GOP Sen. Kennedy: Fixing Education, Family Formation Essential to Confronting Policing and Race Dilemma

Tuesday on FNC’s “Fox News Primetime,” Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) argued there was a deeper problem causing the upheaval between police and certain demographic groups within the United States.

The Louisiana Republican argued that as long as children were sent to “failure factories,” referring to public schools, there was an increased likelihood of incidents, including what had happened in Brooklyn Center, MN.

“Let me give you two things we can do to reduce the crime rate among all demographic groups, but especially among African-American youths. Number one, we’re sending too many of our young people to schools that are failure factories. Let me tell you — if I were king for a day, here’s what I would do: I would – I would turn to all of the parents of our kids below a certain socio-economic level of all races, and I’d say here’s the money that the state is putting up to pay for the school that you’re going to.”

“I’m giving you the money, not the schools use it anywhere you want to,” Kennedy continued. “If you want to go to a charter school, go. If you want to go to a private school, here’s the money. We have to have more freedom of choice and more competition in education. Number two, family formation, nobody wants to talk about it. I’m not saying a single parent can’t be a good mom or dad. But a child who grows up in a single-parent family is six times more likely to grow up in poverty than a child that grows up in a two-parent family. And that is just a fact. And we got to stop talking about it.”

Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor

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