Picture the United States in the 21st century and what you'll see is a country undergoing tremendous change and a dramatic shift in demographics.
So said William Gray III, president and chief executive officer of the United Negro College Fund and former Majority Whip in the U.S. House of Representatives. In the next century, Gray told his General Session audience, Hispanic Americans will be the largest minority group, and those now considered minorities will make up half of the population in the United States. "We have to learn how to integrate these Americans into the mainstream so they can be productive citizens," Gray said. The U.S. economy, he warned, depends on it.
To ensure that tomorrow's citizens are highly skilled and well trained, public education must be supported and strengthened, Gray maintained. He was scornful of proposals to use tax dollars to support alternatives to the public education system, including the plan to offer citizens "vouchers" to help pay private school tuition. It's "absolutely wrong-headed," Gray charged. "I can't understand why folks want the government to subsidize their private choice." It's outrageous, he added, "to ask the poor people to pay taxes so the middle class can send their kids to private school—that takes nerve!"
Support for such plans, Gray continued, reflects a lack of faith in "our American ingeniousness" to improve schools. He suggested that tax dollars should, instead, be spent to secure smaller class sizes and ensure that schools are "places of diversity" by hiring more teachers of color.
Just these two measures alone could strengthen public education and "give hope to kids at the bottom," Gray contended. In smaller classes, teachers have more opportunities to "put their hands on kids" and show that they care, he explained. When administrators hire more teachers from different cltural and ethnic backgrounds, more children have "models of success." In these environments, Gray said, "lumps of coal are turned into diamonds. Kids blossom and become greater than they were before walking into the classroom."
And that's why Gray gets upset when it's suggested that taxpayers should support measures that would, in his opinion, make it difficult to finance high-quality education for all students. "Don't ever give up on our public school system and the young pepole in that system," he urged educators. After all, Gray added, what made the United States so great is that education was "made available to everyone in society. We understood, from a policy perspective, that everybody needed a good education" to build a sound economy and a robust democracy.
That will be no less true in the 21st century, Gray noted, and educators must "redefine access" to ensure that the system will work for all children. Said Gray, "Educators have to say, 'We believe you can'and 'We'll fight to give you a school system, an education, that will give you the skills you'll need to succeed.' "