Political conservatives who have traditionally been “against” public schools must change their stance or face “exclusion” from the growing school-reform movement, argues one of the leaders of the New Right in a monthly newsletter.
Connaught C. Marshner, in the August issue of the Family Protection Report, writes that conservatives, by fighting against the public-school “monopoly,” have “played into the hands of the education establishment, which wants to discredit us.”
Mrs. Marshner has promoted tuition tax-credit, school-prayer, and anti-abortion legislation through the Washington-based Free Congress Foundation. She was also appointed by the Reagan Administration to head a school-finance advisory panel.
"" she writes, “education must become a dominant theme of the pro-family movement.” She advises activists to “sound the theme” of school reform, but not through “theoretical abstracts.”
“There is no question but that the public strongly supports public education,” she continues. “Never mind whether there ought to be government-run schools or not--how can I get the drugs out of my kid’s high school this year? How can I get my kid taught phonics this year?”
Getting Into Teaching
Some people choose their line of work for financial reasons. Others enter professions out of a sense of mission.
Neither of those motivations was at work in the case of 18-year-old Terrel H. Bell back in 1939, or so said the Secretary of Education in a recent speech before the National Association of Blacks Within Government.
According to the Secretary, his widowed mother was so poor “that our family was the one that always got a Christmas basket from the church.”
Despite those financial difficulties, he said that his mother always encouraged him to go to college, although they were never certain where the money would come from.
“One day, I was looking through some college catalogs when I came across the listing for Albion State Normal College” in Albion, Iowa, he continued. The college’s $11.50 annual tuition was enough to convince him to make the move to the Midwest from Lava Hot Springs, Idaho.
“It wasn’t until I arrived there that I realized that all you could study at a normal college was teaching,” he admitted. “You can say that I got into education all because of my ignorance.”
