{"database": "press", "table": "releases", "rows": [["https://www.tuberville.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/icymi-tuberville-introduces-alabama-educator-ruben-morris-at-help-committee-roundtable/", "ICYMI: Tuberville\u00a0Introduces Alabama Educator Ruben Morris at HELP Committee Roundtable", "2024-09-11", "2024", "2024-09", "Republican", "Senate", "AL", "Tommy Tuberville", "T000278", "www.tuberville.senate.gov", "tuberville", "https://www.tuberville.senate.gov/press-releases/", "scraper", "WASHINGTON \u2013 Yesterday, U.S. Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) joined U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA) in a roundtable discussion on ways to innovate within K-12 education to improve outcomes. Senator Tuberville introduced and welcomed the founder of Alabama Aerospace and Aviation High School Ruben Morris to the panel discussion. Senator Tuberville asked the panelists about the impact of artificial intelligence on education, about the relationships between innovative schools and community investors, and about recruiting efforts to bring awareness to these schools.\n\nU.S. Senators Tuberville and Cassidy were joined by U.S. Senators Katie Britt (R-AL) and Joni Ernst (R-IA) in the roundtable discussion.\n\nRead Sen. Tuberville\u2019s opening statement below (starting at 7:30 in the livestream) and watch the full roundtable here.\n\n\u201cThe reason I ran for this position was education\u2014one of the main things. Most of you know that I\u2019ve spent a lot of time [in education]. I spent four years in the classroom, in high school level, and then I got into college. And man, has it changed over the years? It really has.\n\nYou know, there\u2019s more than one way to skin a cat. And we haven\u2019t changed the way we\u2019ve skinned cats in years, as the way I call it, in education. You gotta move on with the times because time is not gonna wait on us. We found out a lot about our education system back during COVID, and I think a lot of our parents did, and we all learned something from it.\n\nYou know, I spent a lot of my money, my own money, and plus the university\u2019s money at all of the schools I coached at trying to get our kids back to reading level that they should be when they got to universities. They made pretty well, obviously, on their ACTs. They made well on some of the tests they took. They had the grades supposedly. But they couldn\u2019t read the way they should be able to read. That\u2019s gotta change. We gotta teach our kids how to read, folks. I mean, if you can\u2019t do anything else, you gotta be able to read. Because [otherwise] you can\u2019t learn, bottom line.\n\nAlabama has recognized a lot of these failures. I\u2019ll tell you that and we\u2019ve had a lot of talks about those since I\u2019ve been here in the last three and a half years. We\u2019ve addressed some of those. And I think it\u2019s very obvious, if you know anything about Alabama, how we\u2019ve changed some of our education.\n\n[I am] so glad today to have Ruben Morris here. Ruben, thanks for being here. Ruben founded the Alabama Aerospace and Aviation High School in Bessemer, Alabama. He knows better than most the struggles facing our education system. He\u2019s seen it firsthand, up close.\n\nAnd that\u2019s what it really takes most of the time. And in recent years, we\u2019ve been spending more and more money on education. Everybody thinks it\u2019s about money. And obviously, it takes money to do a lot of things\u2014 to pay teachers [and get] the best people that we can possibly get to teach our kids. That\u2019s very important, obviously, too [we have to pay] the administrators.\n\nWe shell out close to a trillion dollars a year for public, elementary, and secondary education in this country. A trillion dollars. That\u2019s a lot of money. Close to $20,000 per student, more than anybody in the world. [\u2026] And for what? What are we getting for it? We better figure it out. One thing we know for sure, what we\u2019re doing in a lot of areas isn\u2019t working. Plenty of factors are contributing to that. We need to take a long hard look at what exactly is failing our students.\n\nAll of us need to work together to face the hard facts and start breaking away from the decades-old norms. As we all said, and Senator Cassidy said here. He\u2019s a lot older than I am, by the way. But things have not changed. And you\u2019ve got to change with the times.\n\nOur task today is clear. We need to dig deeper into underlying issues holding our students back from success. We need to analyze what the federal government is doing to impede progress and innovation, and we need to come together to figure out how to change the status quo [to go] forward, not the same, and not backwards. Something\u2019s gotta change.\u201d\n\nSenator Tommy Tuberville represents Alabama in the United States Senate and is a member of the Senate Armed Services, Agriculture, Veterans\u2019 Affairs, and HELP Committees.\n\n###", 1, "2026-03-30T01:40:41Z", "2026-04-06T18:46:43Z"]], "columns": ["url", "title", "date", "year", "month", "party", "chamber", "state", "member_name", "bioguide_id", "domain", "scraper", "source", "date_source", "text", "has_text", "collected_at", "updated_at"], "primary_keys": ["url"], "primary_key_values": ["https://www.tuberville.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/icymi-tuberville-introduces-alabama-educator-ruben-morris-at-help-committee-roundtable/"], "units": {}, "query_ms": 4.333197139203548, "source": "dwillis/congress-press", "source_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press", "license": "MIT", "license_url": "https://github.com/dwillis/congress-press/blob/main/LICENSE"}