ICYMI: Tuberville Introduces Alabama Educator Ruben Morris at HELP Committee Roundtable

WASHINGTON - Yesterday, U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) joined U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) in a roundtable discussion on ways to innovate within K-12 education to improve outcomes. Senator Tuberville introduced and welcomed the founder of Alabama Aerospace and Aviation High School Ruben Morris to the panel discussion. Senator Tuberville asked the panelists about the impact of artificial intelligence on education, about the relationships between innovative schools and community investors, and about recruiting efforts to bring awareness to these schools.

U.S. Senators Tuberville and Cassidy were joined by U.S. Senators Katie Britt (R-AL) and Joni Ernst (R-IA) in the roundtable discussion.

Read Sen. Tuberville's opening statement below (starting at 7:30 in the livestream) and watch the full roundtable here.

"The reason I ran for this position was education-one of the main things. Most of you know that I've spent a lot of time [in education]. I spent four years in the classroom, in high school level, and then I got into college. And man, has it changed over the years? It really has.

You know, there's more than one way to skin a cat. And we haven't changed the way we've skinned cats in years, as the way I call it, in education. You gotta move on with the times because time is not gonna wait on us. We found out a lot about our education system back during COVID, and I think a lot of our parents did, and we all learned something from it.

You know, I spent a lot of my money, my own money, and plus the university's money at all of the schools I coached at trying to get our kids back to reading level that they should be when they got to universities. They made pretty well, obviously, on their ACTs. They made well on some of the tests they took. They had the grades supposedly. But they couldn't read the way they should be able to read. That's gotta change. We gotta teach our kids how to read, folks. I mean, if you can't do anything else, you gotta be able to read. Because [otherwise] you can't learn, bottom line.

Alabama has recognized a lot of these failures. I'll tell you that and we've had a lot of talks about those since I've been here in the last three and a half years. We've addressed some of those. And I think it's very obvious, if you know anything about Alabama, how we've changed some of our education.

[I am] so glad today to have Ruben Morris here. Ruben, thanks for being here. Ruben founded the Alabama Aerospace and Aviation High School in Bessemer, Alabama. He knows better than most the struggles facing our education system. He's seen it firsthand, up close.

And that's what it really takes most of the time. And in recent years, we've been spending more and more money on education. Everybody thinks it's about money. And obviously, it takes money to do a lot of things- to pay teachers [and get] the best people that we can possibly get to teach our kids. That's very important, obviously, too [we have to pay] the administrators.

We shell out close to a trillion dollars a year for public, elementary, and secondary education in this country. A trillion dollars. That's a lot of money. Close to $20,000 per student, more than anybody in the world. […] And for what? What are we getting for it? We better figure it out. One thing we know for sure, what we're doing in a lot of areas isn't working. Plenty of factors are contributing to that. We need to take a long hard look at what exactly is failing our students.

All of us need to work together to face the hard facts and start breaking away from the decades-old norms. As we all said, and Senator Cassidy said here. He's a lot older than I am, by the way. But things have not changed. And you've got to change with the times.

Our task today is clear. We need to dig deeper into underlying issues holding our students back from success. We need to analyze what the federal government is doing to impede progress and innovation, and we need to come together to figure out how to change the status quo [to go] forward, not the same, and not backwards. Something's gotta change."

Senator Tommy Tuberville represents Alabama in the United States Senate and is a member of the Senate Armed Services, Agriculture, Veterans' Affairs, and HELP Committees.

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