John Legend, the Grammy Award-winning musician and activist, delivered a passionate address at Kean University in 2011 that centered on education as the defining civil rights issue of the era. Legend, who graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1999, drew on his own background growing up in a blue-collar home in western Ohio where most of his high school classmates never made it to graduation. Legend laid out sobering statistics: the United States had dropped from first to eighteenth in high school graduation rates among developed nations, and just fifteen percent of schools were responsible for fifty percent of all dropouts—schools concentrated in the poorest communities. He pointed to New Jersey specifically, which ranked well nationally in overall achievement but 47th for its achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged students. This stark framing set up his central argument that educational inequality perpetuates the cycle of poverty and must be confronted as a fundamental question of justice.