Bill Cosby Speaks About School Choice
By: Rosetta Key, WOBM Radio
Comedian and African American social activist Bill Cosby tells parents who are frustrated over their child’s education that they need to get other parents out of their apathy and galvanize them for action.
Cosby was the Keynote Speaker during a telephone press conference and Town Hall about the ‘The State of American Education’ Tuesday night put on by organizers of National School Choice Week.
He says parents who are dissatisfied with the education being provided in their neighborhoods need to build up their numbers and their voices. “You need to go door-to-door and have something to say to people about the school about the situation and you need to continue to knock. You need to continue to speak and you need to stay on it. Cosby says some of this apathy is a continuation of a feeling that is obvious. People don’t think anything is going to work”
Cosby shared a personal story about an elementary school teacher who intervened when he was a student that was beginning to flounder in school. He says her intervention helped him turn his grades around from failing to getting A’s and B’s. He says she also wrote a note for educators in his Junior High School about concerns that he would fall back into his old ways if he didn’t receive similar intervention.
Town Hall Moderator Michelle Bernard, President of the Bernard Center for Women, Politics and Public Policy and one of the National School Choice organizers says she wants parents to think of the School Choice issue as the “most important civil rights and human rights issue of the 21st Century”. She says “if your children are relegated to a school that really isn’t working? Parents need to find ways to get involved with School Choice Organizations in their state. To go to their state legislators and to demand School Choice for that school district.”