I heard you say and agreed access to a good education for poor people who are disproportionately blacks and Hispanics can be hard. And I agree and even said as a taxpayer, I would support real solutions to those issues.

But I think the problem goes beyond money. My brother founded a charter school in Jersey City where 75% of students come from families living below the poverty line, but 100% of the students graduated and 94% were accepted into college and his school operates on 85% of the budget per student as the public schools.

So, if we are prepared to separate those students that really want a good education from those who don't care, we could deliver a good education to every child that wants them. Ask a public-school teacher about this issue.

So, I think it is possible for society to provide poor children a pathway to success.

But the school my brother founded highlights the other problem, that you might have insights on. By definition, parents who go through the effort of enrolling their children in the lottery that determines who gets to go to my brother's charter school care about the education of their children and the results are pretty powerful... caring parents matched up with a good school produce powerful results.

But how does society reach children whose parents don't care and how do we expand access to good schools for parents that do care?

Only one in six poor children regardless of skin color escape poverty permanently as adults? How do we make it three out of six or five out of six? Is there a number, society can't get past because of the parents?

Also, how much of the problem is "the system" and how much of it is the lack of understanding by poor families how to navigate the system, or some other reason? If a poor black family say like the single mother of Ben Carson who earned a living cleaning rich people's homes determined her two children would escape poverty and made that happen, why can't others follow the same path? And is it unreasonable to expect parents to make that their most important responsibility when they decide to have children?

As an employer, I was more than happy to pay for my employees to go to college to get their degrees at state schools, community colleges, and vocational programs. Over the decades, I worked in business we shelled out millions to fund college and vocational education.

You could start with our company as a janitor and end up as a senior officer. We were not the only ones... a hospital we worked closely with had a CEO, who started with the hospital as a janitor. Why did he become CEO and none of the more educated doctors (he did get a college degree while working at the hospital).

The challenge with the company route is that a company is making an investment into a person and you kind of have to stick around for that approach to work. We typically required an employee to work full time, paid enough towards a college education for employees to be part time students and graduate in 8 years. My daughter is having her doctorate paid by her hospital and she has a two-year work obligation after she is done.

Our requirements were that the employee needed to be "working" towards some specific education and get passing grades besides working full time. Why did we do this... not generosity, we wanted to keep employees with the company and studies show the longer they stay, the longer they are likely to stay in the future... get an employee to hang round more than 5 years and you have a good chance they will make their career with your company.

So, what is your frame of reference? Were you able to get access to a good education?

But you might have a point, that poor people don't understand the money is there (it comes with "strings"), but it is there.