In addition to endorsing Barack Obama for president yesterday, Colin Powell told Tom Brokaw on Meet the Press that he believes education is the most pressing under-the-radar challenge the next president will face. Here’s the quote:

I think the American people and the gentlemen running for president will have to, early on, focus on education more than we have seen in the campaign so far. America has a terrible education problem in the sense that we have too many young people not finishing school. A third of our kids don’t finish high school; 50 percent of minorities don’t finish high school. We’ve got to work on this. My wife and I are leading a campaign for this purpose.

Powell also spoke about the need for the United States to become a leader on alleviating poverty abroad.

It’s no great mystery why Powell identified with the Republican Party for most of his professional life; he came up through the culture and customs of the military. But with these core beliefs, the Obama endorsement is really no surprise.

—Dana Goldstein

Dana Goldstein, a former associate editor and writer at the Prospect, comes from a family of public-school educators. She received the Spencer Fellowship in Education Journalism, a Schwarz Fellowship at the New America Foundation, and a Puffin Foundation Writing Fellowship at the Nation Institute. Her journalism is regularly featured in Slate, The Atlantic, The Nation, The Daily Beast, and other publications, and she is a staff writer at the Marshall Project.