US Presidency
2013

Let's give our kids that chance. Let's also make sure that a high school diploma puts our kids on a path to a good job. Right now, countries like Germany focus on graduating their high school students with the equivalent of a technical degree from one of our community colleges. So those German kids, they're ready for a job when they graduate high school. They've been trained for the jobs that are there. Now at schools like P-Tech in Brooklyn, a collaboration between New York Public Schools and City University of New York and IBM, students will graduate with a high school diploma and an associate's degree in computers or engineering. We need to give every American student opportunities like this. And four years ago, we started Race to the Top a competition that convinced almost every state to develop smarter curricula and higher standards, all for about 1 percent of what we spend on education each year.