Education Quote by Major Owens

Major Owens voices impatience with a reform strategy that presumes a plentiful supply of ideal teachers will eventually appear. Improvement cannot be postponed until enough people agree to accept low pay and difficult working conditions. That logic traps schools in stasis: it treats scarcity as inevitable rather than as a problem to solve. The line is both pragmatic and moral. Pragmatic, because a system dependent on undercompensated labor will never scale; moral, because delaying action consigns current students to a lesser education while adults debate the pipeline.

The target is not teachers but the conditions around them. If compensation, support, class sizes, and autonomy make the job unsustainable, recruitment and retention will falter. Expecting excellence under those constraints is a contradiction. The point is to change the inputs if better outcomes are desired: elevate pay to match professional demands, reduce nonteaching burdens, provide mentoring and time for collaboration, and bring in complementary roles that lighten the load. Short of that, reform rhetoric becomes wishful thinking about human stamina.

Owens, a Brooklyn congressman and former librarian, spent his career pressing for resources in urban schools and for pathways that lifted paraprofessionals and community members into educational careers. His perspective grew out of neighborhoods where teacher shortages, overcrowded classrooms, and outdated materials were chronic, and where students could not afford to wait for perfect conditions to arrive. He also anticipated a recurring cycle: when salaries stagnate and accountability rises, attrition accelerates, and reformers call for patience rather than structural change.

Read today, the statement challenges policymakers to stop designing improvements that rely on heroic individual teachers and start building systems that make good teaching sustainable. It invites broader civic responsibility: if the classroom is where a society secures its future, then budgets, labor policies, and community supports must align with that priority. The urgency is clear. Do what is necessary now to make teaching a job that talented people can do well and want to keep, or accept decline as the cost of waiting.