What Newt Gingrich isn't telling you about his literacy program
Newt Gingrich recently declared that, if elected president, he'd ease child labor laws to allow poor kids to work as janitors...
From Mother Jones
For a politician who once proposed relocating children from single-parent households to orphanages, it was not all that surprising when Newt Gingrich recently declared that, if elected president, he’d ease child labor laws to allow poor kids to work as janitors.
What’s notable, however, is the newly minted GOP presidential front-runner’s explanation. Gingrich argues that poor children lack role models who can instill in them the value of hard work—something that, say, a part-time job cleaning bathrooms could easily remedy. Making his case to an audience in Des Moines, Iowa, last week, Gingrich touted the work of an educational nonprofit he founded in the early 1990s called Earning by Learning (EBL). The program offered cash—$2 per book—to students as an incentive to read over the summer. What he failed to mention is that his group also led to a formal ethics complaint amid concerns about not just who was funding Gingrich’s program, but where that money was really going.
As Gingrich tells it, the program started that first summer in 1990 with 9 kids and ended with 30. “What happened was simple,” he said. “The ice cream truck comes by. The kid who’s in the program walks up and buys their own ice cream. Their friend says to them, ‘How come you have money?’ He goes, ‘Well, I read.’ So kids are showing up to the program saying, ‘I demand that you let me read!’”
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