By Michael P. Riccards

In the final stretch for the presidency, we are ignoring one of the most important issues — education. 

When I wrote my fourth volume of short stories, I examined the role my paternal grandmother played in the American assimilation process. She was from a poor family outside of Naples and had to raise her siblings when her mother died young. She married and came to New Jersey, where she struggled to help provide the amenities for her family of five children.  

I was surprised when I found that she, who died when I was only four-years-old, was really the person who provided the impetus and spark to get the family out of the depths of the Depression and into the charming American middle class. On one Easter, they had ketchup on spaghetti for dinner. They could not afford meat sauce. Most importantly, she insisted that all of her children go to college, including the two daughters — a very rare demand for Italian American women in those days.  

I walked away realizing that she intuitively knew that education was the ladder out of the lower class. She did not have much education herself, but she understood the American dream. All of her children went to college; the men graduated, and the girls didn’t. But each ended up married, most with children, with houses and fine cars. She succeeded as she never realized, and most importantly, she was the key member of my lineage, a fact I never realized before. God bless her.

Now in our nation we are saying that the American dream is dead, especially for poor, uneducated white people and for legions of immigrants and their descendants. So it should be a major issue — how do we restore education to the heart of the American dream? While Harris dodges questions and while Trump compares genitalia sizes, we the American citizens are not focusing on education. The people who enshrined universal public education, who created  the greatest network of public universities in the history of the world, are plagued with a generation of children who can barely understand the arts of literacy.  

Just when we were making some progress on closing the achievement gap among the races, the pandemic cut two years of learning out of the school years. Still the schools are faced with two great problems: the decline in test scores especially in mathematics as early as the 4th grade and the chronic absenteeism problems still plaguing our nation. Kids can not learn if they are not in school. We learned that from our use of so-called remote learning. Nothing replaces a good teacher, a structured curriculum, and a program that insists on testing, sequential learning, and honest feedback.

The candidates, and we the citizens, need to move toward a longer school year, a longer day, a mandatory summer set of remedial courses, supplemental salaries for summer work by teachers, a public policy that demands that students go to school and that penalizes the parents and grandparents by withholding government subsidies, a free community college system, the adaption of the National School Standards Board benchmarks on vocational education, and a greater coordination in the regional associations, like the Southern Regional Board.

The accrediting associations like the New England and the Middle States are ridiculous and should be abandoned in favor of a demanding national regulatory board. How long did the Trump University milk students before even the feds got tired of its duplicity? Also, we have millions of educated elderly who are currently bored and watching soap operas every day. They should join an elder care group and be available to tutor one-on-one the deficient left behind. The kids need more mentoring and the older people need some link to the future generation. All would benefit.

We are talking about forgiving college debt. One half of all young Americans go to college, half of them never graduate, so college degrees are for the top quarter, operating in a frankly low demanding environment.

Instead of worrying about the Middle East, the students need to focus on a demanding curriculum and earning a decent paycheck so they can support the government and Social Security and Medicare.

And as we all learned during  the COVID pandemic, our health system is disjointed, confused and not unavailable to some people. There has been since FDR some discussion about universal medical care, how it would work, and if it is American.

I propose a very simpler solution. All Americans will have a choice. They can get medical coverage at work, or if they choose the federal government plans, they can be treated like our congressmen and senators. They have a choice of programs that have an array of benefits, Surely our elected representatives would not be covered by anything un-American.

Michael P. Riccards, a former college president, is the author of 30 books, including “A Republic If You Can Keep it.”

Categories: Jandoli Institute, Michael Riccards, Politics