Is Education Truly Free? (ROUGH DRAFT)

Is Education Truly Free?

          There is a common phrase that goes “the best things in life are free”. However, if that’s true then why can public education be one of the worst? Most do not think about the fact that the United States is ranked 24 in worldwide education when we are a very successful 1^st world country. Yet so many parts of the U.S. have such poor living conditions and education you would think it is a 3^rd world country. A likely misconception is that bad neighbor hoods and bad schools go hand in hand. That one is not necessarily the cause of the other. However, I am in firm affirmation that bad neighborhoods are caused by bad schools and that if schools were improved that the quality of life around the school would also improve. I will establish that education is the most important value in a child’s life, which no child is inherently unskilled or uneducated, that the schools abandon the students before the students abandon the schools, and what we can do to improve our broken education system with issues of tenure and budget. I will prove this by making reference to such works as Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol, as well as the documentary “Waiting for Superman”.

          First off why should we value education in a young man or woman’s life? Why is it necessary to put that above all else? Well it’s simple, because education is priceless. If any student has the right knowledge, can apply it, and has the motivation to do so they can achieve and contribute so much back. If children are the future then invest in the progress of them. In Savage Inequalities the author interviews a series of teachers across the United States about why they think their school is failing; in one such interview a teacher speaks on why her school should get funding, saying “For the brightest kids, the ones who have a chance at a four year college, we cannot provide a AP program…They’ve been given less but will be judged by the same tests.” Well some parents do care about a child’s education, but only their own child, they can only focus and see if their child is successful and could care less if any kid grows to contribute and be a productive member of society. Why should you care about any other child besides your own? You do not owe any type of obligation to other children, they are just the offspring of strangers you do not know or care about. Well care to make a better world for the next generation. To give the basic necessities to those who so desperately need them. To provide knowledge is to provide hope to the students of tomorrow, to give more than you received just to make others can be treated on equal terms.

          Another observation that many seem to forget is that no child is inherently bad or ignorant. A large majority of people seem to forget that the punks they see on the streets of Oakland, St. Louis, Chicago, or New York, were once innocent toddlers with hopes and dreams of the future. But were met with constant disappointment and not given the tools or education to purse what they wanted from a young age and eventually give up hope on school. When talking to a kinder-garden teacher in Savage Inequalities the teacher brings up this very point and adds “If one stands here in this kinder-garden room and does not know these things the moment seems auspicious. But if one knows the future that awaits it is terrible to see their eyes look up at you with friendliness and trust.” Some could argue that this is a competitive world and educational system we live in and that those who truly are gifted or inspired can raise to the top despite the shackles of poverty. In response I say the lives of students should be treated equally, and not that everyone gets the same funding. The schools that need more money than others deserve more, every school should be treated on a case by case basis not one certain standard. The schools that are already successful should not get extra funding, they are already working, use that money on schools that are barely holding and need basic utilities. Our current system makes the rich get richer and the schools that struggle are stuck to wallow in their own poverty.

          Which leads into my next point, the schools that are poorly funded are responsible for the dropouts that they form. As said before these kids are optimistic at a young age, but they are not ignorant, students catch on quickly when they realize that they the private school down the street or the charter school in the next district over is getting much more funding and services than they are. When author Jonathan Kozol talked to a pregnant high school student about why she was having a child so early she responded “Well, there’s no reason not to have a baby. There’s not much for me in public school.” For low income communities with little to no work, education can be the only escape for those who want to achieve more in life. And it is heartbreaking to see and hear so many give up on their own futures because of others selfishness; taking money from education is taking away other’s dreams of bigger success. More than just that it hurts later, you either pay for their education now or you pay for their prison sentence later, and you pay, on average, ten thousand more.

          If that is the case when how can we fix our education system thus bringing the communities around them higher? Well it is not easy and not all the answers are readily available. In addition radical changes to education is going to be met with backlash and hostility from those who are benefitting from our current status.  As Bill Gates said “We can change the status quo but it’s gonna take a lot of outrage.” Those would benefit are the underserving teachers who cannot be fired because of the ludicrous rules of tenure. Now I’m not saying tenure was originally a bad thing, in fact it was made with the best intentions. To protect teachers from getting fired because of their beliefs or ways of teaching and that still works at the college level (mostly) due to have difficult it is for college professors to obtain tenure. Again, in “Waiting for Superman” they go in depth on how tenure at the high school level and below is ruining schools because many teachers stop caring because they have such high level of security in their job. “The things we’ve don’t to make our schools better have prevented our schools from working.” In most states tenure in public schools requires two years of just showing up, not high performance or review just attending the job that deciedes the futures of children. This is no secret either, students are constantly uploading videos of teachers who sleep in class, ignore their students, or even hit children;  travesties that are right in front of us and yet choose to ignore. Because firing a bad teacher with tenure in nearly impossible and everyone has an experience in school where all the students and faculty had at least one deplorable educator in their school, but could not do a thing because the teacher had tenure. I know I did growing up, did you?

My final point is that our education budget should be higher if we want our system to be better. A lot of people always say "children are our future", but it's amazing how little they are willing to sacrifice for our future. Because especially in California, when we needed money instead of rising taxes our education budget was cut. Then again, and again, and again. Now our education fund is a husk of what it used to be, and our public schools are suffering big-time for it. So if we want kids to stay in school and be excited for it then shouldn't we invest more in it? With such little resources it’s no wonder kids don't get much out of school. It can feel so empty and shallow and it hurts our teachers as much as it hurts our students. I've known and know plenty of teachers who have had to pay out of pocket of the resources they require for their lessons in day to day classes. It has gone to a ludicrous amount now, with such little funds schools are closing left and right and classes become incredibly overcrowded. So if we want to end it we need to give back and end this cycle instead of continuing this loss onto our children in the future.

          In conclusion, the neighborhoods that most are afraid to drive by, locking their car doors and pitying the poor children that have to be in the schools are in that condition because of those bad schools and it can be fixed. I want to stress that education, the passing and exchange from teacher to student and back, is so crucial to bettering the communities that surround schools. Although it might be difficult and it might be costly it will pay off in the end in spades because a quality standard of learning should be available to all children because, after all, the best things in life are free.

Works cited:

Kozol, Jonathan. “Savage Inequalities”. Broadway Books, 1991.

Guggenheim, Davis. “Waiting for Superman”. January 22^nd 2010.

https://rankingamerica.wordpress.com/category/education/

http://www.money.cnn.com/infographic/economy/education-vs-prison-costs/

Response: Waiting for Superman

Waiting for Superman is a documentary about the travesties in the current educational system of the United States. It brings up some very interesting points on how screwed up our system is, especially when it comes to things like tenure of high school teachers. However it does paint a picture of the solutions that it presents as the end all be all of the issues in the education system. The magnet schools and charter schools that the movie presents as solutions are steps in the right direction. They are not, however, the whole answer, they are not even close. The problems in our education system are so deeply rooted that it is going to take radical change so solve the crisis with our children. I mean a complete overhaul of the system because small changes to the system are either quickly taken back or mostly ineffectual. One of the biggest issues when it comes to making changes like that is that the teachers union and our government educational system is that are so stubborn about change. In the movie there is a couple quotes that stuck out to me one was spoken by Jeffery Canada and that was "The things we've done to make out schools better have prevented our schools from working." A great explanation about the amount of regulations and rules that plague of educational system, how the original intent was to improve but now is the downfall. The other quote I wanted to talk about was by a small time business man known as Bill Gates "We can change the status quo, but it's gonna take a lot of outrage." No better proof of this statement than in the movie where it came from. The documentary talks about Michelle Rhee the DC superintendent, and how she tried to flip the education system on its head because it is so hideously corrupted and exploited and how she was constantly met by red tape from the teacher's union and the government system. She tried to make a much progress as possible within her short time in office, but was constantly barricaded. Michelle tried her best to help and if more government officials were like her and actually tried to fix education rather than promising empty lies our country could make a lot more progress in a much shorter amount of time.

Our Education System

So to talk about our current educational system and two ways to solve it I need to analyze what its state is right now. Right now our educational system runs on a fast food model. The teacher stuffs as much information into the student as possible so that it can be regurgitated back out on tests without the student every having any "real" comprehension of what he or she learned the entire class. The system is a quantity over quality, the focus is on the information without understanding and it may work in the short term, however, looking at the long term learning any information will not and does not work with this current system. 

The first way to fix our education system is to start with the instructors. Our current tenure system with teachers is hideously broken. Let me evaluate on that statement: tenure can be a good thing, it helps teachers have a sense of job security and let's good teachers stay at schools. But it is a double-edged sword because some teachers who have tenure can slowly start to give up as the years go buy. Teachers, in my opinion, are the most important part about our educational system. If a teacher is passionate about something no matter what it is; that class will become interesting. I know this from experience, all through out my school life every teacher that was considered "good" or "one of the best teachers at the school" were not the classes with the easy A or the fun subject it was always the class with the most passionate teacher. No matter what the subject is, if the teacher is invested in it as his or her class is, it will be a good class. That's why tenure should not be based on time, but on performance. Now how this performance could be evaluated could be difficult. If they system let the students decide through interviews or performance then they could easily let the easy A teachers pass if they think that teachers that REALLY want to be teachers might not get jobs because students might find their material too difficult. But honestly I would rarely find that happening, because if you need students if rise to the occasion, most will. Which is why teachers should be paid by how good they are not how much time is put into it. You know, like almost every other job in existence, if you do it well you get paid more not if you do it crap for a long time.

Which leads into my second point, our education budget should be higher if we want our system to be better. A lot of people always say "children are our future", but it's amazing how little they are willing to sacrifice for our future. Because especially in California, when we needed money instead of raising taxes our education budget was cut. Then again, and again, and again. Now our education fund is a husk of what it used to be, and our public schools are suffering big-time for it. So if we want kids to stay in school and be excited for it then shouldn't we invest more in it? With such little resources its no wonder kids don't get much out of school. It can feel so empty and shallow and it hurts our teachers as much as it hurts our students. I've known and know plenty of teachers who have had to pay out of pocket of the resources they require for their lessons in day to day classes. It has gone to a ludicrous amount now, with such little funds schools are closing left and right and classes become incredibly overcrowded. So if we want to end it we need to give back and end this cycle instead of continuing this loss onto our children in the future.