Remembering Kennedy

Remembering Kennedy

Given Sen. Edward Kennedy's prominent role in education as chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, it's appropriate to take a break from the college readiness issue and remember Kennedy. Does anyone have experiences or memories about Kennedy they would care to share? Thoughts about his impact on education?

Michael L. Lomax, President and CEO, UNCF

UNCF joins the nation and the world in mourning the passing of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. For his entire forty-seven-year career in the United States Senate, he stood with us and with all friends of education in the fight to see that all Americans have the opportunity to get the education they need and that the nation needs them to have. He was an early and stalwart supporter of the fight to outlaw legalized discrimination of every stripe--race, ethnicity, religion, gender, disability and age-in every facet of American life: voting rights, public accommodations, medical care and, closest to our hearts, education. But he was also among the earliest to understand that the legal right to an education means little if access was made difficult or impossible by financial barriers. In recent years, he sponsored increases in Pell Grants, the largest federal student financial aid program, of which he had been an original sponsor in 1972. He championed last year's College Cost and Reduction Act, which invested $170 million in historically black college...

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UNCF joins the nation and the world in mourning the passing of Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. For his entire forty-seven-year career in the United States Senate, he stood with us and with all friends of education in the fight to see that all Americans have the opportunity to get the education they need and that the nation needs them to have. He was an early and stalwart supporter of the fight to outlaw legalized discrimination of every stripe--race, ethnicity, religion, gender, disability and age-in every facet of American life: voting rights, public accommodations, medical care and, closest to our hearts, education.

But he was also among the earliest to understand that the legal right to an education means little if access was made difficult or impossible by financial barriers. In recent years, he sponsored increases in Pell Grants, the largest federal student financial aid program, of which he had been an original sponsor in 1972. He championed last year's College Cost and Reduction Act, which invested $170 million in historically black colleges and universities. And even during his final illness, he remained engaged and active during the reauthorization of the Higher Education Act.

He also understood that access to the education system is of limited value if the education given, especially in low-income and minority neighborhoods, does not prepare students for college or work. As always, he followed his convictions, even crossing the partisan divide to support Bush administration legislation to improve the education our public school systems give their students.

The commitment to education that Sen. Kennedy and UNCF shared was part of a Kennedy family commitment that reaches back more than a half-century and continues today. It was fifty years ago this year that Sen. Edward Kennedy's brother, then-Senator John F. Kennedy, addressed the 1959 Convocation of UNCF in Indianapolis, Indiana. "It is no exaggeration," he said on that occasion, "to say that there are few educational drives more important or of more vital significance than that of the United Negro College Fund." "In this world of crisis," he said, education is "an urgent requirement of national security."

Both John and Edward Kennedy referred often to the torch of leadership. President Kennedy spoke in his inaugural address of the torch that had been passed to a new generation of Americans. Last year, supporting the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama, Sen. Kennedy said that "the torch will be passed again to a new generation of Americans."

The torch that the Kennedy family carried for so long has also been passed to the next generation. Last March, President Kennedy's daughter Caroline accepted UNCF's President's Award for her work on behalf of elementary and secondary education. "All my family, my uncles and my mother," she recalled, "believed in the power of words and ideas to change the world and change lives. And UNCF makes that change possible for the future leaders of our country. A college education is the key to opening the door to the American dream and the global economy, and no one has opened that door for more young Americans than UNCF."

Almost thirty years ago, Sen. Kennedy captured the way so many of us feel today, as we mourn his passing and pledge to complete the work that he helped us with for so many years. "For all those whose cares have been our concern," he said in1980, in words that still resonate today, "the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die."

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Categories: Education News OP-ED