Keynote address: educational innovation and the law.

• Position: Symposium: Educational Innovation and the Law

Thank you. Thank you all very much. I want to thank the dean for the introduction and the welcome to Notre Dame. It's great for me to be here; it's great for our family to come and spend time with all of you.

Before I get going, I would be remiss if I didn't make one other introduction. My chief counsel is here, the person who serves as my chief counsel in the Governor's office. This is a totally gratuitous move on my part, but he is an alumnus of Notre Dame. Jeff Chiesa is here and is so excited to have me have to come to his alma mater to speak.

Obviously also another alumnus of Notre Dame who I've already spent some time with today in Father Scully's class, is former New Jersey congressman Mike Ferguson who is here as well.

Both dear friends of mine, and I thank them for taking the time--because I'm sure this is the way they normally spend football weekends here: come to the law school and do some thinking and do whatever else they're going to do.

I am by the way, completely impressed. I saw there are tickets for this thing, first of all. And then I was seeing on Twitter there was some demand for these tickets. And then I actually saw the tickets and they have my picture on them.

So I'm lording this over Jeff in ways you can't even imagine. Like, Notre Dame printed pictures of me on tickets. Tremendous. We'll be hanging those up in my office when we get back to Trenton.

But I thank you for the opportunity to talk about an issue that I think is the single-most important issue in America today for our long-term future.

There are lots of really important issues surrounding debt and deficit and tax reform and entitlement reform. And I care very deeply about those, and have had some, I think, good progress on some of those issues in New Jersey.

But we're not here to talk about that today. I'm relieved in one respect that we're not. You know, those are kind of the actuarial accounting portions, which as a political science major and history minor in college, you know I had no interest in being an accountant or an actuary. But as governor during difficult fiscal times, you begin to feel like you are one.

My staff tells me all the time that when I speak about this issue, this is the issue they can tell I feel most passionate about.

I was talking to Father Scully's class before I came over here in leadership, and I was telling them that I don't use prepared speeches except for very rare occasions like the State budget address, things where I have to remember numbers or remember not to be too inflammatory.

And so today I'll talk to you from my heart about what I feel about this issue. Because to understand why I feel the way I feel about this issue, you have to understand where I come from. Not just in New Jersey, but I was born if Newark, New Jersey in our state's largest and in many ways most challenged city.

I was born in Newark; my parents were born in Newark; three of my four grandparents were born in Newark. So Newark was a large part of our family's culture and history and definition of who we are.

I was born in 1962. In 1967, two things happened--two things that directly affected my life, one inside my own family and one outside of it. My parents decided as I was getting ready to turn five years old that they needed to move me out of Newark and move my younger brother out of Newark because they were convinced that there was no way that we could get a good education there, and I was coming to the age where I would go to kindergarten.

The thing that accelerated that decision, of course, were the riots that were in Newark in 1967 that the city has never recovered from, and forty-four years later Newark still has not recovered from the riots that occurred in 1967. It hasn't recovered economically, and it has not recovered educationally.

The reason I tell you that that is the core of the way I feel about this issue is this: I'm convinced with every fiber in my being that if my parents had not done what they did, which was--now understand who my parents were. My room was a graduate of West Side High School in Newark. Never had the money to go college and worked for the rest of her life until she died. From the time she was seventeen until she was seventy-one when she died.

My dad worked in the Breyer's Ice Cream plant in Newark during the day, and put himself through Rutgers at night to get his degree. Our first family picture was at my father's college graduation when he was in his cap and gown and my mother was smiling next to him, and I was in utero three months prior to arrival. My father and mother, it was any enormously proud day for them because my father was the first in his family to be able to get a college degree.

For my mother, she was living vicariously through him knowing that it was probably an opportunity she was never going to have. So for these two who cherished education so much and the importance of it, that decision in 1967 to leave the only place they had ever known to go to what my mother called "the wilderness," which was Livingston, New Jersey, fifteen miles due west of Newark.

It was an enormous decision, plus they had no money. So they borrowed $1000 dollars from my maternal grandmother and $1000 from my paternal grandmother to put a $2000 down payment down on a $22,000 house in Livingston because they heard it was a great school system.

My father, who was a Korean War veteran, got the VA mortgage to be able to buy the house. But for those efforts, I am convinced I wouldn't be standing here today. If my parents had kept me in post-riot Newark in the public school education system, which would have been all they would have been able to afford and the only option that would have been available to them, I wouldn't be standing here as the fifty-fifth governor of the state of New Jersey.

And once you're lucky enough to have that experience, I can't tell you how many times I think to myself today as I sit in that chair how many young men and women in the public schools in Newark today have all the God-given talent that would be necessary for them to be governor of New Jersey, but they never will be because we neither have the guts nor the will to change the status quo and to stand up to the comfort of adults in favor of the potential of children.

I would suggest to you don't let anybody fool that you this issue is any more complicated than that. Understand what the Socratic status quo does to protect itself. It makes issues complex that are not really complex at all. It tells you that this...