00:00Hello, everyone. Thank you, Reverend. Thank you for having me this morning. My name is Michael Bennett. As the Reverend said, I'm not a politician. I was the superintendent at Denver Public Schools before I was in the Senate.
00:17And I didn't fly to New Orleans. My family and I drove here. Over four days, we took the back roads from Memphis. Our first stop was Marianna, Arkansas, my wife's hometown.
00:32The distance from Washington, D.C. to Marianna is a thousand miles, but it might as well be a million because the people living there are invisible to the broken politics in Washington, D.C.
00:48And that's true of all the places we visited up and down the Mississippi Delta. We visited communities trying to rebuild their economy from ashes.
01:00Heard doctors worry that their rural clinic was going to close, even though they're in some of the unhealthiest counties in America. Drove by shuttered schools and one thriving private prison after the next.
01:16The Delta needs us to use this campaign to put these issues front and center. And today I want to focus us on another critical issue that hasn't come up in any of the debates.
01:30And that is the issue of education. There was a time in America when public education was the wind at our back and transforming our economy.
01:42But today, taken as a whole, our education system is reinforcing the income inequality that we have, not liberating people from it.
01:52The best predictor of the quality of the education you're going to have is the zip code you are born into.
02:00And as a school superintendent, I met kids who woke up at 5.30 in the morning to take three buses across town to a better school,
02:10who came to class exhausted because they worked the night shift. I know parents who speak with tears in their eyes about the gap between their child's potential and what they're able to learn in school.
02:24One parent in the Delta told me, we just want our kids to be able to keep up with the times. Today we are falling short of even that basic expectation.
02:38I know you know this, but when one group of children has access to preschool and the other, through no fault of their own, does not.
02:50When one group has access to a million dollar house and therefore a quality K-12 education and the other does not.
02:59When one group has access to tutors and counselors and parents who went to college themselves and the other does not.
03:07Then even equal is not equal and we need to make a change.
03:13We need preschool for every kid in America who needs it and that's every kid in America.
03:26We need K-12 schools all across this country that any senator would send their kid to.
03:34We need people to be able to go to college without bankrupting their families and for the 70% of kids that don't go to college.
03:42We need them to get the training and skills so they can earn a living wage, not just a minimum wage.
03:49And one more thing, we need to start paying our teachers like professionals that they are.
03:58This may all seem obvious to everybody here, but we're doing almost none of it.
04:03Three days ago I was in Sunflower, Mississippi.
04:0774% of the community is black.
04:10Average incomes are half of what they are in the country.
04:14The poverty rate is three times higher, but every day for the last five weeks the Sunflower kids have walked through the doors of a summer school fulfilling their responsibility to our democracy.
04:27Every day they pass a mural on the wall that says education is the seed of freedom.
04:34Like millions of kids across the country, their hands are full.
04:39They need to learn English, they need to learn math, they need to learn science.
04:44They have no time to figure out how to pay teachers what they deserve, how to fix the education system to benefit them,
04:53how to end our system of mass incarceration, address the climate crisis before we incinerate this planet,
05:01end gun violence and restore America's role in the world.
05:06They already have a job to do.
05:09And they have a reasonable expectation that we're going to do our job to make sure we're not the first generation of Americans.
05:17To leave less opportunity, not more, to the people coming after us.
05:22That is what we must do in this election.
05:25We must beat Donald Trump, begin to govern this country again,
05:29and create an education system that works for everybody in America, not just the wealthy few.
05:36That's why I'm running for president.
05:38Thank you for having me here today.
05:40It is a great honor to be here with all of you.
05:43Thanks.
05:46Thanks.
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