This is my 12th year in Pittsburgh, and one of the things that fascinates me is that we hear so much about economic revitalization, political leadership, neighborhoods, diversity of employment opportunities, technology, new growth. Boy, maybe I’m not paying attention, but it seems to me we don’t really hear a lot about education.

The critical issue, for me, is not the economic aspect of regional development, but the educational aspect. I know in the arts, in classical music, we’ve lost a generation. The orchestras have relied on their old audiences and haven’t developed new audiences. I really wonder whether we’ve lost a generation of school kids. I think we’ve lost clearly some sense of what’s good and what’s not good.

To get at this issue, we have to go all the way back to the beginning and ask "What do we want for our children? What do we want their experience in school to be?" And that’s every day. That’s not college. That’s not SAT scores. That’s not the Westinghouse Science project. It’s what we want for those students every day in that classroom with those teachers.