On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “The Story,” Harvard Professor and President Emeritus and former Harvard President Larry Summers stated that “we don’t have the right kind of standards in education at the high school level or at the college level” and the education system places “too much emphasis on self-esteem and not enough emphasis on excellence.”
After host Martha MacCallum said [relevant remarks begin around 8:45] that education spending hasn’t been effective, Summers responded, “You are absolutely right that we don’t have the right kind of standards in education at the high school level or at the college level. You are absolutely right that we place too much emphasis on self-esteem and not enough emphasis on excellence. You are absolutely right in expressing those concerns.”
He continued, “But I will tell you that, if you look at the record of the Trump administration when it was in office, they didn’t do anything about any of those problems. And it doesn’t solve all the problems, there [are] a lot of things that need to be done, but what the Biden-Harris administration did was a set of things that made community college more accessible to a large number of Americans, and what’s actually probably a more important issue, they did more for the two-thirds of Americans who don’t have college degrees, in terms of their ability to get jobs.”
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