I'm taking four days off. I'll leave you with this. Expect Al Sharpton to adopt it as his own soon. He has co-opted several of Jackson Jr's ideas already:
A Public Education Of Equal High Quality
By Congressman Jesse L. Jackson, Jr.
Thursday, May 22, 2003Which do you think would provide your family with greater security and long-term protection—an education, or a gun? I believe most of you would reply, “An education.” If education is the priority of the American people – and I believe it is – then we should have the wisdom and political will to codify it in the form of a constitutional amendment that guarantees every American citizen the legal right to a public education of equal high quality.
Education is primarily a state and local responsibility in the United States. In the truest sense, then, we really don’t have an American educational system or a national commitment to education. We have stratified layers of different educational systems in America, with huge discrepancies in the quantity of money spent and the quality of public education available. Bona fide equal opportunity, under the current stratified structure, is impossible and will always be a hoax.
If we believe that every child deserves a high quality education, then how can we provide an equal high quality education for every child---53,000,000 of them, located in 50 states, 3067 counties, 20,000 municipalities, 85,000 schools, located in 15,000 school districts? It will be virtually impossible without the assistance of the Constitution guaranteeing every citizen the right to a public education of equal high quality. As long as education in America is a state right and not a human right under our system of government it will always be separate and unequal.
Local communities should continue to administer and operate local public schools, but I believe they should do so within the framework of a high minimum standard that a constitutional amendment would provide. The amendment, however, should be accompanied with a new federal commitment to provide a public education to every American child of equal high quality.
Creating a public school system of equal high quality would turn the conservatives’ “competition” argument on its head. Yes, competition would improve all education in the United States. But with this amendment the real competition would be among the states, counties, municipalities and public schools to reach, maintain and even improve on the standard of “equal high quality.” Then it would be the private and parochial schools that would have to vastly improve in order to attract students away from the public schools – and get parents to spend additional money to pay for the privilege.
Admittedly, while the current Supreme Court is also very conservative and could potentially interpret an amendment narrowly—all Supreme Court interpretations reflect the Court’s current legal orientation and politics—the Court’s reasoning would still have to come to grips with each of those concepts, “all citizens”, “shall enjoy”, “a right” to a “public education of equal high quality.” Just as a conservative Court rendered a narrow interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, 58 years later the Court in Brown brought forth a broader interpretation. The more liberal interpretation of Brown however, would not have been possible without the Fourteenth Amendment. So just as a conservative Supreme Court might render a conservative interpretation of this amendment today, a liberal Court might later interpret it more broadly. The central point is that every parent and child in the future would have greater federal legal protection and, therefore, a better chance for a good education with an amendment than without it.
Why don’t the politicians get it? Both conservative Republicans and Democrats use noble motives and responsible language to articulate their destructive education priorities. The catchphrases include “being fiscally responsible,” “exercising fiscal and monetary restraint,” and “practicing necessary economic austerity.” The program implementation is called “balancing the budget,” “eliminating the debt,” and “slowing down growth to fight inflation.” But since the Civil War, these conservative economic priorities have applied only to domestic programs of economic and social reconstruction.
Economic stinginess, fiscal responsibility, austerity, tight money, necessary cuts---whatever they are called---do not apply to national defense or security expenditures, which are always conceived and defined in narrow military terms alone. In fact, American education has sometimes been the accidental beneficiary of the obsession with defense, along with the spontaneous and unplanned approach to public education.
If we believe in the power and value of education, then we must stop reacting defensively out of fear. We must go on the offensive, and democratically plan and pay for the finest public school system the world has ever known. We have the money, the organizational skill, the technology, and the knowledge to create such a system—and the amendment that frames the issue and sets the standard. The only missing element is the political will.
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Jesse L. Jackson, Jr. is a Democrat who represents the Second Congressional District of Illinois. He is also the author of "A More Perfect Union, Advancing New American Rights" (Welcome Rain, 2001).