MomsRising, by Bruce Lesley
…
A few weeks ago, Melissa Harris-Perry appeared in a “Lean Forward” promotional ad for MSNBC and said:
We have never invested as much in public education as we should have because we’ve always had kind of a private notion of children: Your kid is yours and totally your responsibility. We haven’t had a very collective notion of these are our children. So part of it is we have to break through our kind of private idea that kids belong to their parents, or kids belong to their families, and recognize that kids belong to whole communities. Once it’s everybody’s responsibility, and not just the household’s, then we start making better investments.
As an advocate for children, I appreciate her last point that, in this country, we do a poor job of making the needed investments in education, early childhood, child health, and child nutrition to ensure better outcomes for our nation’s children. For example, less than 8 percent of the federal budget is now invested in children and the sequestration cuts another $4.2 billion out of children’s programs. …Read more