Wealth & Money Quote by Kenny Marchant

“Raise the bar” is one of politics’ favorite magic tricks: it sounds like a promise of transformation while politely refusing to name who gets measured, how, and at what cost. Kenny Marchant’s line rides the familiar wave of early-21st-century economic anxiety, when “global economy” became a stand-in for everything from outsourced jobs to rising test-score obsessions. The sentence’s real muscle is the word “however,” which implies an unnamed complacency: whatever we were doing before, it is now insufficient. That pivot manufactures urgency without having to prove it.

The intent is clear: justify policy pressure on schools by framing education less as civic formation and more as national economic infrastructure. “Prepared to compete” turns students into future labor-market entrants first, people second. It’s not subtle. The subtext is that schooling is a race with winners and losers, and that international competition is an external threat that can discipline domestic debates. Mention “international level” and dissent starts to sound like indulgence, even sabotage.

What makes the rhetoric work is its flattering toughness. It offers a moral high ground - excellence - while smuggling in a technocratic agenda: standards, testing, accountability regimes, perhaps privatization or workforce-aligned curricula. Yet it dodges the uncomfortable questions that follow any call to raise standards: Who is being left behind when the bar rises? What supports rise with it? The quote doesn’t argue; it recruits. It asks listeners to accept competition as destiny, and to treat education policy as economic defense spending by another name.