[originaltext] (R)=Condoleezza Rice (I)=Interviewer (I): Finally tonig

(R)=Condoleezza Rice
   (I)=Interviewer
   (I): Finally tonight, the tie between educating our children and national security. It’s by now a familiar warning: Our public schools are not adequately educating our children. A new report put out by the Council on Foreign Relations frames the risk in a global context, impacting both our economic and military power—among its recommendations, expanding a core curriculum in school districts across the country beyond an emphasis on reading and math to include more science, technology, history, and foreign languages, offer students more choices and competition to public schools, and launch a national security readiness audit to raise awareness and hold schools accountable. The 30-member task force was headed by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and I sat down with her in Washington this morning. Condoleezza Rice, welcome.
   (R): Thank you.
   (I): Secretary Rice, why frame this as a national security issue? And make it concrete. What’s the specific impact you see of poor education?
   (R): National security is broader than what you can do with your military forces, obviously. But, even there, when it comes to the very tangible assets that the United States needs to defend itself, the education of people who can be soldiers, too many people can’t qualify for military service.
   (I): Simply can’t qualify?
   (R): Simply can’t qualify, when it comes to the foreign service or to intelligence agencies or to the ability to have people who can think about the problems of cyber-warfare and cyber-security and critical infrastructure protection. Then, of course, there’s the matter of the competitiveness of our economy, People can fill the jobs and be the innovators of the future, so that the United States maintains its economic edge, and then finally the matter of our social cohesion. The United States, we’ve always been held together by the belief that it doesn’t matter where you came from. It matters where you’re going. And that is—absolutely, without education, we cannot maintain that cohesion.
   (I): Speaking of that, I heard you talked about that this morning, the social cohesion part. We’re sitting here, your report comes out at a time where there’s a lot of sense that the game is a little rigged, that public life is unfair, and in education as well.
   (R): Absolutely. If people believe the game is rigged, if people no longer believe that you can start out anywhere and end up at the top successfully in America, that the American dream is part of the past, I think that erodes a sense of belief and confidence in our nation. It makes us inward-looking. It makes us envious of other people, all the kinds of things that we have avoided as a people. If that turns against us, then I think our national security will be affected. And today, the sad fact is that, for the children who have the fewest options, the educational system is not delivering. If I can look at your zip code and I can tell whether you’re going to get a good education, we’ve got a real problem.
   (I): You feel you can do that?
   (R): Yes increasingly. And I think if you are a child in difficult circumstances, the neighborhood school may not be the answer any longer.
This is the end of Part One of the interview. Questions 1 to 5 are based on what you have just heard.
   Question One What is the interview mainly about?
   Question Two What is recommended in the report?
   Question Three What is the job that people can’t qualify in the army?
   Question Four What can hold American people together?
   Question Five According to the woman, what can she tell when she looks at the zip code of a child?