Cuomo Says, "It's Time to Make Education a National Funding Priority"

Former New York governor Mario Cuomo told attendees at Saturday's Second General Session that the United States should aspire to be "the best-educated country in the world."

Calling education "one of the most intelligent expressions of progressive government in our history," former New York governor Mario Cuomo called for a federal commitment to make education a funding priority at the 2005 NASSP Convention. At the same time, however, he acknowledged that politicians are slow to "put their resources where their rhetoric is."

Cuomo offered an assessment of the current drive toward privatization, claiming that a "free market is essential to a good society, but is not sufficient for a good society. There must be intervention from the political system." And even Adam Smith, considered the father of free-market economics, touted the essential nature of a system of public education, Cuomo said.

Throughout U.S. history, there have been striking examples of such political interventions to public good, Cuomo explained, including Social Security, the Marshall Plan, national highways, and Medicare and Medicaid. "It's time for education to be on that list," Cuomo said. "Our commitment has to be to make us the best-educated country in the world."

Frequently reminding the audience that he was addressing them as he would address a lay audience, Cuomo called voucher programs "a joke," citing the limited impact of the assistance they offer and private schools' limited physical capacity to educate all U.S. children.

Cuomo drew frequently on his own humble background as the son of Italian immigrants in a poor community in Queens, NY, and indicated that public schools represented the best hope of such families for generations of new Americans. "And yet our education system works worst where its most needed — in areas where problems are compounded by poverty," he said.

Using the technological advancement in California's Silicon Valley as an example, the former two-term governor charged that the current education system is not training workers with the high levels of skills employers need. "When we needed computer engineers," Cuomo said, "we approved 200,000 visas for foreign workers, and we paid them $90,000 while U.S. workers were making $30,000. Let's figure out a way to raise our own computer engineers.

"Until we're first in the world in education, we can't be first in the world in anything else," Cuomo concluded.