Joe Cunningham: “if you look at the American people, there are bright sun spots in education. You go to a lot of the schools, we have…”

“if you look at the American people, there are bright sun spots in education. You go to a lot of the schools, we have fantastic teachers and we have some fantastic programs. But if you go, for example, outside Chicago, where I used to coach and teach, about 5 miles down the road there is about 7 miles of Federal housing projects. Those kids do not learn in school. They carry guns, not books. Most of the girls become pregnant one or two times. The grandmothers raise them, and if you are a male child the only hope you have is to be in a gang, or a female child, even today are becoming more and more involved. The chance for them of achieving the American dream is less; the welfare reform helped that. But those are some of the other ways in education that I think that we can enhance it, and there are so many ways, Mr. Speaker. We are only covering just a little bit here. Remember a gentleman, Mr. Speaker, named Jaime Escalante? He had a vision that he could teach minority children in the inner cities physics. How much support did he have with the kids? They thought he was nuts. The administrators and the teachers thought you cannot do that in an inner-city school. We have tried it. You are going to fail. What about the parents? He had zero support. Well, Jaime Escalante set out to teach these children physics. It was up to I think 90 percent of them got A's and went on to college in physics when he proved it.…”