Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was tapped Thursday to succeed former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush at the helm of the Foundation for Excellence in Education. She’s no stranger to the education reform movement. She’s long been an advocate for school choice.
This fall, during a keynote discussion at the foundation’s annual conference in Washington, she discussed issues from growing up in the segregated South to trusting parents to make decisions about their children’s education.
In this excerpt, transcribed and lightly edited, she explains how she supports both improving existing public schools, and giving parents more choices.
I’m a great believer in public schools and public education. It’s one of the foundational institutions of our democracy.
But who are we kidding?
The problem today is that we have a public school system that is, in its very essence, unequal. If you are a parent or a family of relative means, you will move to a district where the schools are good. That’s why houses are expensive in Palo Alto, where I live. That’s why houses are expensive in Fairfax County, near here. That’s why they’re expensive in Hoover, Ala., right outside of Birmingham.
If you are really of means, you will send your kid to a private school. And so who’s stuck in failing neighborhood schools? Poor kids, many of whom are minority kids. So we already have an opt-out system in the public school system. And all that those of use who believe in school choice are saying is, give parents who don’t otherwise have the means a chance to send their children to a school that might work for them.
Now, we’ve got many public opportunities. Charter schools are over-subscribed because so many of them serve children very, very well. In parts of the country, [parents have] the ability to go to a school district where your child is going to get a better [education] … So it’s not the abandonment of public schools.
And I don’t think there’s a person in this room who wouldn’t say we shouldn’t do everything we can to fix the public schools. We need to have higher quality teachers. We need to have better-trained people in the classroom. There’s a lot of work to do on the public schools.
But in the meantime, we can’t afford to lose generation after generation of kids on the alter of, “well, they have to stay in the public schools to which they are assigned. ”
We just can’t afford to lose those kids, because we do know this: If you don’t read by the time you’re in third grade, you’re probably not going to read. So we’re not losing kids every 18 years. We’re losing them by the time they’re eight or nine years old.
So my remedy is yes, high-quality teachers. Yes, better after-school programs. Yes, early childhood education. All of those remedies.
But school choice is a near-term intervention to prevent the further deterioration of the circumstances of so many children who are currently trapped in those bad schools.
Watch the full clip of her discussion with Fox News’ Juan Williams and U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio here:
