U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan headlined the final day of the South by Southwest Education conference, offering his thoughts on educational technologies and fielding questions about the future of learning in the United States.

His speech, given March 8, highlighted this year's focus at SXSWedu: putting technology in classrooms.

"I really believe that technology is a game-changer in the field of education," he said. "It's a game-changer we desperately need, both to improve achievement for all and to increase equity for children and for communities that have been historically desperately underserved."

Duncan urged those in attendance to push for progress and also expressed the need to tailor learning experiences to the individual, inspire creativity and build an infrastructure to support collaborative learning environments in schools.

He spoke about the necessary changes to an industrialized education system that is becoming increasingly antiquated in a technology-driven job market and the imperative to provide disadvantaged students with the same opportunities as their more privileged peers.

"Technology can level the playing field, instead of tilting it against low-income, minority and rural students who might not have laptops and iPhones at home," he said. "It opens the door for all students, as long as we make sure the students with the most need have real access."

The Chicago native has been an advocate of elevating teachers' statuses as one of the top professions in the country and creating incentives for talented educators.

"We've demonized teachers; we haven't given them the respect they need," he said. "I think teachers are desperately underpaid. Not everyone agrees with me, but I've been very public; I think we should double starting teacher's salaries No one goes into teaching to make a million dollars, but you shouldn't have to take a vow of poverty to do it, either."

He also expressed an ambitious desire to get high school dropout rates down to zero, saying that dropouts "are basically condemned to poverty and social failure."

During the Q&A portion of the keynote speech, an audience member asked, "[When] are we going to actually put a ceiling on what a college can charge as tuition?" Duncan responded by emphasizing Income-Based Repayment (IBR) plans and an increase in Pell Grants by $40 billion over the next decade.

Duncan addressed the No Child Left Behind education policy, which supports standardized testing as a measure for achievement, calling it "fundamentally broken." He added that he would meet with Gov. Rick Perry and encourage Texas to apply for a waiver that would pardon the state from certain aspects of NCLB.

SXSWedu Quotes

LeVar Burton, actor, "Roots," "Reading Rainbow," "Star Trek: The Next Generation"

"I can remember very clearly as a child growing up in Sacramento, Calif., wanting desperately to be anything but what I was. It was so uncomfortable being a person of color in the early 1960s. It was no fun being black in America. I wanted, with every fiber of my being, to wish myself into another state of being."

"For me, science fiction literature tends to ask what I know to be two of the most important words in combination in the English language, which are 'what if.'"

"It is our responsibility to discover and discern what [each person's] gift is, and then come hard to the table ... Come hard to the table in the service of something that is greater than ourselves."

Marjorie Scardino, Pearson CEO

"In today's global economy, average is no place to be. Countries and people need to work to be exceptional to keep pace with what average probably used to be."

Mark Williams, AISD board president

"[SXSWedu] is a great conference because it reinforces what we know, but find hard to do. This conference talks about the combination of not only technology, but technology as a tool to enable the content, the pedagogy of projects and engagement that students need in order to [develop] 21st century skills."

"We can make change, and we'll do it well, not perfectly. Is the public going to be willing to let us have some misfires as we do a little [research and development] and innovation? We hope they will, because I think we all sort of intuitively know that the kids in the school system today are very different than the ones we've had in the past."