美语听力素材:人们重新关注新冠疫情期间学校的选择(1)

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At some point, for the sake of our children, the policies must take priority over the personalities. So, because you have an issue with President Trump's tone, you're going to allow Biden and Harris to deny our underserved black and brown children school choice. There has never been a bigger embrace of giving parents the opportunity to choose which school they want to send their children to and making their tax dollars portable to meet their decision, whether it be public or private or religious. Any of those choices. Now, COVID-19 has heightened this issue because a lot of parents are teaching from home and they're becoming better acquainted than ever with what their kids are learning and what they're not being taught in school. So, The Wall Street Journal wrote a very powerful piece on this today. And part of that piece says this: "...parents are also discovering the woke political bias that passes for education in too many schools. In Philadelphia, a public-school teacher tweeted his concern that 'conservative parents' listening in 'are my chief concern'. School choice is the real civil rights issue of our time, and the GOP deserves credit for making it a marquee part of its 2020 agenda." goes on to write The Wall Street Journal editorial board. 

Joining me now, Jack Brewer, CEO of the Brewer Group, and a former NFL player. Jack, always good to talk to you. Thank you for being here tonight. Great to be here. I wonder what you see changing in terms of how people look at school choice, particularly in the black community where a lot of children, you know, for decades have not really had any choice at all where they go to school. Yeah. Martha, you know, I spent a lot of time in the public school system. I spent a lot of time with underserved kids in particular. And you know, the sad thing about it is that our public schools have just not been able to adequately keep up with the real issues that are facing the kids that go to school there. You look at underserved youth. And you look at places whether it's Detroit or Baltimore. You have reading proficiency levels for kids and math proficiency levels that are worse than third world countries. Right. And these school systems are spending 20 and $25,000 per year per kid. That's right. They are spending twice as much as it costs to go to private schools. This is a real issue that all Americans should stand up against. Yeah. I mean, you start looking at it. You know, we have over two million dropouts in America every year, two million dropouts. Well, Martha, 71 percent of those dropouts are fatherless.