HELPING TO END LINGERING SEGREGATION IN AMERICA

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 brought an end to segregation in America, but economic segregation is stronger than ever today. Economic status coupled with some discrimination generally leads to separate neighborhoods for people of color and separate schools for their children. For many children of color, lifelong poverty is a fait accompli before they reach adulthood. By that time, they have dropped so far behind more economically advantaged white children to make it virtually impossible for many to compete for college admissions, let alone afford it. Their financial future is nearly preordained to be no better than their parents.

You can point the finger of blame anywhere you want, but the bottom line is that children have no say in their fate and are innocent victims of an educational system that usually fails to afford them the tools and resources to compete academically. By and large, schools in poor communities, especially urban areas, are far below the standards of predominantly white, suburban schools. Many good teachers and administrators naturally gravitate to the highest paying school districts.

Combine inferior schools with a child’s home environment and the disparity widens even further. Household items that advantaged children take for granted like computers are not so prevalent in poorer homes. Because of the cycle of poverty, parents or guardians are far more likely to be poorly educated and therefore unequipped to help their children with school work. Children of color are far more likely to be growing up in dysfunctional households. Many are being raised by grandparents. According to the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services almost two-thirds of the children in foster care are African-American, American Indian, or Hispanic.

Trying to quickly change the home environment of poor, minority children would be a daunting task, but making their schools better is clearly within our societal capacity to do.

We can apply some of the same methods used to keep our military at near-peak readiness. The United States maintains five federally funded military academies: The United States Military Academy, the Naval Academy, the Coast Guard Academy, the Air Force Academy, and the Merchant Marine Academy. The guiding principal behind these institutions is to create a steady infusion of talented officers to help keep the military at its best. Student cadets attend these military colleges tuition-free with room and board in exchange for several years of military or military-related service.

Why not create five federal teaching academies where our nation’s best teacher and administrator candidates could receive a free education in exchange for five years of service in poorer K-12 schools throughout the country? Each academy could be focused on a particular field of study from arts and humanities to science and engineering. Within five years we could have 25,000 or more talented educators working in schools they would otherwise not consider. The whole educational makeup of underfunded schools in poor communities would be transformed and energized.

The military and its related military academies protect our economic and strategic interests worldwide. These teaching academies would protect these same interests here at home by creating more and better educated high school graduates who would go on to college and beyond. In today’s global economy, the demand for talented individuals is more essential than ever if a nation is to remain strong. We have already seen the emerging power of countries like China, Brazil, and India largely due to their large, well educated workforces.

Furthermore, by better educating the poor we could begin to break the cycle of poverty that has plagued our nation for over a century, thereby reducing the cost of social programs like welfare. A study by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services agency found that “families living in poverty were the least likely to have resources available to them” and “the more compromised these families are, the more likely it is that they eventually will come into contact with the child welfare or some other social system.”

A study conducted by the State University of New York - Binghamton found that three decades ago the U.S. prison population was about one-eighth its current size and that people of color today account for more than 70 per cent of our prison population. Poverty breeds crime and creating better schools in poor neighborhoods will offer young adults viable and lucrative career paths other than crime. This, in turn, will reduce the cost of running the largest prison system in the entire world.

Any child given a good education and a fair chance to compete will acquire two essential ingredients for success: hope and self-esteem. Who can argue with a more equitable approach to education that helps children in need, reduces the cost of social services and prisons, and creates a more vibrant and powerful economy?

Jeff Gewert Sandy Hook, CT © Copyright 2012, Jeff Gewert

HOPE FOR DISADVANTAGE KIDS WHERE YOU MIGHT NOT EXPECT IT

No one can blame a child in a poor community who fails to achieve certain academic standards when faced with huge inequalities in the quality of education. Therefore, you would think there would be a relative consensus that we as a society should do more to help these children.

Instead, the blame game takes center stage. The middle-class and above often blame the parents and guardians of these children characterizing them as unmotivated, lazy, and entitlement-dependent. The parents on the other hand frequently hold the schools and government accountable. No matter where the blame is directed or where it rests, the fact remains the children are innocent.

These kids have enough going against them. The average middle-class child has a relatively stable home environment, well educated parents, some degree of family wealth, and a solid support network. None of this exists in many poor households.

If government with societal support could sustain comprehensive, concerted, and substantive programs to give children the education they need to compete, a whole generation could rise out of the perpetual cycle of poverty. And the cost would likely to be less than the parade of half-hearted, disingenuous, band-aid solutions implemented since the New Deal.

Unfortunately, this is not likely to happen anytime soon, in fact, it may never happen. There is hope, however. Having mentored three young boys over the past 12 years, as well as producing several video documentaries about underserved children who succeed in adulthood, I have seen one common thread that applies to just about every success. That thread is a strong-willed parent or guardian who stresses education, while guiding the child with consistency, tenacity, encouragement, and love.

These parents (hereafter to include guardians) relentlessly police their children to make absolutely certain they are always doing their school work and building other life skills necessary to succeed. Of course, not every parent has the wherewithal to do this, but the ones who do cannot afford to pass up an opportunity to help ensure their child has a better life. This is no easy task for many, particularly for grandparents who should be enjoying their golden years, or single, working mothers who toil long hours in grueling jobs.

In the absence of these guiding parents, children come home from school and do nothing except watch TV, play video games, and interact with other children who are often reinforcing negative behavior. Summers are spent much the same way. All this while advantaged kids are far more likely to be doing their homework and honing their academic skills in the summer, thereby gaining an even greater advantage.

Surprisingly, some parents simply acquiesce to the will of the child, while others allow their children to participate in decisions that affect their future, at an age when they are incapable of understanding the ramifications. If given the chance, a child will invariably make the wrong decision.

After school programs, educational summer camps, and mentors can help, but they will not bear a lot of fruit without a dedicated parent at home. Furthermore, non-profits are often under-funded, and consequently understaffed and mismanaged. The level of support parents assume their children are getting may not be the case. And mentors are part-time and do not typically get involved in day-to-day academic support.

Like it or not, the schools, non-profits, and mentors are not going to have any profound affect on a child unless the parent nurtures a home environment conducive to learning and shelters the child from the negative influences of media and the neighborhood. Only then will a child have any real chance of breaking free of poverty.

© Copyright 2012, Jeff Gewert

EQUAL OPPORTUNITY TO EDUCATION DOES NOT EXIST IN AMERICA

All children in America will never be afforded an equal chance of succeeding in this world so long as the quality of education is so overwhelmingly determined by the individual wealth of each community. The best teachers and administrators are naturally going to gravitate to the school systems offering the highest salaries. The difference in pay scales can be alarming. A mediocre, physical education instructor in a middle-class community on Long Island can make double to triple what a gifted language arts instructor might get in a poor New York City community.

Wealth also brings better school programs and better educational tools as well. High-speed computers and other technology are pervasive in middle-class schools and very scarce in poor ones. Tutoring and other after-school programs in general are vastly better in affluent neighborhoods.

Much of the foundation of a good education begins at home. Again the disparity between rich and poor is even more pronounced. A typical middle-class kid lives in a sate neighborhood in a nice home being raised by a reasonably stable family with educated parents who possess the wherewithal to monitor and guide their young ones. On the other hand, many poor children grow up in dangerous neighborhoods, terrible housing, in broken families, and parents or guardians with little or no education, some do not even speak English. Even if these parents or guardians appreciate the value of education, they do not have the tools at their disposal to help their children at home.

Access to computers, calculators and other technological tools in middle-class homes are as common as milk in the refrigerator, while they are virtually non-existent in poor homes.

As a “C” student growing up in a middle-class community I know the value of these household advantages. My verbal skills were constantly being drilled into my head at home and reinforced simply by being around other educated peers in the community. You could not help but learn to communicate well. A poor child, on the other hand, surrounded by a myriad of languages including Ebonics is already at a tremendous disadvantage.

So how do you fix this uneven playing field? Before answering that, let me first say that nothing will work if the American public does not accept and embrace the fact that poor children are disadvantaged and be truly committed to addressing the problem with the tenacity and sacrifice we apply to going to war.

We seem to allocate a disproportionately high amount of our national resources to addressing what lies outside our borders. Just think of all the time and money we invest in space exploration and the relentless pursuit of new and better military weapons to be used against foreign enemies - real or imagined, and what impact these same resources could have on the quality of education for all of us.

I have two ideas for addressing the problem of education, one where we can emulate professional sports and the other the defense community. Of course, many readers will say both are unrealistic and maybe they are right. My reason for posing them is not to say whether they can be adopted in America, it is only to demonstrate that there are ways to solve the disparity in education if we have the will to do so. Surely we have the resources.

Professional baseball, basketball, football and hockey have all adopted a salary cap on how much each team can spend in total on their players. The goal is to give each team a relatively equal chance of winning. This prevents teams with disproportionately high revenues and payrolls from dominating their respective sports. The quality of the players are the raw material or commodity that principally dictates success or failure, just like faculty and administrators in each school system largely determine the success or failure of their school population. The idea is that although some teams may have to sacrifice a little, it makes the entire league stronger which ultimately benefits all teams.

So why not apply such a salary cap to each community’s school system regardless of their individual wealth? Like professional sports, some communities would have to make modest concessions, but in the end the entire nation would be enriched.

This would have to be applied to private schools as well to prevent an abandonment of public schools in affluent communities and a rise in private schools to circumvent these caps. The federal government would have to oversee and enforce this policy. Of course, there would be an uproar from wealthy communities, unions, and the like; but the bottom-line is that no individual or school system would suffer much if any of a decline in wages or education respectively, while the poorer communities would see a incredible improvement. Even if an affluent school system had a slight decline in the quality of their teaching staff, surely it could be off-set by their well educated parents at home.

The other idea borrows from our nation’s military service academies like West Point and Annapolis. These federal institutions offer a free, high-quality education in which each graduate has to pay back this debt to the country by serving in the armed forces for a predetermined period of time. This insures a steady influx of talented individuals to make sure our military is always at near optimum readiness.

Why not create an education academy for future teachers and administrators where graduates pay back their debt by working a set number of years in poor school systems with their salaries subsidized by the federal government?

Whether you agree with these proposals or not, one thing is certain: If the country truly desired to help poor children succeed and escape the spiral of poverty we have the means and resources necessary to do it. We just don’t seem to have the heart. It’s about time the public and the politicians stopped placing the blame here and there, and considered that the victims of our unfair education system are helpless children. They have no say in the quality of their education which largely determines success or failure in life, and yet they have to live with its consequences for a lifetime and pass this legacy on to their own children.