American Dreams by Marco Rubio

Author:Marco Rubio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2014-11-20T16:00:00+00:00

Education’s power to make the American Dream possible is something that is very close to me. First, admittedly, it was an abstraction my parents drilled into me as a child. Later, it became a reality that I saw change my sister’s life. You see, I had the good fortune of being what we think of as a traditional student, coming out of high school and going immediately into a four-year degree program. My sister didn’t have that luxury.

Barbara is my older sister. She never had the same opportunities I had. She married young and didn’t go to college. Before my senior year in high school, she wound up living in our parents’ home with an infant son and another on the way. All the odds were stacked against Barbara. She could have given up, put herself and her family in the hands of the social welfare system and passively accepted a life of dependence. But she didn’t. In her early thirties she found herself working at an insurance company processing paperwork. She knew that if she didn’t get a degree, she would never make a better life for her kids. So while my parents helped watch my nephews, Barbara went to Florida International University and earned an education degree. She went to work as a special education teacher. Then, while working as a teacher, she graduated with a master’s degree in education. Today, she is the vice principal of an elementary school in Miami.

Barbara is a good example of what a twenty-first-century student looks like—not just the eighteen-year-old high school graduate but the older student. The struggling mom who wants to increase her earning potential but can’t just drop everything and go back to school. The returning veteran. The worker who has lost a job that is never coming back and needs to be retrained. The high school student who wants to fix airplane engines but loses interest in schoolwork that seems geared toward the college-bound. It is a tragedy for these students of today that we still have an education system that caters to the students of yesterday.

There are millions of Americans who don’t have the money, time or inclination to spend four to six years on a campus. At the same time, companies complain of a shortage of skilled workers. So smart, forward-looking companies are beginning to partner with local governments to close this gap. In Cleveland, General Electric worked with the city to create the MC2 STEM High School, which brings students to GE’s manufacturing plant their sophomore year to get practical experience and mentoring from GE employees. MC2 STEM’s graduation rate is 95 percent, compared with just 60 percent in the Cleveland public schools.23

These efforts deserve more of our support. Our education system—and we as a society—need to stop looking down our nose at people who don’t sit behind a desk or a computer for a living. These are honest and, in many cases, well-paying jobs—jobs that are going unfilled for a lack of workers with the right skills.

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