Philadelphia is at a crossroads. Our city has great opportunities and great challenges facing us over the next four years. The choices we make now will determine the type of city we will be in a generation, and I am running for Mayor to make sure that Philadelphia becomes a City of Opportunity for all of its residents.

Over the last decade, we have watched as Center City and University City boomed, and as the Navy Yard begun to take off. Shiny new towers have gone up as jobs and residents have started to come back. But there’s another side of Philadelphia as well.

Today, 40 percent of Philadelphians with a job have to commute outside of the City to get to work. We have the second lowest rate of small business job growth since the Great Recession, ahead of only Detroit. Crime is far too high, and relationships between police and community are badly frayed. And, most distressingly, our schools have failed to educate a generation of our children. We can do better. We can make sure every child gets a world-class education, and that every family lives in safer and cleaner neighborhoods.

Fixing our schools starts with ending the SRC – without equivocation and without conditions – and restoring local, parental control of Philadelphia schools. We deserve to run our own school district. To fix our schools, we also need to fund them. When teachers don’t even have pens and paper for their classrooms, much less textbooks or technology, our children can not learn. This will not be an easy process, but it is an absolutely necessary step for the future of our city.

Once we fix our schools, young families who move out of the City after they have kids will stay here and businesses that want a well-educated workforce will begin to return. But to improve our economy, we need to do more. Philadelphia’s working class, middle class, and small businesses pay far too much in taxes. You pay the same tax rate on your house as a mega corporation pays on a Center City office tower. You pay a 4% wage tax on every penny of your income that suburban residents don’t have to pay. That just doesn’t make sense. I will change it.

To make sure that every Philadelphian can share in our prosperity, I will also make sure that every Philadelphian is provided with true justice. The era of mass stop-and-frisks of African-American and Latino men made without regard to whether they have done anything wrong has to end. We need community policing and mutual respect – where individual police officers are on the beat in neighborhoods, where residents know officers by name. Justice also demands that we provide a welcoming city to immigrants and provide them with municipal IDs and all civil services regardless of how they came to America.

I am running for Mayor to take on those tough challenges because that is what Philadelphia deserves. We’re a can-do city, and we do not take no for an answer. That is the approach I have taken my whole life.

Since I was a kid, people have been telling me that I shouldn’t dream big and that couldn’t accomplish anything. I was told I would never get out of poverty. I was told I would never graduate college or law school. I was told I couldn’t fix public housing or make the courts work. I have never listened to those voices – because they were wrong. As your Mayor, if you dream with me, if you stand with me, and if you fight with me, I will never stop fighting for you.