School choice advocate Dr. Howard Fuller was in Denver this week at the request of the Piton Foundation and the Donnell-Kay Foundation.
Dr. Fuller has long been a friend of ACE and sat down to be interviewed for our latest video. By fighting for expanded parental choice for four decades, Dr. Fuller has developed a way of articulating the need for reform that people understand and can relate to:
“On Feb. 1, 1960, four students from North Carolina A & T sat down at a lunch counter and demanded to be served. Here in 2009 … we can have four students go sit down at a lunch counter where they are welcome but they can’t read the menu. My question is, how in the world did we get here? How could this be?”
Dr. Fuller was speaking to an audience of educators and parents at Manual High School, and EdNews Colorado covered the event.
More from Dr. Fuller:
“This question about educating our children isn’t just a moral issue, which it is. It isn’t just a social justice issue, which it is,” Fuller said. “It is really an issue that deals with, how do you sustain a democracy?
“One thing I’ve learned over all of these years is that many people support change as long as nothing changes,” Fuller said. “We go to these conferences and we discuss change and we make the mistake of thinking that the discussion constituted the change.
“I have seen so many great schools that are educating the very kids that people say cannot be educated,” Fuller said, then paraphrased Mortimer Adler’s Paideia Proposal. “So what I’ve concluded is … there are no unteachable children. What there are, are adults who have not yet figured out how to teach them.”