Marilyn Musgrave: “I have a great deal of interest in education. I have been married to a public school teacher. He taught for 24 years.…”

“I have a great deal of interest in education. I have been married to a public school teacher. He taught for 24 years. When I was a graduate of college, I taught public school for a time before I started raising our four children. When I first started being interested in public policy, I ran for our local board of education, and I served there for 4 years before I went into the State legislature in Colorado. One of my committee assignments that I requested right away was the education committee because I feel very strongly that a good education is one of the best tools that we can give a child in order that they might have a successful life. I have faced the challenges that public school teachers face. I am very appreciative of the job that they do. I am, most of all, however, very respectful of parents. You birth a child, you nurse a child, you get up with them in the middle of the night when they are sick, you try to instruct them on what they should eat, you try to instruct them on how they should behave, you instruct them in the moral arena; but somehow or another when it then comes to education, some people think that parents do not have the ability to make a good choice for their child. Well, of course they have the ability. But most of all they love that child, and they have a very strong desire for that child to be successful.”