Norton Rainey

Vince, thank you so much.

What an honor to be on your show.

Absolutely.

And you know, Vince, I want to talk about what you just said a minute ago, and that is that we saw some very alarming trends in our country just a few weeks ago when the national assessment came out once again showing that our low-income children were only proficient at 14 and 19 percent in math and reading.

And as you mentioned so well, only a third of these kids in eighth grade are actually literate, which is a very alarming data point.

But here's the deal.

This is not new information.

This is something we've known for decades now in our country.

In fact, it dates all the way back to the early 80s when a report came out to our country called A Nation at Risk, highlighting the difficulties we were having and the crises we were facing in our education system.

And that if we didn't act and do something about it, that we were going to have

catastrophic circumstances.

And that's what we're now seeing.

We've seen a record amount of money being spent in public education, but the results are not actually very good.

And our return is

abhorrent for our kids.

And so we get some issues in our country right now.

So yes, to your point about the opportunity to do something about that, ACE was founded 25 years ago by some remarkable business leaders that believe we could do a lot more for our low income children, that we should level the playing field and that your education really should not be dictated by the zip code that you live in, but based on who you are as a human being, that every American should have access to a great school.

And over 25 years, we helped out more than 120,000 children with scholarships.

We've seen those kids do remarkable things.

And at a federal level now, we have this amazing opportunity for the first time ever, where thanks to some heroic leaders in this movement, in the big, beautiful bill this year, President Trump signed a federal school choice tax credit, which will be a game changer for our country.