- There's someone right there with a hand.
Yes, do you have a question?
- I'm a teacher, and I'd just like to know
what you would do as president
as far as our Secretary of Education goes?
What are the most important things
to you when you're putting someone
in charge of education?
(crowd cheering)
- What do you teach?
- [Audience Member] Fourth grade.
I don't want to talk about the math problem.
(crowd laughing)
- I was just so happy that I got it right.
I can't tell you.
First of all thank you.
- [Audience Member] And this is a social worker next to me.
- Thank you for teaching the fourth grade.
Thank you for being a social worker.
(crowd clapping)
I would like to put somebody in
that job whose walked in the footsteps
of the teachers in this country
and also the kids in this country
that are living in poverty.
(crowd clapping)
For reasons that I won't get into
when I was first running for this job
I often got accused of not being qualified
in the Senate, which was meant to hurt my feelings
and people would say here's why you're not qualified
cause you've never run for office before
and I'd say you know what I wish
people did before they went to the Senate,
teach in a high poverty school
for 10 years of your life.
So you can understand what's going on in this country
and on just the teacher pay question,
which you didn't ask, but I'll just mention.
We gotta understand people
that we are living in a country
where we have inherited a system
of paying teachers that was developed
when we had a labor market that discriminated against women
and said you can have two professions
one is being a teacher and one is being a nurse
and the whole design of it still
imagines that humans are shackled to
that labor market and it doesn't exist anymore
and until we figure that out
we're never gonna pay teachers
as the professionals that they are.
We're gonna continue to lose 50%
of them in the first five years
of the profession and this achievement gap
that we have in this country will never be solved.
One of the reasons I'm running is
I'd like to be the education president.
(crowd cheering)
- We've got time for one more.
Yes, sir in the tie.
- Hi thank you for taking my question.
My name is Vladamir.
I work for city council and one
of the questions constituents always ask
is regarding gentrification - that seems to be
a thing nationwide really in regards to big cities.
But we understand that...
So their concerns always in terms of
affordable housing, is that the guidelines
and criteria to determine affordable housing
doesn't match, right?
So what they'll say is, what they claim is low income,
is high income for a lot of especially New Yorkers.
And we understand that is something
that's linked to the federal government.
So how, if any, fix you would have for that?
- First let me say that I used to work
for a mayor and one of my jobs
was going to city council on Monday night
to get yelled at by the city council
and the first night I ever got back from that
my kids were very young and they had seen it on TV
and all they wanted to know was,
how did you get inside the television set
(crowd laughing)
and what did you do to make those people so mad at you?
(crowd laughing)
So, I know a little bit,
but I think there are three things.
One we gotta fully fund housing vouchers
in this country, half the people
that are eligible for housing vouchers
in America don't get those housing vouchers.
Second, we have to build a lot more housing
in the United States and that's gonna require
much better alignment between the federal programs
that you're talking about and local governments
decisions on zoning and all of us in America
are gonna have to suck it up
and realize that we're gonna need to have
more density in this country
if we're actually gonna have affordable housing
and some of the most progressive cities
in this country are the least embracing
of that sort of housing and third
a point that you didn't ask about,
but it's related, we've gotta figure out
how to address evictions in the United States of America
because we are destroying families,
the ability of people to hold a job
and hang on to housing because to often
we use the remedy of eviction
when a less onerous remedy
could actually make the difference.
So, thanks.
- Ladies and gentleman.
(crowd applauding)
Senator Michall Bennet.
Thank you very much.
(upbeat music)