Good Schools Only for the Rich…and Congress
Excellent piece over at One News Now.
Education – ‘the great equalizer’
Pete Chagnon – OneNewsNow – 9/19/2009A panelist with the Bill Cosby town hall event weighs in on educational choice.
The About Our Children town hall featuring Bill Cosby will be broadcast live on MSNBC on Sunday from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. Eastern. The event was the idea of the Independent Women’s Forum president who will also moderate the meeting, which will focus on education, parenting, and health.
Derrell Bradford is deputy director of Excellent Education for Everyone – a school-choice advocacy group co-founded by Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Cory Booker. Bradford will be discussing education at the event. “Every person has to make education a priority — every child, every parent,” he contends. “It is a serious thing, it is the thing, it is the great equalizer, and it is how we will fix much that ails this great nation.”
He adds that at the same time leaders cannot tell children to take education seriously and then continue to send them to failing schools. Bradford believes that educational choice is key to success — and that with choice, children can get a superior education at a fraction of the cost the government is currently spending per child.
“In Newark, [where we have] a billion-dollar school system…we are spending $25,000 per kid…that’s elite private school tuition to get 40 percent of our kids who can’t pass our high school exit exam, which you can pass with a 50,” he points out. Bradford says that type of system is typical of the bloated monopoly the government has on schools — and until that monopoly can be broken, he argues, true education reform will not be achieved.
Amen, brother. The whole thing is here.
The Department of Education and the NEA have not educated one, single child. Sure, a few cents here and there make it to the classroom, but for the most part, the focus is on how many union members they can employ.
