A Land Where Hearts No Longer Break

If you believe our nation is basically sound, and if you believe fairness and opportunity are still universally available in America, I urge you not to watch a movie called Waiting For Superman. If you have any conscience at all, it will break your heart.

You will see the desperate decline and potential collapse of our public school system, considered by Thomas Jefferson to be absolutely essential to the survival of the American Republic. For the decline of public education is not merely an economic issue of competition with the Chinese. It is a moral issue at the core of what a nation with a heart owes its children and future generations.

In this movie you will see teachers failing to teach and students failing to learn. You will see parents desperate to get their children into better schools that offer hope for the future. You will also see those students, often quite young, waiting for their number to come up in a cruel lottery where only a few will be chosen. You will see their young faces when their number does not come up.

Though only elementary school students, they know instinctively they have lost their best, perhaps their last, hope of living a better, more productive life.

If those last pictures do not cause you to weep for them and for your country, then you have entered the land where hearts no longer break.

Please visit Senator Hart's blog at Matters of Principle.