Education - Change we can't afford Not to make

"We're going to have the best-educated American people in the world." Dan Quayle, 9/21/88

When it comes to proof that we need to change our education system, we only have to reflect on Former Vice President Dan Quayle. I quite enjoy his misstatements and spoonerisms until I remember that Vice Pres. Quayle is a product of the public school system that my children are floundering though.

"Quite frankly, teachers are the only profession that teach our children." Dan Quayle, 9/18/90

There is no single scapegoat for the problems our society faces in educating our people. Teachers aren't the problem, funding isn't the problem, poverty isn't the problem, video games aren't the problem, children aren't the problem. We have locked ourselves in a cycle of addressing bits of the big picture. We know many of the issues and have tried to address them politically. It obviously isn't working. When we do see a solution to one piece of the puzzle we don't look to see if the first solution causes another part of the problem.

"If we do not succeed, then we run the risk of failure." --Quayle, to the Phoenix Republican Forum, 3/23/90 (reported in Esquire, 8/92) Also reported by Reuters, 5/2/90

StartChange.net believes that we have to make changes to our public education system on both the macro and micro scales. We need to address the education and accountability of our teachers, we need to address poverty and culture's effects on children, we need to utilize the science we've spent billions of dollars subsidizing to create an educational system that will create "the best-educated American people in the world."