In September 1962, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered a powerful speech at the Park Sheraton Hotel in New York City to commemorate the 100th anniversary of President Lincoln’s Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.
State Education Department staff recently uncovered the only known audio recording of this speech, which can be heard at www.nysm.nysed.gov/mlk; it is a remarkable treasure that this morning we are pleased to be able to share with the world.
It is also, for me, a rallying cry for us to continue our efforts to transform our public schools.
In the speech, King laments the disparity between African-Americans and white Americans in every aspect of society. He asserts that there is only one way to commemorate the Emancipation Proclamation, and that is “to make its declaration of freedom real.”
When he spoke those words, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had not yet been passed. The election of the nation’s first African-American President was virtually unimaginable. The progress toward fulfilling our nation’s promise over the last 50 years has been truly breathtaking.
Yet despite that progress, true equality of opportunity remains elusive — in no small part because we as a country have not yet found a way to provide all of our children with an education that prepares them for success in college and careers.
As a teacher and principal, I was driven each day by the conviction that while we cannot ignore and indeed must address the challenges posed by economic hardship, inadequate access to healthcare, housing and the like, the single best tool we have to advance opportunity is education.
And the essence of education comes down to the interaction between teacher and student and the rigor and richness of the work in which they are engaged. The efforts of the Board of Regents to implement new college- and career-ready standards and to improve the training, evaluation and support of teachers and principals are about exactly that.
The new Common Core standards are different from past standards efforts because they were explicitly backward-engineered to ensure that students could reach college and career success by the time they graduate.
They were developed by asking primary and secondary educators, higher education faculty and business leaders: What are the skills students must have to succeed in college and in the 21st century economy?
The Common Core demands that we challenge students to read complex texts more closely, to write more and to write using evidence drawn from other texts to advance their arguments.
A skilled educator, for example, could build a fascinating lesson from the newly discovered audio recording of King’s speech. Why did he deviate from the written text in certain places? Why did he emphasize some words and phrases over others? How does this speech compare with his Letter from Birmingham Jail or his “I Have a Dream” speech?
At a recent community forum in Brooklyn on the Common Core, parents described to me their experiences graduating from high school thinking they were prepared, then arriving on a college campus only to be told that they had to take numerous remedial classes. With great urgency and conviction, each of these parents explained that they wanted something better for their child.
The Common Core offers a path to the precise reading, writing and thinking skills that will help propel their children and children across the state to success. Yet some now want us to delay, or even abandon, our efforts to raise standards.
I say no. As King said in that speech a little more than fifty years ago, “We do not have as much time as the cautious and the patient try to give us.”
We have many great schools in New York State, but we do not have time to wait to dramatically transform those that are not working. We do not have time to wait to give all students — regardless of their race or zip code or the language they speak at home — access to the enriching and engaging learning experiences they need and deserve. And we do not have time to wait to ensure that the students who graduate from our high schools do so ready to succeed in college and careers.
King concludes his speech this way: “And so I close by quoting the words of an old Negro slave preacher who didn’t quite have his grammar right but uttered words of great symbolic profundity and they were uttered in the form of a prayer: ‘Lord, we ain’t what we oughta be. We ain’t what we want to be. We ain’t what we gonna be. But, thank God, we ain’t what we wuz.’ “
So let us all pledge today — Dr. King’s birthday — to do whatever we can to make real the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation, the promise of King’s words and the promise of equal educational opportunity for all. Our children cannot wait.
King is education commissioner of New York State.