John Kuhn at the NPE Conference: This is Our Education Spring
John Kuhn, alongside Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis, gave the keynote speech to the Network for Public Education conference on Saturday, March 1. He kindly gave me permission to share the text of his speech here. You can watch it here, thanks to the expert volunteer Vincent Precht.
Speech by John Kuhn, delivered on March 1, 2014, at the University of Texas in Austin.
Promise
You're an impressive group. I'm looking out at a collection of some of the bravest and most outspoken advocates for America's public education promise. That word--promise--is important, and it's the title of this speech. There is a public school, funded by and accountable to the people, a school required to admit and educate every child, no matter where they live, anywhere you go in this country. There isn't a square inch of America that doesn't fall inside some school district or another. There isn't a pupil who can't walk into their local school and demand an education. This is no accident. This is by design. This is promised to us.
And that promise is under siege.
Today, a concentrated effort to shatter that promise has become a mainstream movement, supported by America's richest individuals and corporations, by the foundations and think tanks they sponsor, and by influential politicians from both parties, whom the billionaires also sponsor. Other than you and me and advocates like us across our nation, there really isn't much standing between us and a tomorrow dominated by for-profit chains of schools that educate the kids they want to educate and leave the public school system, the greatest and most noble and
