Michael Bennet: “the hour is late, or early in the morning, and my colleague from Hawaii is here. Before I leave the floor, I want to say…”

“the hour is late, or early in the morning, and my colleague from Hawaii is here. Before I leave the floor, I want to say how pleased I am to see the Senate actually debating the state of education in America. I said earlier today when I was here that if you are born poor in this country, you arrive at kindergarten having heard 30 million fewer words than your more affluent peers, and if you are born poor in this country, by the time you get to the fourth grade, only about one in four kids is proficient in mathematics, fewer than that are proficient readers. What it all adds up to is that if you are poor in the United States, your chances of getting a college degree by the time you turn 25 are about 9 in 100. I often think about that when I am in this Chamber because there are 100 desks here, and if we were poor kids living in America, the desks that would be occupied by college graduates would be the three desks that my colleague from Hawaii is sitting at in the front row over there, the four desks behind him, and then two more desks in the following row. Every other desk in this Chamber if they were occupied by poor children in this country, would be occupied by somebody who didn't have a college degree. Sometimes people say to me: Well, don't you know that not everybody will go to college. College isn't for everybody. I find that when people say that, they are often talking about other people's children, not their own children.…”