 I really want to thank the NEA Foundation for this terrific honor. It's really an amazing night. It's particularly amazing to be here with so many wonderful teachers. It's humbling. And as Dennis mentioned, tonight we're honoring my family as much as me. And I want to thank them. Above all, Sanita Leeds, my wife, partner, and fellow philanthropists. I also want to thank my children who inspire me, keep me busy. And my parents and siblings with whom I built the business that fuels our philanthropy and who built the foundation for our philanthropic work. At the heart of my family's philanthropy and success are really four core values. First, treat people as you would like to be treated. Second, create great organizations to collaborate and work. Third, reach outside because there are always more answers outside than inside. Fourth, embrace diversity. Without these values, my family would not only not have survived, it certainly wouldn't have prospered. Like so many American stories, my family's story starts somewhere else. As Dennis mentioned, both my parents were refugees from Nazi Germany that came to the US in 1939. Thanks to our principles of treating people well, one of my grandfather's former employees helped my grandfather's family come here. Thus my father survived and thrived instead of perishing in the Holocaust. In the US, my parents lived the American dream, as I did, due to a wonderful public education system and wonderful teachers. My mother went at no cost to New York City's Queens College. And my father's education was paid for by the GI Bill. My parents brought us up with the same values to work collaboratively, to treat our people well, to make our organization's wonderful places to work and to embrace diversity. Based on these values, we were able to make our company one of the best companies to work for, according to Fortune and Working Women magazines. Thus we attracted and developed and motivated, and still do, the outstanding people who have worked together to make themselves and our organizations a success. As Dennis also mentioned, my family and I launched the SHOT Foundation, the Institute for Student Achievement, the Alliance for Excellent Education, and the Education Funders Strategy Group. A number of the wonderful people from those organizations are here tonight, and I'd like to thank them for their efforts. And this award is as much about their success as mine. So please join me in thanking them. You know, with these organizations, I've spent a lot of time looking outside the US to see what we can learn from high-performing countries. So I must say that one of the things we learned is they're not perfect. Everybody does take responsibility, and they are more aggressive about treating poverty. But secondly, I'd say we also learned some other big takeaways. First, that teacher unions are strong, part of the solution. Their governments and business leaders work with the unions to build collaborative systems that provide effective places to teach and learn. Second, they create a culture of respect for teachers and learning. In Singapore, teachers are called nation builders. And I did not make this up, but when my wife, Sunita and I, took a taxi and gave the driver the address, he said, oh, that's the National Institute of Education. That's where they're creating our future. Third, these countries consider the US a leader, and will tell you they get their ideas from the US, from its research, its model schools, and its great teachers. This is beyond a doubt the most exciting time in human history. Believe it or not, global prosperity is at an all-time high and going higher. Global hunger is declining, illiteracy is declining. We know more than ever before, and technology is advancing rapidly. It's also, and I'm sure the teachers here who are winning all these awards know, the most exciting time for teaching and learning. We know more about how to work together. We know more about how the brain works and how people learn. And as I said, the US is the leader in the science of learning, in model schools, and as you could tell from the wonderful performance and the honorees, it's a leader in teaching. The NEA, with its 3.2 million members, is the largest professional organization of teachers. As a group, it knows more about teaching and learning than anyone. I appreciate the efforts by the NEA and its leadership to collaborate, to reach out, and to partner. Whether acknowledged or not, the people in this room will lead the change and be the front lines of change. It's only if we accelerate our efforts and work together to make public education a great place for children and teachers that we will attract ever-increasing numbers of people into the profession like the teachers we honor today and accelerate our countries and the world's forward progress. Thank you again for this wonderful honor.