Everyone needs to support America's College Promise Act of 2015.

[image: www.atlanticcoastentertainment.com]

America's Promise

Today Congress received a bill that it simply must pass. Making two years of community collage available to all residents is easily within our abilities to afford, it is long overdue, and it would move us one giant step forward on the pathway to fulfilling a promise to ourselves. And that promise is this: “We believe we can do better.” The key to doing better is education. Making it affordable to all who ever wanted to find their potential in life is what America's College Promise Act of 2015 is all about. It is not perfection. It is not the Promised Land. But it would give all who need it this most powerful message: “We believe in you.” At one point in my life that is all I wanted to hear.

When I was a boy I was the poorest kid in my class, and I knew it. I went to school hungry, and dirty, and too weak to excel at anything that required physical energy. One day my expectations were so low I was in the midst of settling in my mind for all time that my permanent place in society was at the bottom of the heap. Hunger and weariness and low expectations can be that depressing. But there was a “buzz” going around that day about some test scores. I wasn’t much interested. I was focused on finding a morsel of food somewhere that day that might sustain me long enough to find the next morsel.

The buzz was about some college test scores. What did I care about college test scores? This was the 8th grade, and college was far beyond my dreams. When we had settled into our seats our teacher announced the results. He wasn’t particularly pleased. Among the five schools in town, we had only one person who had scored near the top. I was that high scorer. Later that day he asked me if I was going by the post office. I told him I was. Then he handed me a card and asked me to drop it off. I said I would. On the way there I read the card. It was to the State Department of Education. They wanted to know if I intended to go to college. It was for their planning purposes. He had checked “no” in response to that question. He hadn't t even bothered to ask me. I thought, What an asshole! As I neared the mail drop, I saw a waste basket nearby. He had only asked me to drop it off, not to mail it, so I tossed the card into the waste basket to show my disdain for the process, if not to him.

Thirty years later I walked across the stage at Ohio’s oldest university and accepted a doctorate from my home state. I few years later I delivered the commencement address to 600 high school graduates in my home town. My message to them was this: You can do almost anything if you first believe you can. I even wrote them a poem to that effect.

Did my teacher give me the right “kick in the ass” that I needed at the time? I am certain of it. Long ago I decided it was his way of saying “I believe in you.”

Whether two years of community college is the beginning or the end of formal education, it is the key to new job skills, to developing the potential for millions of youngsters, and to lifting them up at a time when they need it most. Isn’t it time for all of us to tell our kids, our young and our older adults: “We believe in you?” It isn’t free; it’s an investment. The payback in literacy, in productivity, innovation, and in better decisions is beyond measure.