Wealth & Money Quote by William Bennett

Nostalgia does a lot of lifting here, and Bennett knows it. “Back to where they were in 1963” isn’t a policy benchmark so much as a mood board: a pre-Great Society, pre-busing, pre-culture-war America that many conservatives imagine as more orderly, more coherent, more teachable. The date is doing rhetorical work precisely because it’s vague. Nobody has to specify test scores, graduation rates, or funding formulas; the implied comparison is moral and cultural, not technical.

The “five years” deadline adds a CEO-style ultimatum to public education, framing schools as underperforming contractors rather than civic institutions. It’s also a setup for the real punch line: “educational bankruptcy.” That metaphor smuggles in a market logic that treats schooling as a failed enterprise that should be liquidated, with taxpayers refunded like shareholders. It recasts citizens as customers, and teachers and administrators as managers who’ve squandered an investment.

The subtext is less “let’s innovate” than “the system is illegitimate.” By proposing that people “educate themselves and start their own schools,” Bennett nods toward privatization, homeschooling, vouchers, and the moral authority of parents over professionals. It’s a populist move dressed as fiscal prudence: return power (and money) to “the people,” imply that expertise has become bureaucracy, and suggest that community-level solutions will outperform a centralized system.

Context matters: Bennett was a prominent conservative voice in the Reagan era, when distrust of government programs was ideology, not just frustration. The line isn’t built to solve education; it’s built to win an argument about who deserves control of American life.