On my inaugural Reality Check podcast (and thank you, NR for hosting it), Howard Fuller chastises teachers union boss Randi Weingarten for berating people who choose to get their kids out of bad schools and send them to other schools, such as charters: “When someone like Randi Weingarten says . . . ‘Charter schools are the [polite] cousins of segregation,’ It’s demagoguery at the highest level.”
Having been a leader in the coalition to bring vouchers to Milwaukee’s poorest in 1990, and in doing similar for kids every day since, Fuller knows of what he speaks. Today in America, the greatest country on earth, more than half of our children fail to master the critical knowledge and lessons necessary to be successful and truly live the American Dream. That’s not only unacceptable, it’s benign neglect. As the seminal report “A Nation at Risk” admonished in 1983 (an unbelievable 34 years ago!),
“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. As it stands, we have allowed this to happen to ourselves.”
How about today, we resolve together to say, “not on our watch!”
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