Today Is John Adams’ Birthday. He Would Have Said, “Screw You Rick Perry”

Today is the 276th birthday of John Adams, founding father, second President of the United States of America. On September 10, 1785, in  a letter to John Jebb, a religious and political reformer, Adams wrote,

“The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people and be willing to bear the expenses of it. There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves.”

 – John Adams.

The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States: With a Life of the Author, Notes and Illustrations, Volume 9, by John Adams, (Little, Brown 1854), pg 540

In August, Perry told supporters, “I don’t think the federal government has a role in your children’s education. . . . I know there’s probably a few of you in here who have not read my book ‘Fed Up.’ But I talk about the intrusion into our lives by the federal government in a host of different areas. Education is one of them.”

Apparently, Governor Perry doesn’t think the states should have a role in your children’s education, either.

Under Governor Rick Perry’s tenure, Texas ranks number 43 in the nation for its high school graduation rate. Just “[s]lightly more than 61 percent of students graduate each year,” ABCNews reports,” adding:

Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan has taken aim at Texas Gov. Rick Perry for what he describes as the abysmal quality of education in the state’s public schools.

“Far too few of their high school graduates are actually prepared to go on to college,” Duncan tells Bloomberg TV’s Al Hunt of Texas in an interview set to air tomorrow. “I feel very, very badly for the children there.”

…

“You have seen massive increases in class size. You’ve seen cutbacks in funding. It doesn’t serve the children well. It doesn’t serve the state well. It doesn’t serve the state’s economy well. And ultimately it hurts the country,” he says.

Duncan attributes the conditions to Perry’s policies during his decade-long tenure as governor, including a more-than-$4-billion cut to public school funding in the state’s most recent budget.

Perry, long been an outspoken critic of federal education standards, has rejected participation in Obama’s Race to the Top initiative, which he has said “could very well lead to the ‘dumbing down’ of the rigorous standards we’ve worked so hard to enact.”