MARYLAND BUSINESS ROUNDTABLE FOR EDUCATION

I like the word "commencement."

I like it because it’s a word that is more about beginnings than about endings. It is more about what comes next for you, as a graduate, than about what came before. And there is so much that I want to say to you today about your future: to encourage you, to challenge you, to support you.

But first, I want to congratulate you. Sometimes, looking back over your shoulder is exactly the right thing to do. Today, I want you to look back at the wonderful thing that you have done in earning this degree. Today, I want you to wallow in what you have just accomplished. I want you to shamelessly celebrate your success. You have worked hard, given up your free time, stayed up late, pushed yourselves, and now here you are: graduates of the School of Professional Studies in Business and Education at the Johns Hopkins University. So congratulations, and whenever the party starts, I hope it’s a great one. You deserve it.

At the heart of it, what we are celebrating here today is the very meaning of your degree. We are celebrating the same thing that parents and teachers and administrators cherish as a tenet of a sound education: the idea that achievement counts, that what you do in school pays off in life. Every one of you here today is a living testament to the truth of that idea. Your Hopkins professional degree, from a world-renowned university, tells people that you merit a certain respect for your knowledge, for your expertise, for your intellectual rigor. It says to people what every diploma should say: that you, the bearer of this degree, deserve the rewards of these credentials because you have earned them. Your degree reveals you as a person who keeps on learning year after year, who keeps your skills sharp in a tough marketplace, and who works at getting better and better at what you do.

But your degree says more about you than your skills and your credentials. It represents a joy in learning, a freedom of the intellect that can bring you wonder and discovery every day of your life. It exemplifies a love for the sensation of experiencing the world, in all its complexity and its change. George Bernard Shaw once said, "The real moment of success is not the moment apparent to the crowd." The real triumph in life, he said, is in "being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one." The degree you will receive today tells the world that you are a person who seeks more than the ordinary from life, a person with your own mighty purpose. And that, too, is reason to celebrate.

But let’s remember that today we are also celebrating those who helped to bring you here to this joyous moment. We are celebrating the loved ones, the parents, the grandparents, the friends, the colleagues, the mentors, the teachers. The people who support us, who teach us, who praise us, and who also humble us by reminding us that we might not know as much as we think we do. Take my mother, for instance, who when I was having difficulty arranging my living room furniture said, "All those degrees, and you still don’t know how to arrange furniture." Or take the fourth-grader whose school I visited. When I asked him a question about computers, he prefaced his reply to me by saying, "What you fail to understand in asking that question..."

These are the people who not only keep us going, but who keep us honest. We should thank them, not just because we need their help and their inspiration, but because we need to be constantly reminded to not take our own success or knowledge for granted. In fact, I think it’s fair to say that in the 21st century the only way to succeed is to never, ever take your success or your knowledge for granted.

Yogi Berra, that always-quotable old New York Yankee (and the only Yankee this Oriole fan will quote), didn’t know much about mega-mergers or dot-coms, but he was onto something when he said, "The future isn’t what it used to be." I think what he meant was that the future always changes once you get there. And I think that a perfect symbol of our new world, of our new future, is the fact that today, in its 90th year, the institution from which you are graduating has a new name: the School of Professional Studies in Business and Education.

It is a name that gets to the core of what education now means for all of us. I can tell you from the work that I do with CEOs and education leaders across the state and throughout the country: today, perhaps more than ever before, business and education are united in the enterprise of building knowledge through our nation’s schools. In a world in which all the rules for graduates have changed, business and education are now not only partners, we are siblings. When you think about it, this is family we are talking about: how our children will gain the tools they need in school. Where our neighbors will work. What our communities will look like. What kinds of choices we will have. Business has a responsibility to provide a realistic view of the workplace, to define skills necessary to succeed and to show that performance in school equals success in the workplace.

Schools are in the business of developing human potential. And business is only as good as the knowledge and the abilities of people who work. That is why, in a knowledge-based economy, teachers and schools are going to play a more and more crucial role in the economic development of our cities, and our states, and our country. If any of you, as teachers, are wondering when you’re going to start to get the kinds of rewards and influence that you deserve, I’m telling you: hang in there. It’s coming. When knowledge becomes the coin of the realm, the teacher holds a pivotal and essential power. It is teachers who make the very existence of business possible. It is teachers who, as part of their job in shaping well-rounded students, can make education relevant to what employers want young people to know. And, at the same time, it is business that has not only the self-interest, but the obligation, to stand up for strong schools. At the Maryland Business Roundtable, I’m seeing it happen, and I’m here to tell you: it is the future.

Just look at the speed of life today. At 3M Corporation, 30 percent of revenues are now from products that are less than three years old. In the auto industry ten years ago in 1990, the average time it took to go from a concept to an actual car was six years. Today, it’s three years. In a publishing industry that usually takes a year to get a book into stores, Stephen King’s new electronic novel went from his laptop to worldwide Internet sales in a matter of weeks. And it never once touched paper. The big publishers are still in shock.

Who is going to prepare us for all of this? Schools. Where do families want to buy houses? In areas with good schools. What do businesses look for when they are hiring or relocating? Solid schools. What helps to determine if a community’s tax base shrinks or grows? The quality of its schools. Where are we discovering that we can put some of the best practices of business to work? In the systems and organization of our schools. It all works together. It is our shared task, as parents and educators and business professionals, to make it work. Together.

Mahatma Gandhi said that we must become the change we seek in the world. Part of doing that, I think, is to embrace our collective responsibility for actually creating the future, one person at a time, one moment at a time. We must watch over our children, assure their safe passage to adulthood, put aside our own skirmishing to do what is best for them. We need to do away with the hierarchies that leave some of us, as educators, feeling undervalued. We need to understand that, in this enterprise that we call education, the real boss is the best interests of our children. In my work, when CEOs from rival companies sit down to talk about what to do for our children and our schools, there are no competitors at the table. There is only us, and the kids, and our future. I think our children deserve that from us. We owe it to them.

And so as we try to become the change that we seek, we must realize that what we do now -- or fail to do now -- will affect this generation, and the next, and the next. We must stop thinking that the problem is "out there" -- somebody else’s job, somebody else’s schools, somebody else’s kids. It’s not. The real problems, and the real solutions, are "in here:" in the examples we set, in the commitment we show, and in the message we send to our communities about what we want from our schools. To solve these problems, we have to understand that real success goes beyond doing well. It means doing good.

I think Thomas Jefferson summed it up for us when he said, "If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be." In the end, that is the real reason to unite around education. That is why Norman Augustine, the former CEO of Lockheed Martin and one of my mentors, has taken such a passionate public position about how a lack of education threatens our democracy. That is why schools are at the very center of our local and national discussions about who we are as a community. Any way you look at it, we are what we learn. And, in vital ways, our schools are where we do it.

And so, as you receive your diploma today and move on through this world a day at a time, what can you do? First, be an advocate for a child. Send a message to children -- your children, our children -- that what they do in school matters. Let them know that an impressive record of achievement is not just a piece of paper; it is the most far-reaching ticket they can ever have, and it will in large measure determine where they can go in life and where they can’t. Do what you can to help a young person to understand that today, just getting by and graduating from school is not enough.

What it comes down to, I think, is using your own path of success to leave guideposts for someone who comes behind you. Maybe these will be small signs, small messages, small actions. But hundreds and hundreds of small things done right add up to something huge. In the words of Margaret Mead, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has."

And look at us. We are not a small group at all. We are the people who make up this society. If, acting individually on behalf of our shared future, we can each do good, then collectively we can achieve greatness.