file photo Ridgewood Train Station
School Choice: Securing a Better Future for Our Country
by Andrew Campanella
It’s time to take the fight for school choice in America to a new level. To ensure that millions of additional children have access to the best schools possible, we must — must — reach tens of millions of additional Americans and galvanize their support for educational equality.
With one American child dropping out of school every 26 seconds, we cannot wait. Our country faces an education crisis, and it’s up to us to let our friends and neighbors know — en masse — that school choice CAN provide an essential and beneficial solution for families across the country.
To help make this vision a reality, National School Choice Week will host the first-ever nationwide, whistle-stop train tour in support of school choice.
The goal of this tour — along with the record-breaking 3,000 events being independently planned for National School Choice Week 2013 — is to demonstrate overwhelming support, and demand, for school choice…while shining a positive spotlight on the hundreds of organizations, thousands of schools, and millions of Americans working every day to increase access to great schools in our country.
The National School Choice Week Special — a historic railcar — will depart Los Angeles Union Station on January 25, 2013 and arrive in New York on February 2, 2013. Parents, students, community leaders, education organizations and elected officials of both parties will host 14 very special events along the tour’s route.
The Special will link the modern-day fight for educational equality to important movements that have shaped the American way of life — from suffrage to civil rights — all of which used similar whistle-stop tours to generate overwhelming support for causes that changed our history for the better.
With bold strokes, our generation can — and will — make its mark on the tapestry of our national experience. Social change isn’t just something we read about in history books. It’s something we can make a reality, and in the process, secure for ourselves not only a place in history books yet unwritten, but secure for our country a brighter and more prosperous futurewhere no child is denied the opportunity to attend the best schools possible.