Exclusive Interview with Secretary Arne Duncan, Katia Beauchamp and Andrew Yang.
HARLOW: Earlier this week at the Clinton global initiative in Denver, Colorado, I sat down with education secretary, Arne Duncan, Katia Beauchamp, Birchbox co-founder and entrepreneur, and venture for America founder, Andrew Yang. We talked about how the American workforce is changing and what we need to do to stay ahead.</s>HARLOW: Let me start with you, Secretary Duncan. It seems like every city that I go to, and I focus a lot on income inequality and poverty in this country in my reporting, and every city I go to, I speak to mothers. Mothers in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Mothers in Baltimore. Mothers in Detroit. And I ask them what they need. And they say, I need better education for my kids. And I know it is an answer that frustrates people. But you just told me 81 percent, that's the high school graduation rate in this country. Is our system moving fast enough to help the people that need it most? And what's the change that you want to see, to create the opportunity to create the next Katia and Andrew?</s>ARNIE DUNCAN, EDUCATION SECRETARY: So we're thrilled that our nation has an historic high of graduation rates, 81 percent. Even more pleased that every group of students, African-American, Latino, native American, Asian, white students, poor children, children with special needs, English language learners, everyone is improving, but we are not getting better fast enough. I really do think this income inequality, this division in society, between the haves and the have-nots, that's the defining issue that we have to solve. And I think we can only solve that by giving great educational opportunity to every child. And I think that the dividing line in our nation now is less they're around class, they're around education opportunity. You give me the poorest kid from a toughest neighborhood and for, you know, single mom, or dysfunctional family, put them in a great early childhood education program. Put them in a good elementary and middle school. Put them in a high school where they have high expectations and a chance to take AP classes. That student -- that young person will be just fine. But absent those things, we're actually perpetuating poverty, perpetuating social failure. So I think while education has always been critically important, I would argue it's never been more important. So what do we need to do to scale? To give every child a chance? I always start with early childhood education. It's the best investment we can make.</s>HARLOW: Pre-k?</s>DUNCAN: Pre-k. High-quality pre-k. And if our babies can enter kindergarten, ready to be successful, then the world changes for them. If they start behind, we don't do a great job of catching them up. Making sure that children are going to schools with high expectations, with great teachers and great principals, the chance to be truly college and career ready changes everything. And if they can graduate high school and go on to some form of higher education, they have a real shot in life. But we have to take to scale what does work for children.</s>HARLOW: That has to be the most important thing, doesn't it?</s>DUNCAN: Yes. Obviously, I'm biased, but I think everyone else is far down below that. And just growing up in Chicago and working in the inner city, on the south side, I understood how powerful education was. But what I also saw was that too many of my friends growing up shot and killed, got locked up, and the ones where that happened, with these tragic outcomes as a young kid, that's very, very hard to watch. Those are ones that didn't graduate from high school. My friends that graduate from high school didn't have those, so it's bigger than education. We talk about Baltimore, we talk about Ferguson, you can't talk about these big, massive social issues without talking about real educational opportunity, or the lack of that opportunity.</s>HARLOW: Andrew, you have said, well, your goal, issued say, also, is to create 100,000 new U.S. jobs, right, by 2025. You think we are training people for careers that existed 20 years ago. Do we need something drastic? Something dramatic to really shake things up?</s>ANDREW YANG, FOUNDER, VENTURE FOR AMERICA: Well, I believe we do. And as one example, there's a town in Michigan where they're testing self-driving cars and they're projected to come online in 20 years. Right now, there are about 900,000 Americans that drive cars for a living. And many of them are t no really prepared for different --</s>HARLOW: Bus drivers, taxi drivers, chauffeurs.</s>YANG: Yes, so there's a curve coming. This is the first time in recorded history where technological advances actually haven't driven up the average income or the median income. And so, our system, right now, is in a foot race against technological progress, to be able to educate people for the jobs that are coming this year, next year, 10, 20 years from now.</s>HARLOW: And so, what is your recommendation? What do we need to do? Because you say that there is this misconception, that innovation only comes from Silicon Valley. That we need to look more, at these cities that frankly need it most - the Detroits, the Baltimores.</s>YANG: Well, the way I learned was that I had a more experienced mentor, that I worked for, for a number of years. And I think that apprenticeship really is something that the U.S. needs to bring back. Not just in entrepreneurship, which is where my organization, bench of America focuses, but really in a variety of different fields. Right now part of our educational system is that we have a one size fits all factory model, all the way up, including for four-year degrees. And we need to introduce more varied options that lead people to productive careers that don't necessarily involve four years on campus.</s>KATIA BEAUCHAMP, CO-FOUNDER, BIRCHBOX: Yes. That's what I was going to say as well. I think it's really interesting that with all of the innovation around us, education just looks very similar than it did for our parents and our parents' parents. And what we really are seeing happening, which is truly exciting, is that taking risks in entrepreneurship is now bleeding into businesses directly. You see entrepreneurs making a career of disrupting education in and of itself. And that creates the flywheel that Andrew is talking about.</s>HARLOW: What it takes, though, is guts. You say, Andrew, we don't teach our children to take enough risks.</s>YANG: Entrepreneurship right now in the U.S. is at a 24-year low among 18 to 30-year-olds. I think it's exactly to the point that you're describing, that we're training our young people to be quite risk-averse and failure averse. I mean, if you got an "F" and took it home to your parents, I'm sure they wouldn't be, hey, that was a great learning experience. I think they would probably a tough conversation. And I'm reflecting on this now more that I have a son. And so, I'm trying to, you know, like play that scene out, and be like, oh, I should be pretty understanding. But our system right now, also, is very much in the classroom, where many college graduates were fortunate enough to graduate on time, which isn't everyone, but they haven't had many experiences outside of the classroom, which is in contrast to a place like Israel, where college graduates have had two or three years in operating environments, in military service, and others. And then their appetite for risk is much, much higher. If you look at their entrepreneurship statistics, they're the highest in the world.</s>HARLOW: He brings up Israel a lot as an example, and Germany, apprenticeship. Is that a model we should seriously consider?</s>DUNCAN: It is a model. More and more high schools are moving this direction, but having a real opportunity to learn from mentors, folks who are in the entrepreneurial space. If you talk to young kids today in high school, they all want to own their own business. They don't want to work for the traditional big firms. And so, if you want to capture them, if you want to continue to increase graduation rates and reduce dropout rate, you have to provide these opportunities. I think the thing that's so important, too, is so many of our kids are so disconnected from this world. If you go to, you know, south side of Chicago, west side, or inner city Baltimore, there aren't jobs there. There aren't businesses there. And it's hard to imagine, it's hard to dream those dreams when you are so socially disconnected. And so we have to bring the entrepreneurs into the communities. Silicon valley is fantastic. What Andrew's doing to bring them into Detroit and the other places is so desperately important. Our kids need mentors, they need role models, they need those opportunities.</s>HARLOW: When we return, one of my panelists said, there's something we desperately need more of in business, women. We'll discuss.