http://www.foxnews.com/printer_friendly_story/0,3566,291301,00.html
WALLACE: All right. So people are going to say, "All right, Newt Gingrich, you come up with some ideas." You're putting together what you call the American Solutions Conference where you're going to come up with big ideas. It's going to be in late September. Give us an example. What is the kind of bold, transformational change that you're talking about that would really shake up Washington? GINGRICH: Well, let's start with education. The Detroit public school system currently graduates 22 percent of its entering freshmen on time and fails to serve 78 percent of the young people in Detroit. And if you're an African-American male, you have a 73 percent unemployment in your 20s if you drop out of school and a 60 percent chance of going to jail. Now, faced with a catastrophic collapse of that scale, we should basically fundamentally replace the Detroit school system with a series of experiments to see if they'll work. I would include paying kids in very poor neighborhoods the equivalent of working at McDonald's if they took math and science and got a B or better. I would include the system, which is a private school system that graduates — 85 percent of its students in the inner city go to college. Instead, because of the unions — and let's be clear. This is entirely about the unions. It's about . Because of the unions, in San Diego, I was briefed yesterday, there's a school that has great scores that is a charter school that's going to be closed because the teachers aren't unionized. And you look at Detroit, which is a disaster. Just one quick thing. Detroit in 1950 had 1,800,000 people and the highest per capita income in the United States. Today, Detroit is at the 62nd per capita income with 950,000 people. WALLACE: And is that the kind of thing that you as president would want to get involved in and run, or is it the kind of thing, I mean, that you would leave — most people would say you'd leave that to the city of Detroit and the state of Michigan. GINGRICH: Well, first of all, I think that the reason we created — and we're having workshops nationwide online in late September — is because there are 513,000 elected offices in the United States. And the reason that I've chosen to focus on creating a nationwide movement is precisely your question. I think we ought to challenge the Detroit school board. We ought to challenge the Detroit city council. We ought to challenge the Michigan legislature. We ought to challenge the governor of Michigan. But by the way, while you're doing that, if you don't challenge the union and the education bureaucracy, and you don't challenge the UAW, you are not going to save Michigan. Michigan has lost more jobs than any state in the United States except the impact of Katrina on Louisiana. And nobody stops and says, "What is the systemic reason for this collapse?" I do think a president has an obligation to say to the country, "You can't compete with China and India if your education system is failing," and that has to be solved locally. And frankly, I think the federal Department of Education is not a useful asset in trying to solve that. WALLACE: Not surprisingly, your comments this week drew some pushback. You compared yourself to French General de Gaulle being asked in the '50s to join the pygmies, and here's what someone on the American Spectator blog wrote. Take a look. "Newt is brilliant. Unfortunately, Newt knows he is brilliant. As a result, he has little control over his ego." Mr. Speaker, how do you plead? GINGRICH: Well, look. I was a child living in France in 1958. My dad was serving in the U.S. Army. We lived in Orleans. And I experienced what happened in France. I watched the die, literally killed by the paratroopers after the Algerian war. I watched President de Gaulle, who had been the savior of France after World War II, who had retired to get out of politics because he thought it was a hopeless mess, brought back to create the Fifth Republic, which just elected a new president, the longest serving French system since the monarchy. And my reference was as a teacher. I mean, I find it fascinating in the city that if you actually studied something and you actually know about something, you must be egocentric because you're actually talking about facts as opposed to what my consultant advised me that the focus group said last night that I should memorize. I was relaying the systemic failure of the American system, Democrat and Republican, systemic in Sacramento, systemic in Detroit, systemic in Albany, systemic in Washington, D.C., and the fact that neither political party is producing the kind of campaign and the kind of candidates not just for president but across the system. We are not coming to grips with how big our problems are.
And the reason that I've chosen to focus on creating a nationwide movement is precisely your question. I think we ought to challenge the Detroit school board. We ought to challenge the Detroit city council. We ought to challenge the Michigan legislature. We ought to challenge the governor of Michigan.
(Sigh) Newt, our govenor is a socialist Democrat woman from Canada, and a joke. Our legislature can't agree on a lunch menu and the democrats want to inflict HUGE tax increases to pay for a $1.2 BILLION budget defecit next year. As for the Detroit city council -- their titles are synominous with failure.
Albany New York is becoming another Detroit, crime riddon, failed public schools etc. The ONLY reason it wemi-survives is because it is the capital of New York and gets extra funding to keep it afloat.
Attention Newt and staff: Check out this website for Brighter Choice Charter Schools in Albany.
http://www.brighterchoice.org/
It is a remarkable success story and charter schools should model after this. Yep, it's non-union and it actually teaches kids the 3 R's without all the left wing pap. It holds students and parents accountable.
Oh, did I mention that the results are a million times better than the teacher union plagued Albany government schools.