from discrimination have been under attack. Our colleges are locations of inclusion and respecting the dissimilarities that make all our college students specific. That is what will make us unique that is what tends to make us American.
With the President’s management and historic assist from the American Rescue Plan and the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, we have additional funding to do much more in education and learning than at any time right before. These investments and efforts are a down payment on transformational alter.
We have a opportunity to be the era that really transforms our training method into 1 that helps make Dr. King’s desire a reality … by doing work together and by recognizing that all of us are related.
In a 1968 speech Dr. King stated, “[W]e are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a one garment of destiny. Whatever affects one particular immediately, impacts all indirectly. … I can never ever be what I should to be until eventually you are what you ought to be. And you can never be what you should to be until finally I am what I ought to be. …”
When we deliver our children—regardless of background or circumstance—with a significant-top quality, abundant education, we empower them to be what they can be.
So, specifically right now and in the days in advance, let us comply with Dr. King’s instance of leadership and provider, acquiring strategies to give a hand up to some others and make a variation in our communities.
With each other, let’s work more durable than ever to elevate the bar for learners of all ages and backgrounds … to reimagine schooling … and to deliver the transformative modify that this instant calls for and that our pupils and family members should have.
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