Now everybody has to be held accountable. There's some resistance by some that they don't want to be held accountable. Somebody jumped out and said that I was bashing teachers. No, what I said is that teachers also have to be accountable. I don't understand how if teachers are in our community can't teach then how come we can't say something and deal with that. I don't understand that. Principals can't function--I don't understand that and the principals are not allowed to analyze teachers. You fire the CEOs if the stock go down. You can leave a job on Wall Street if you give me a year or two of bad stock but I can't question the teacher at my child's school if she gives me a year or two of my kids not making the grade--somethin wrong with that. That ain't union bashing that's children lifting. I'm all for the union, I'm all for bashing administrators, I disagree with the budget cuts they did a march about on Monday cause I think we cannot cut education budgets but at the same time you cannot just keep blaming the children when those that are deemed responsible from the teachers to the principals to the administrators to the electives to the parents. All are blaming each other and the child is sitting there not learning how to read and count. Do you understand 52% of black men in this country are not getting a high school diploma? And they're putting them out there in the world to compete with children that have technological skills and they will not survive. They're fast tracking them to jail and a life of crime and you and I don't want to talk about it cause our friends may be offended? If you my friend, you want my child to have the same access anybody else does.

Where this will go, we don't know. We first gonna get everybody in the discussion but there need to be real reform around the children and this is a fight that's gonna get some folks dislodged and other folks lodged. What I want to see is that at the end of the day we close that gap. I don't understand why the reading scores and the math scores in our communities are so low. I don't understand why we cannot get the same, and in fact Mrs. Barry, assemblywoman Barry was a principal. We can't get the same teachers assigned to our schools. I was in Detroit. They send the experienced teachers to the least troubled schools. It'd seem to me that the folks with the most skills aught to be where they're most needed. "Well, Reverend, you don't understand. These kids today are different and crazy." Well then if you're not equipped to teach today, you aught not be teaching. You know I fly 3 or 4 days a week. Can you imagine a pilot saying "I'm good as long as there ain't no turbulence"? But if you get turbulence you're on your own? You wouldn't get on that flight. I'd be like "what you talkin bout?" Teachers telling me "well you don't understand, the parents are no good, the kids are no good." Then you aught not be teaching in these days--you need to not apply if you can't do the job.

One teacher told me the other day "well you gotta understand, Reverend, the parents are not interested, the kids are wild..." I said, "Did you know that when you applied for the job?" She said, "Yeah." I said, "Well then you knew what you was coming into. We not gonna pay you for not doing what you applied to do." Now Klein ain't saying that, I'm saying that cause it's our kids in there. You not not teaching administrators, you not teaching our kids and somebody's gotta stand up for the kids. They can stand up for the administration, others can stand up for the teachers, others the principal--somebody's gotta say but the kids are not learning. Then you have these self-serving conferences that remind me of the surgeon that said I executed well, I cut through the skin well. The other one said well I went in and did my part well--I moved the poison out and the other one says and I sewed the body back up well. But the verdict is, the body dies. Everybody talking about what they did but the man's dead. So all of ya'll running around giving me literature and putting up your website what you do but the kids are not learning. So whatever we're doing collectively is not enough and we're gonna force that forward. Are you with me on that?

So I asked the Chancellor to be here. I told him I'm going into some crowds with him that I ain't familiar with but I can't kick off nothing without him coming on Saturday morning and say this in front of some of the folks that I used to march on them and may be marching on them in the future but on this one we gonna be together. Chancellor of the schools of the city of New York, Joel Klein.

Klein: Thank you very much. Good morning to you and Happy Father's Day to all the fathers... [non-education related]... Two events happened 54 years ago in 1954. You know, God works his miracles in strange ways one of those events was the Supreme Court deciding Brown vs. Board of Education. You know, Thurgood Marshall was a man I knew--my wife was a law clerk to Thurgood Marshall. I always thought that Brown vs. Board of Education was the beginning of a new America cause it promised every kid an equal educational opportunity. Shortly after Brown vs. Board of Education a man named Al Sharpton was born in 1954--54 years ago. You know what I'm here to tell you?...I'm here to tell you that Al Sharpton is going to finish the work that Thurgood Marshall began in Brown vs. Board of Education. If you look at it, you know Al spent a lot of time. He gets up to speed, but if you look at it today, skin color and poverty are correlated with educational outcomes. Now I grew up, I told you last time I was here on Martin Luther King's birthday, I grew up in public housing, right? My father was a postman. Nobody ever gave me anything in life. Education changed my life. It's unimaginable for me to stand here as the chancellor of the school system where I was just another kid trying to scratch two nickels together to make my way through. See, but I have this view in life. You know, if you're richer than I am, you can have a bigger house, you can have two cars, you know, you want a boat that floats your boat I'm ok with all of that but if you're richer than I am your kind don't get a better education than my kid. That's wrong and unless we put a stop to that we will not have the country we want. Now if you look at it today, in the fourth grade, the average African American kid is two years behind. By the eighth grade, he's three years behind, by high school four years behind and that's what leads to this constant achievement gap. Now we're not gonna fix that gap, we're not gonna fix that gap by some affirmative action. We're gonna fix that gap by educating our children from the beginning and what our effort is all about is to focus the nation on it because people get uncomfortable about it. You know, it makes them uncomfortable to deal with these issues. We've got a presidential election going on. You hear anybody talking about this? No. The Reverend and I and this whole movement, Cory Booker's a part of this, Geoff Kennedy you know ...we've got people all over the country that are calling me signing up. When we announced it on Wednesday, we wrote to both campaigns--we wrote to McCain and we wrote to Obama and we said we want to start a national dialogue on this so that when the next president gets elected this will be at the top of the list cause this is the biggest issue right? We're gonna make this front and center and you know what happened? We wrote that email, the Reverend and I, and the next morning we got back from both campaigns. "When can we meet? We want to be with you." We're going to Denver, we're gonna have a seminar on these issues and focus the whole country on them. We're going to Minneapolis for the Republican Convention to focus people on it. But we gotta come together, all of us, and we gotta be really honest about it. There's something wrong 54 years after Brown, we promised every kid and equal educational opportunity and 54 years later we haven't delivered on it. Like the Reverend said, people tell me all the time "well it's the kids, it's the families, it's this and it's that," a lot of people. There's another group out this week that says "we're not gonna fix education until we fix poverty." Let me tell you something, we should fix poverty, but let me give you the real truth in life--we're never going to fix poverty until we fix education. We're never going to fix poverty until we fix education. I want to leave you with one story that inspires me all the time, an absolutely true story. In the middle of Bedford Stuyvesant, there's a little school that's called the Excellence Academy that's an all boys school of 92% African American and about 8% Latino. I went there, somebody asked me to go visit, right? In the middle of Bedford Stuyvesant, so they rehabbed the building that had been a place where they sold drugs and they made it into a school. I did that together with some philanthropists. I walk into this building. I bump into some little boy, he's a little late. He turns to me and says "good morning, chancellor." So number one I say, you know if I go to any school in NY, they look at me and they have no clue. On a good day somebody says "who's that, is that the mayor?" So they have no idea. So this kid says good morning chancellor and I said "good morning, young man, what's your name?" He says, "My name is Jamal." I say, "Jamal, what do you do at Excellence Academy?" He says, "I'm in kindergarten, chancellor." I say, "oh yeah, and what do you do here?" He says, "Well I'm in the University of Pennsylvania program." So I look at him and I say, "well, Jamal, you're in kindergarten. What do you mean you're in the University of Pennsylvania program?" You know what Jamal tells me? He said, "Well you know, chancellor, I'm on my way to college and it's not too young to start thinking about it now, right?" When every kid, when every kid in this city in kindergarten, in pre-k, when every kid in this city looks you in the eye and says "I'm on my way to college and it's never too young to think about it," we will have a different system. I went back at the end of the year to see how Excellence Academy did. It was the first year it got grades. You know what its grades were? Its kids were 100% proficient in math and 92% in the ____. That's better than virtually any school in the city. Don't tell me it's the kids. Don't tell me all the excuses. This country--I love this country--this country's done amazing things for me. This country will never be the country we want until we get right on education and we are not right on education. Al Sharpton's gonna put his shoulder to the wheel. We're going all around, we're gonna call them as we see them and we're gonna change this. We're gonna need your help, we're gonna need the community's help, we're gonna need the nation's help but it's long overdue and we need to get right on education. Thank you Sharpton.