Janet Napolitano
Janet Napolitano
Janet Ann Napolitanois an American politician, lawyer, and university administrator who served as the 21st Governor of Arizona from 2003 to 2009 and United States Secretary of Homeland Security from 2009 to 2013, under President Barack Obama. She has been president of the University of California system since September 2013, shortly after she resigned as Secretary of Homeland Security...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPolitician
Date of Birth29 November 1957
CityNew York City, NY
CountryUnited States of America
And we ask the American people to play an important part of our layered defense. We ask for cooperation, patience and a commitment to vigilance in the face of a determined enemy.
Now, a lot of what we are doing right now, quite frankly, is because of what happened on Christmas. Many of the things were kind of in the works. We were already planning, for example, the purchase and deployment of advanced imaging technology. You call them body scanners. We call them AITs (Advanced Imaging Technologies).
Today in America, we are trying to prepare students for a high tech world of constant change, but we are doing so by putting them through a school system designed in the early 20th Century that has not seen substantial change in 30 years.
So not only do we need to deal with threats as they emerge, we have to be thinking in anticipation of future threats, and the things we do have to be things that enable the system to continue to work.
Public schools were designed as the great equalizers of our society - the place where all children could have access to educational opportunities to make something of themselves in adulthood.
If American schooling is inadequate now, just imagine how much more obsolete it will be when today's kindergarten students graduate from high school in just 12 years.
Smart businesses do not look at labor costs alone anymore. They do look at market access, transportation, telecommunications infrastructure and the education and skill level of the workforce, the development of capital and the regulatory market.
You can't imagine a world, quite frankly, without a safe and secure aviation system. And so our job is to really focus on that, and what we need to do to keep it safe and secure.
With these newly forming areas, it's too soon to predict what they will be in the long run, ... I think areas like Pinal County are very fluid.
Today's children need more years of education than we are offering. And they need more daily hours of instruction than we are providing. They are ready to learn long before kindergarten, and on the other end of the spectrum, all of them must have access to advanced education for years after they graduate from high school.
Our school facilities must be repaired, and our teachers need to be trained and treated as artisans of a noble profession.
They have a great facility there, well prepared, and we'll keep dividing between Phoenix and Tucson as they come in,
As we move deeper into the 21st Century, the need for a quality public school system will become more of an economic issue and more of a civil rights issue. Because, as our economy relies more on brains and less on brawn, the only way everyone can secure all the blessings of liberty is to receive a quality education.
They (FEMA officials) just don't have their act together, ... They didn't know where their evacuees are; they didn't know how many each state had. Those are basic questions. You need competence at the top to manage these large-scale disasters.