Back to School- The Injustice

Let's play a game. Imagine that you have 2 people having a contest to see who can use a ladder to scale a 10-foot wall fastest. These 2 people have relatively the same height, build, and athletic ability, and start out with the same drive to climb the wall...let's say there's a big burlap sack with a green dollar sign filled with money on the other side of it for the winner. Their chances are pretty even, right? Okay, now what if I told you Climber A had a 6-foot ladder and Climber B had one of those rickety 2-foot high house painting stools with 3 steps that very technically counts as a ladder. Little bit of a game changer, eh? True, they'll both still have their obstacles...Climber A still has to actually climb the ladder made available to him and put in his work once he gets to the top and Climber B can definitely still climb over if he's determined enough (and maybe with a little bit of a boost from a person willing to help out) ...but the smart bet's on Climber A, right?

This is the problem that American public schools face today. Many people assume that public schools present a largely uniform experience, but the difference between these taxpayer funded schools in different areas is greater than one might imagine...in fact, it's almost like first class and coach educational systems. Entire generations of kids find themselves in Climber B's cleats, looking at their inferior equipment, magnified challenges, and lack of dedicated, passionate instructors willing to give them a boost...and often, they choose to just quit the race. Dropout rates in the City of Philadelphia constantly hover around 50%...unless your education was lacking as well, I don't need a bar graph to tell you that's way above the national average (33%).

There are those who bring up charter schools as a viable alternative...I'm not sure how paying some company to fuck things up for profit is an effective use of taxpayer dollars...maybe that money would be better spent, uh, in the schools that need it? There are those who suggest that people dissatisfied with public education should opt for a paid, private education instead. While this is an option, it by definition excludes those without the ability to afford the $3,000 per year tuition of St. Jesus Preparatory School For Exceptional Young Men. Some people even have an answer for that, suggesting that the government provide school vouchers for free private education. It's a program that's being considered and implemented in different areas of the country. While that's a noble thought, it doesn't address the real problem...that the free ones are so bad, the government is considering paying people not to go there! I might drop out too!

I brought up the Philly dropout rate, and other urban areas tell a similar tale...Detroit, Baltimore, New York, Milwaukee, Cleveland, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas, Denver, Houston...all graduate under 50% of their students. That's under. 50. Fucking. Percent. (Do I really have to Google up all the stats for high school graduate earning power vs. non-graduates? They won't even let you flip burgers without a high school education some places...hell, they're starting to investigate strippers' educational backgrounds...it's a tough job market.) What do these areas have in common? Many have high minority populations...because who needs the plantation when you can ensure that large swaths of certain subsets of people are guaranteed to work menial, unskilled jobs for just enough money to feed themselves and get their black, brown, and off-white asses back to work for their entire lives? (Yeah, I said it.)

It's not any secret that schools in areas with heavy minority populations consistently underperform when stacked up against schools "in the hills"...people will often use fake addresses or take impossibly long commutes just to get a decent free education. I've had the opportunity to spend time at both kinds of public schools, and the differences are clear as day. Skipping over the neighborhoods, which present challenges of their own, it's a wide gap. The maintenance of the actual facilities, the quality of educator, the number and newness of books (I once had a History book that ended with the Vietnam War) and computers (if applicable) ...hell, even the food is markedly better in the suburbs. Why? We pay the same taxes pretty much wherever we live, (if it ain't sales, it's property, if it ain't property, it's income, if it ain't income, it's some tax they made up last week) so how is it that the investment in our most valuable resources are so severely unbalanced? Are we saying that some kids are worth more than others because of where they live?

I'll stop short of calling it genocide only because it doesn't directly kill people, but make no mistake, lives are being destroyed. There are kids out there right now that will never reach a fraction of their full potential because they never had a chance. The fact is, we as a country do not have equal access to an acceptable free education....it's beyond a fucking shame, it's an ongoing national tragedy. I was one of the lucky ones, I'm making the most I can with a overall subpar education...but somewhere, the potential next Einstein took one look around his classroom, saw the bars on the windows, the computer that only takes floppy discs, the minimally compensated, lackluster and uninterested teacher, and his Science book that ends with a proud recognition of the recent discovery of the mysterious planet Pluto, and said "fuck this"...if that's not injustice for all, I don't know what is.