Your party has been doing everything it can to destroy our public education system -- cutting funds, reducing the nurturing of the human mind to one number on a standardized test at the end of the year (too late to do the teacher any good), deprofessionalizing and demonizing teachers.
I could go on and on, but you and I both know what I'm talking about: You want to privatize education so if we absolutely must spend public money on educating the children of the masses, at least your billionaire cronies like Rupert Murdoch will get to put a big slice of that $500 billion pot into their pockets. And the path to that goal involves ensuring that public education fails, so privatization will seem like the solution to an intractable problem.
A few years ago, before the all-out assault on public education, there was a push in the educational community to expand early childhood education -- full-day kindergarten, expanded pre-school, more funding for Head Start. I'm sure you remember -- even that Bush guy and his wife were on board.
Now, of course, that is out of the question. Adding more educational services? That's a laugh. It's taking everything those of us in education can do -- much of it using our own private funds because you took the money away from our schools -- to provide just the basic minimum.
Nevertheless, US students who do not come from poverty are still keeping pace with, and even leading, the rest of the world.
But what about the kids from low socioeconomic status households? The ones who show up on the first day of kindergarten with a vocabulary that is only a fraction of the vocabulary of their peers -- a gap that, once established, continues to grow throughout the educational years? Who know few or none of their ABC's, while their peers are linking letters to sounds or even reading already? The kids who will spend the entirety of their educational career playing catch-up from the huge gap they start kindergarten with?
Mitt, these students need smaller class sizes, and earlier education, and more adults to provide them with more interventions to close that achievement gap. But I know for damn sure those in your party won't allow us to do that as long as they retain a shred of power at either the state or national level. (Much less will they provide the social safety net that prevents poverty from being an educational issue in other industrialized countries.)
But the good news for socioeconomically disadvantaged students is that at least they have Sesame Street, exposing them to one letter and one number a day. And the Cat in the Hat, who on Monday will be teaching kids about the international space station. And a variety of other children's educational programming addressing literacy, STEM, history, geography, the arts, and how our democracy works.
Public education, done well, is the embodiment of what has made this country the envy, and the beacon of hope, to the world: It gives those who start their lives in disadvantaged circumstances a real opportunity to pull themselves out of those circumstances and make whatever they want to make of their lives.
This, Mitt, is what America is all about.
And if you and your party (with a disturbing amount of collaboration from elected Democrats) refuse to fund public education and insist on hamstringing it so that it beomes more difficult with each passing day for educators to do our jobs, at least let PBS keep the pennies that fall out of your bags of gold so they can continue providing, on the cheap, some vestige of what you won't let the schools do.
If there is only one thing worth borrowing money from China for, that one thing is reducing, or at least preventing the expansion of, the achievement gap.