I am not unaware of the cost of education; I have three children in college.

I said, we need to make sure cost is not an issue. As a taxpayer, I support educational scholarships based on need to ensure no child who puts out the work is denied a college education due to cost. I do think that scholarship money should be tied to a work study program, that converts 16 hours of work a week during the school year into the cost of school.

I paid for college first with a sports scholarship and then after destroying my knees by working 32 hours a week at a hospital. So, I am asking for half of what I was able to work, since I think more than 16 hours a week can take away from the time students should be studying. On the other hand, as someone who ran a company with 42,000 employees, I always gave preference to applicants that worked while going to school over GPAs. It is easy to teach people a job, but hard to teach them to work.

I also support what I call a 2nd chance program. Far too many young people and disproportionately poor and therefore minorities, do not realize how important education is until they try to get a job and then it is too late. The 2nd chance program would provide free community or vocational college for adults that maintain a passing GPA and major in a field our country needs people in. I hate to limit it to community college and vocational school, but we don't have unlimited resources as a country.

All five of my children worked during college, I believe working is part of a child's education and they should start before they really "have" to work. I started as a child (my father had a business and we started out picking up litter and eventually graduated to cleaning bathrooms, by high school we were working the loading docks. Dirty hard work teaches you that every job is important, but not every job pays well. Since you have to work to earn money, might as well go after a job that pays well.

You call my thinking "Pollyanna", but here is the reality. Blacks who get college degrees earn within 1% of what whites with the equivalent background do and have a slightly lower unemployment rate (I guess to many white children hang around in their parent's basement). So, its education more than skin color that is holding blacks back.

Now to be clear, I do realize racism exists, but here is another truth, most employers are not racist, and I always thought to the extent employers were racist, that was a competitive advantage for my company.

The best companies are the companies with the best people. Any company that does not hire the better worker because of the color of the worker's skin is losing a better employee to another company. I once built a data entry operation on the bus line to a black neighborhood next to a day care center to cash in on those talented single black mothers that wanted to work and needed a job that fit with their responsibilities as single mothers. Noble of me... not really, I just wanted good people. The company I ran with 42.000 employees explored working from home more than 20 years ago... not because of a pandemic, but because there was so many college-educated women who wanted to work but need a flexible job they could do from home.

I sense you have never tried to run a large company. And that is part of the problem. To many people have no idea how employers think. Most of us don't care about a person's skin color, we care about the impact they can have on the company's bottom line and many employers are prepared to invest in people that have the right work ethic.

Next time you watch a professional sports game look at the team. Do you think the coaches are focusing on skin color or talent to win... Employers think the same way, it is just not obvious... but the goal is the same... winning.

Neither Trump nor Biden are going to help black children succeed. Blacks have waited on Democrats to "fix" things for decades... but what exactly can a political party do to fix things. Shelby Steele said it best, we needed government to address systemic racism and for the most part it has... now blacks as individuals need to begin to compete as individuals, those that do are succeeding if they start out with a good education or other skills. So, how do we achieve the first part... a good education... not just a book education?