Mayor Pete Buttigieg Interview by Celeste and Gary Lawson Peter (Pete) Buttigieg has been Mayor of South Bend, Indiana, since 2012. He is a graduate of Harvard and a Rhodes Scholar. Mayor Buttigieg has served as an intelligence officer in the United States Navy Reserve. He is seeking to win the Democratic Party nomination to run for President of the United States. This interview was conducted on May 29, 2019. Celeste: Good morning Mayor Buttigieg, according to the Human Development Index data, which measures the well-being of people across the globe regarding education, health, and income, African-American children in Iowa rank near the bottom concerning academic performance. If elected President of the United States, what plans do you have for creating balance in the academic performance among all students? Buttigieg: So, one of the things that we know about American economic opportunity is that it is not evenly distributed and education is a huge part of that. If you are behind in education, you’re going to be behind for the rest of your life. We need to take proactive steps to deal with that. One thing that I think is important is to make sure that we support Title I schools, where most lowincome and minority Americans are studying and get them extra support. For example, we know the difference a top-performing teacher can make in the life and the lifetime earnings of a child. So, my proposal for increasing teacher pay prioritizes Title I schools in order to get that kind of support. We also need to make sure that college is more accessible and affordable for students who are headed to college, knowing that, especially for first-time and first-generation students, costs can be an obstacle and student debt can pull people down. It’s one reason why I think we need to expand Pell Grants index them to inflation so we don’t have to go back to Congress every time the cost of education increases, and use that as a way to access higher education for people of all backgrounds but knowing that will especially help African-American students and students from lowincome communities. Also, I think that just at a more basic level right now, we don’t see the kind of commitment to quality public education that is needed in Washington, and it starts with personnel. So, I’m committed to appointing a Secretary of Education who believes in public education and who takes these concerns seriously. You know, we are dealing with the legacy not only of things like school segregation, but things like housing segregation, which in turn has lead to disparities in academic and educational outcomes. These things aren’t going to take care of themselves we’ve got to proactively root out these inequities and make sure that federal policy is helping to make sure that happens at the state and local levels.
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