Leadership Matters September 2014

Farooqui issues call to defend public education, rouse silent majority

By Michael Chamness IASA Director of Communications

education. The founder and CEO of K12 Insight, Farooqui will be the headline speaker at the general session of the IASA Annual Conference Thursday afternoon, October 9. Fittingly, the title of his presentation is “If We Don’t Stand Up for Public Schools, Who Will?” “What I have learned about America is when something that’s important to you is at risk, the American way is to fight for it,” said Farooqui, acknowledging that the odds are stacked in the current environment of public schools being starved financially and battered by the media and reform groups. “School superintendents have to fight the big dollars from some of the reformers. They may be well -meaning and think they are contributing to educational improvement, but what they are doing could dismantle public education. There is a rush to build more charter schools, but this is not about

Suhail Farooqui watches and listens in amazement as reformers and the media tear down public education in America. Growing up in Mumbai, India, Farooqui viewed the United States as an educational destination. “I came here because America continues to be a beacon for education and opportunity. I was inspired by engineering and I wanted to be a space shuttle astronaut. When I read NASA’s fine print, it said you had to be an American citizen,” said Farooqui, who earned his undergraduate degree in Electrical Engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and attended the graduate program in Electrical Engineering at Yale University. He also became a naturalized citizen of the United States and has become one of the staunchest defenders of one of our nation’s cornerstones, public

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