With the economy fizzling and the U.S. appeared headed for a recession, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich calls for good pre-schools, small class sizes and higher quality education in low and moderate income communities.

Reich, now a faculty member at Berkeley's Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, made his remarks in an op-ed that appeared in Tuesday’s New York Times, entitled “Totally Spent’’.

“Over the longer term, inequality can be reversed only through better schools for children in lower- and moderate-income communities,’’ Reich wrote. “This will require, at the least, good preschools, fewer students per classroom and better pay for teachers in such schools, in order to attract the teaching talent these students need.’’

Reich, whose remarks drew nearly 200 comments to the Times website, also called for increasing the wages of the bottom two-thirds of Americans. He noted that while the number of working mothers with school-aged children has almost doubled since 1970 to more than 70 percent, “there’s a limit to how many mothers can maintain paying jobs.’’

Reich maintains his own blog at http://robertreich.blogspot.com/