A cabinet confirmation. A piece of state legislation cloaked in secrecy. A ban on immigrants from seven Muslim nations. A visit from a university chancellor to a local civic club.
At first blush, the list seems unrelated. Dig deeper, however, and a common them emerges: education.
Tuesday, Ole Miss Chancellor Jeff Vitter was guest speaker at the Columbus Rotary Club. One of his talking points was the important role out-of-state students played in his university’s success – a brain infusion, he called it, a means of attracting well-prepared, academically advanced students to Ole Miss to fill a gap that would otherwise not be filled. The implications are obvious: Our state’s K-12 education system does not provide those kinds of students in the numbers needed for our universities to seek and attain excellence.
That should be no surprise, of course. Our state has long lagged in its commitment to public education, regardless of our state leaders’ arguments to the contrary.
On a national level, Trump’s ban on immigrants is another event where the subject of education emerges. Among those who protested the ban were the nation’s top tech companies. The ban, they insist, deprives them of the highly-skilled and educated workers they need. This comes at a time when the tech industry has committed to spending $20 trillion by 2020 on new technology. That tech is so dependent on foreign-born talent confirms what we have long known about the state of education in our country.
On both the state and national level, our education is falling below expected standards.
Stealing Vitter’s phrase, we need “brain infusions” on both levels.
Most recently, the U.S. Senate confirmed Betsy DeVos to head to Department of Education, despite the fact she never taught or attended a public school nor sent her children to a public school.
Meanwhile, our country ranks 14th among the 40 developed countries in education.
Those who supported DeVos’ nomination believe she has a mandate to “get the federal government out of education and return it to state and local control.
That’s flawed reasoning. Of the 13 nations that rank ahead of the U.S. in education, all are funded and operated by their national governments.
Such a move would be damaging to many states, especially Mississippi, which lacks the resolve to even keep its roads and bridges from falling apart, let alone be entrusted with the future of our children’s education.
It is time for real solutions, and the first step in the process is taking politics out of the discussion.
To date, it is the one thing we have been unwilling to do, unfortunately.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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