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Former governor Ed Rendell addressed the resplendent attendees at this year’s Pennsylvania Society Dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria in Manhattan, famed birthplace of a $20 apple salad. Rendell, who along with his wife Judge Marjorie Rendell, was being honored, sent a message to a crowd that may have caught them off guard.

As you may know, the PA Society Dinner is THE event for the Commonwealth’s political and business elite, a prime opportunity for deal making and campaign fundraising.  So alluring is this dinner and the flowing champagne that some lawmakers in Harrisburg actually made the trek to New York despite their inability to pass a budget five months late.

Ditching work while struggling families across the state suffer the consequences to attend a gala at a hotel where a suite can cost you $10,000 a night? How’s that for a galaxy far, far away?

Citing a renaissance in Philadelphia and Pittsburg which is attracting new people, young and old, Rendell said Pennsylvania was doing very well in many respects. Everyone wants to be in Philadelphia, said the city’s former mayor proudly.
The glitterati nodded in agreement.

Right Through the Very Heart of It

“But yet, ten minutes  away from all of this good news [in Philadelphia], all this vibrance, all these gleaming towers,  is some of the worst poverty in the United States,” he continued, “We’ve got to do something about it.”

“This isn’t class warfare. It’s not about income inequality. …We have an obligation to end the level of poverty that exists in the midst of all this opulence.”

The clinking of champagne flutes were silenced as the din of the room died down, giving way to a clamor of applause.

Poverty “saps hope and it saps opportunity out of those neighborhoods,” Rendell said, adding that when kids see the only people making money are the drug runners on the corner they can only ask what’s in it for them.

“Well,” he said, ”Education is the way out and the way up.”

Start Spreading the News

He urged the attendees, which included senators and congressmen, CEOs and other leaders of communities, to do whatever they could to support universal Pre-K because too many of our kids who only get a half day of kindergarten fall behind in first grade and never catch up, dropping out before high school out of frustration.

“And unless we deliver to our kids universal quality Pre-K education when they’re four years old, nothing else is going to matter because that’s the ladder up. That’s the ladder up.”

Concluding his remarks, Rendell addressed the budget impasse by issuing a challenge to the crowd. The protracted fight in Harrisburg, he said, was about educating children and that legislators, Democrats and Republicans, needed to hear that they understood that education is the only way for those impoverished neighborhoods to “come alive with hope and vibrancy and opportunity. An education matters.”

It’s Up to You

As we wait and wait for what could be the Commonwealth’s largest education funding increase in history, it’s maddening to say the least that school districts now face closure in the interim. There’s a simple, logical response to this budget debacle and those who vote against funding schools, especially as we head into an election year.

Rendell said to tell them, “If you don’t fund education, don’t come back the next year after voting no and ask us to fund you!”

We don’t know if any of our truant legislators ordered any Waldorf salads that night. But we have to wonder, how did they like them apples?