Jerry Brown’s Cone of Silence to Student Reporters Reaches 100 Days

For the past 100 consecutive days, reporters from USC’s online newspaper Neon Tommy have called California Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate Jerry Brown‘s office, trying to get him to clarify his position on the massive cuts to the public education system. They haven’t heard back, but that hasn’t stopped Neon Tommy from posting updates, in a feature they call “Jerry Brown Watch.”

Neon Tommy Editor-in-Chief Callie Schweitzer pens the 100-day anniversary column.

8,640,000 seconds. 144,000 minutes. 2,400 hours. 100 days.

This is the time in seconds, minutes, hours and days since Neon Tommy began its Jerry Brown Watch: a chronicle of our efforts to engage California’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate in a conversation about his education policies….

Now that the primaries are over, Brown has an obligation to address the issue of education in California. He needs to be courageous and get specific. We need a leader who doesn’t wait to see what direction the public wants to pull him, we need someone who is bold enough to make a decision and stand by it….

Education is an issue that affects everyone. There should be no Democratic side and no Republican side–the issue should be a place where the politicking ends, and we all meet in the middle to guarantee the best future for generations to come….

November will be here before we know it, and in between now and California’s general election on Nov. 2, let’s make Meg Whitman, Jerry Brown and any other politician across the nation answer these tough questions. We should be demanding that politicians talk to us.

Schweitzer notes Brown’s silence on education is particularly disturbing since his father was former governor Edmund “Pat” Brown, who is widely credited with building and expanding the California public university system during his tenure in office from 1959-1967.

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