Working Families Need Good Schools

Tonight the Democratic presidential candidates debate again, this time under the auspices of the AFL-CIO and MSNBC. If ever there was a moment for this group of candidates to show genuine concern for working families and the issues that affect them, this would appear to be it.

So what does that have to do with the ED in 08 campaign? Plenty.

Again, let me cite some statistics, but bear in mind, there are tens of thousands of real American families sitting around the kitchen table trying to make ends meet for every dry-sounding number I use.

• 46% of high school graduates - graduates, mind you, not dropouts - say they are not prepared for the jobs they hope to hold in the future. When they sit around the table, what do you suppose they are thinking about?


• A high school dropout will make $260,000 less during his or her lifetime than one of those high school graduates, regardless of how unprepared they may feel. You think maybe they wish they had been better prepared to finish in school?


• Nearly one-third of all high school graduates who enter college have to take remedial classes - and their families have to pay for them (again) and they don't get credit for it. What do you think they talk about at the kitchen table?

One last observation: We used to worry about unskilled jobs being shipped overseas to cheaper markets. That's a thing of the past. Now, it's the skilled jobs with good paychecks attached that are moving, and they are moving to where workers are better educated! That's right, better educated than Americans.


Now if that's not something for candidates to talk about over the debate table tonight, I don't know what is.