Parenting & Family Quote by Mark Kennedy

A politician’s favorite magic trick is to sound decisive while promising not to touch the steering wheel. Mark Kennedy’s line is built to do exactly that: it frames federal involvement as benevolent support, then instantly cordons off federal authority by elevating “local school boards, parents, teachers and administrators” into a civic chorus. The sequence matters. By stacking every familiar stakeholder, Kennedy creates the impression of broad democratic consent, even though those groups routinely disagree about curriculum, discipline, budgets, and what “educating our children” should mean.

The key verb pair, “help, not hinder,” is a rhetorical permission slip. “Help” is undefined on purpose: it can mean more funding, fewer mandates, or political cover for local priorities. “Hinder” carries the sting of bureaucratic meddling, a word that activates long-running conservative suspicion of Washington and of experts who don’t live in the community. The subtext is federal restraint as virtue, local control as morality.

Contextually, this fits an era of recurring school flashpoints: standards, testing, culture-war curriculum battles, and special education and civil rights enforcement. The quote nods to parents and teachers alike, but it quietly reassigns the federal role from rule-setter to facilitator, minimizing the uncomfortable truth that “local” can also mean unequal. Invoking “our children” makes it sound nonpartisan and protective, a soft emotional seal over a hard policy stance: decentralize power, and treat federal oversight as the problem unless proven otherwise.