Advocate is passionate about educational choice for all


Mark Hare



(December 13, 2007) — We should all have Brian Bennett's passion. The world would be much better for it.

Bennett, 58, is an educator, dedicated to giving every child and every family, regardless of means, the right to choose the right school for themselves.

His name will not be familiar to many of you. But Brian Bennett was born in Rochester. His family lived in Pittsford, where he attended St. Louis School until 1961, when the Bennetts moved to San Diego, still his home.

Bennett came to my attention through an e-mail announcing a scholarship fund being created in honor of the former Rochester-area resident.

Bennett taught in Catholic schools and eventually served for 18 years as principal of Blessed Sacrament Parish School in San Diego. Last month, a prominent San Diego family established a $1.5 million Brian's Scholars Foundation that will provide scholarships to 75 to 100 students annually. The foundation will make a Catholic education available to many students who otherwise would not have access to it.

But there is much more to Brian Bennett's story.

A story in The San Diego Union-Tribune last May reported that while working at a summer camp in 1965, Bennett visited the Los Angeles home of an African-American friend and found himself in the middle of the Watts riots. The experience awakened him to the civil rights movement, and three years later, he campaigned for Robert F. Kennedy. He was at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the night Kennedy was assassinated, after winning the California presidential primary. His activism, and his Catholic faith, led Bennett to see a first-rate education as a civil right.

Bennett, who still has some family in the Rochester area, has been a powerful advocate for school vouchers, arguing that they can be a tool for empowerment and choice.

He served as director of the office of school choice for the San Diego school system, and has helped found more than a dozen charter schools, as well.

A year ago, he was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease.

He has been weakened by ALS, which slowly destroys motor neurons eventually leaving a patient with little or no voluntary muscle movement. He is unable to talk by phone, but was more than willing to answer some questions by e-mail. I thought you might find his thoughts insightful.

"The reality is that poor parents, like other parents, have every right to a good and safe neighborhood school," he says. "Low expectations are changed in the classroom when teachers believe that all children can learn. We need to stop blaming families and start attracting teachers and administrators who believe this. Labor unions that oppose merit pay and higher pay for work in urban centers are contributing directly to perpetuating a system that is neither equal nor equitable."

Vouchers can be a tool to create options for poor families, Bennett says. "I believe that a voucher equal to the local public school district's expenditure per child" can be effective, he says. "The receiving private school, including religious schools, must be willing to accept students from a lottery" and publish results to guarantee accountability.

Failing schools, Bennett believes, represent a moral failure.

"Poor children can learn, and children of color can learn, and children who speak a different language can learn," he says. "To suggest otherwise is the height of racism and classism and has no place in 21st-century America."

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