Educating on Education

Do you want to know what’s wrong with our public education system? Well, for starters, it’s how we fund it.

A year ago, I was volunteering with a group of my college peers to tutor in Springfield, MA. We were tutoring High School students who were mentoring Elementary students in sports. There was a GPA requirement to participate in the program, and as college students, we were completing the mentoring circle.

I mention the program to explain that these were civically minded, dedicated and bright students. I was helping with Algebra II and Calculus. And only one of the four schools that these kids came from gave their students textbooks. These kids were expected to learn MATH without a textbook. That is ridiculous. I won’t talk of the success I had with raising their grades (I did), I want to vent that the students not in this program had NO BOOKS and LITTLE HELP…but y’know, it’s the teachers/students fault.

Already mad, driving back to my college with my fellow collegians, I’m venting “THEY DON’T HAVE TEXTBOOKS”…and one of my college peers (in my ivy-league school) said “we had two books at my school. One for class and one for home. So we didn’t have to lug the books back and forth” She went to public school, too. But in a far different area.

So, this is probably the biggest reason for the achievement gap. Schools are funded by property taxes. Schools in wealthier areas are better funded, which in turn draws those who can afford to, to move to those areas. We end up with people who could afford to pay for a private school and/or textbooks receiving a first rate education for free. And those who can’t afford those areas, lacking textbooks and being blamed for not pulling themselves “up by their bootstraps” They don’t have bootstraps. They don’t even have books.  Parents in the wealthier areas don’t understand why we say schools need more funding; their schools are well funded. They block any attempt at raising taxes and blame bad teachers/lazy students.

You want to fix public schools? Make school funding universal, per student. Don’t make students dependent on the economics of where they are born to determine what chances a kid has in life. If rich people think they deserve a far better education, then let them send their kid to private school and pay for it. Charter schools that take money from these “failing schools” is NOT a solution. We are increasingly living in a “separate but not equal” country. Kids born into upper-class/upper-middle class households are given every advantage but can’t see it because it’s in the guise of “public education” and those who don’t win the birth lottery are vilified as lazy/corrupt. WAKE UP AMERICA.