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Floor Speech
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Mr. BRAUN. Mr. President, I come to the floor here to give an even simpler argument as it applies in many different areas in addition to education.
Senator Scott came to the floor to ask for choice, opportunity, and competition all mixed in together. When you have got that, you have got the description of a perfect marketplace, whether it is for healthcare, whether it is for education. And, ironically, the two places in our country where expenses keep going up and up would be in healthcare. Most families would put that up there right along with education.
K-12, having that ability to choose where you would want your own kids to go to school is something that you should never be afraid of. If you are not interested in it, you are probably trying to hide something. That would be, in many cases, where you are not mustering what it takes to minimally educate your own child properly.
I was on a school board for 10 years--2004 through 2014--in Indiana, a public school system in one of the most Catholic places in the State of Indiana. I will never forget, a high school tried to start that was Catholic. Our public school system was so good it couldn't get to first base, but at least the attempt was made. Not all areas are blessed with a public school system, as we traditionally know it, offering that top- notch education.
Whenever you do fear competition, transparency--which doesn't necessarily apply here, but choice, it does--you are probably trying to cover up something that is not performing.
And, sadly, here is where you need the choice more than any other place, where folks can't afford to have the choice. And if you are trapped in one system, what does that say for your kids' future?
I ran a business for 37 years. So many businesses tried to do the same thing, get involved in markets. It gets concentrated. That is what is happening in our healthcare industry. It is like an unregulated utility, and it disguises itself as free enterprise. That is restricting competition, restricting transparency, restricting choice.
Costs have been going up for decades with no end in sight; postsecondary education, very similar. Here, all we need to do is take a system that still has a pretty good value to it, it just is not producing the results.
Indiana has been one of the leaders in charter schools and choice. We have over 100 charter schools. I reflect back--I think it was when I was a State legislator--on a neighboring county, there were three grade schools. The smallest of the three had to be shut down because of cost cuts--well, best performing of the three. Those kids would have had to travel 10, 15 miles to get to one of the other two public schools, elementary. This place worked as hard as it could over 2 years, scraped together the resources, and kept their Otwell Miller Academy open. It was the choice of the parents. They were part of a system that wasn't working, and they were able to do it. Had it not been for the charter school policy in our State, that community would have been out of luck.
We have some of the best charters in the country in Indiana because we are a place that generally embraces competition, transparency, choice, and no barriers to entry. Whenever the healthcare industry is trying to lobby for not having more competition, for instance, through physician-owned hospitals, when public school systems want themselves to be the only option, sometimes you get lucky, like I did, and went to a great public school system, but many times you don't, and you are trapped in a bad system.
Our schools, too, that are charter sometimes are a little more experimental. They focus on things like STEM, CTE, particular education that community might need, where if you are brought into the same old curriculum, the same old process, the same thing that is not generating even the basic results, you are trapped in something that should never be the case.
Be for choice. Be for competition. Be for a successful education.
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