Former Arizona Governor Jan Brewer appeared on Friday’s edition of Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM host and Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon to talk about her commitment to educational reform and her support for America’s military personnel, which combine in her involvement with groups like Military Families for High Standards and the Collaborative for Student Success.
“I grew up on a military base, so I understand what the military is about, and then I got involved in politics because of education,” she recalled. “All the time I was there, I was fighting for education. And then being a mother on top of it, of two beautiful sons, it was very important to me. And so I think that certainly the military is really one group that really represents the need for their children to have high, consistent, and comparable education standards in our public schools.”
She explained that consistency in educational standards is especially important for military families because “they move from base to base, and their kids move from school to school. They need to have some type of comparable standards, so they know just exactly where their kids are.”
Without such standards, Brewer explained that military families “have no way to know if they’re moving into a better school, or a worse school than they’re already attending.”
Of course, high, universal educational standards are important to non-military families as well. “In Arizona, I want to know what my kids are doing, as compared to the kids in New York, or the kids in Florida,” she said. “Because we want all the kids to be successful.”
Bannon, whose daughter is an Army captain, observed that it was difficult for civilians to truly understand the stress military service puts on families, and how deeply active-duty personnel worry about their loved ones back home.
Brewer recalled her childhood experiences of watching military families come and go from the base where she lived, “playing baseball with us in the summertime, and then all of sudden they’re just all picked up and they leave.”
“It takes them a while to adjust, because everything is brand new: new teachers, new friends, new expectations, new educational curricula. And then, they’re there for a short period of time, and then they know they’ve got to leave again. The tears, and the goodbyes – it’s traumatic. It’s very, very traumatic on these kids, and these people are making huge sacrifices.”
“We’re competing in a global economy, and we want all our kids to be successful. Education is the basis for all of that,” said Brewer. “And now we’ve got military people refusing to take advances in the military, because they don’t want to move their kids into another school district.”
Brewer agreed with Bannon that the country doesn’t truly understand the needs of military families beyond education, either.
“In Arizona, we have several military bases, and the economic dollars that it brings into our state – people, you know, they don’t want to hear the jets flying, they don’t want this, they don’t want that. They don’t understand that these people are protecting us, and keeping us safe,” Brewer said. “It’s sad, it really is sad.”
Brewer declared herself a “true supporter of the military” because she has seen it in action throughout her life, adding she was “very appreciative of each and every one of those men and women that sacrifice their lives to protect us.”
“We should be very, very proud of them,” she said. “And we should take so much into consideration. They bring us cultures from all over the world, they come into our communities, with the bases they bring the dollars into our economy, and we just take it for granted.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00AM to 9:00AM EST.
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