Excerpted from Gov. Deval Patrick’s commencement address at the University of Massachusetts Boston

Byline

Our founders understood the transformative nature of education. We were one of the first states to require a public education for every citizen. John Adams, a schoolteacher in Worcester before becoming an icon of American democracy, wrote into our Constitution that protecting our liberties will “depend on spreading the opportunities and advantages of education in the various parts of the country, and among the different orders of the people.”

Our Commonwealth is the home of Boston Latin, America’s first free public school; of Harvard, America’s first college; of Mt. Holyoke, America’s first college for women; of Perkins School for the Blind, America’s first school for the sight-impaired. For centuries, we have been a leader in education because our forebears appreciated that education was about advancing civilization and securing our future.

But a glorious history does not guarantee a glorious future. Sensing that the time was right to refresh our mission and commitment, Massachusetts embarked in 1993 on an ambitious path to education reform. You are among the first class of college graduates to have benefited from the commitment to excellence that we undertook as a state. Because of those efforts made over the past 14 years, Massachusetts is recognized as having one of the finest public school systems in the nation. And for that we should all be proud.

But the world keeps changing.

In the Commonwealth today, we still teach on an agrarian schedule, with children dismissed from the school day and the school year in time to plant, to harvest and otherwise keep up with chores around the farm.

Achievement gaps for poor and minority kids persist, and half of all kids in some of our public high schools drop out before they graduate. And they then become the 75 percent of prison inmates and 69 percent of jail inmates in this country.

We have rightly focused on the need to test progress and achievement, but there are serious and thoughtful questions we don’t even ask about whether the test we use measures the skills that count. And when 50 percent — 50 percent — of the entering freshmen at some colleges require remedial courses to be ready for that college’s work. And we offer less and less enrichment for gifted and talented students.

I meet teachers all over the Commonwealth, including in wealthy communities, spending thousands of dollars of their own money for required materials in the classrooms.

Parents are paying fees for their kids to play a school sport, or park in the high school lot, or to join the math team. And there are a record number of property tax override votes in cities and towns all across the Commonwealth because state aid has not and cannot close the gap at current levels between what education actually costs and what local communities can raise.

Mandatory fees on this campus and others are higher than the tuition. Senior faculty appointments are not keeping pace with the need, financial aid is stagnant, and buildings — like your garage over there — are in a sorry state of repair.

And that, my friends, that is just the local landscape. You are about to enter an economy that does not recognize borders. The skills and talents you offer will be measured against those of people in Shanghai and Bangalore as well as in Raleigh and San Jose. China is building a university the size of UCLA every year for the next 10 years. While the United States will graduate 70,000 engineers this year, India is graduating 350,000 engineers, and China an astounding 600,000. Right here in Massachusetts, there are 125,000 people looking for work and 80,000 vacancies — jobs that go unfilled because the people who need work don’t have the skills to do the jobs that are available.

“Human history,” George Orwell wrote, “becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.” My friends, if we rest on our laurels today, if we fail to take account of the changes upon us in the state and in the world, then catastrophe will befall us. And at unspeakable cost.

What we need, I believe, is kids who are ready to learn, teachers who are ready to teach, principals and superintendents who are ready to be accountable, and workers who are ready to excel. We need generations able routinely to even imagine sitting where you sit right now, who can conjure that image at an early age and project themselves and their achievement into the seats you occupy today.

So, right here, right now, I commit my administration for the next 10 years to a statewide and sustained effort to change fundamentally the way we think about and deliver public education, to get ready for our future.