What are we doing?

The innocence and the resilience of kids is why I love my job. When I was growing up my biggest worry was if I was going to get ice cream after soccer practice, or if my current crush was going to look over my way during math. I never had to worry about where my next meal was coming from, translating for my parents or having to skip school to stay home to take care of a younger sibling. These are challenges my students face daily, yet come into school motivated and ready to learn. If these situations aren’t part of your reality it’s easy to believe that they don’t exist, yet a lot of students are experiencing

I’ve had students who were homeless. Students with families of 8 living in a 3 bedroom apartments. Students with siblings living in different countries who they’ve never met. Yet, regardless of these challenges they continue to persevere on their own academic journey. Our educational system is set up for some students to prosper, while others must overcome many obstacles to get an education. Students are receiving different opportunities based off of the situations they are born into. These same situation in which they have no way of controlling. So the question I keep going back to is how are we, a society, ok with this?

“And while some might see income inequality as the result of adult life choices about matters such as how hard to work or where to live, educational inequality seems unfair, because the economic status of a child is outside the child’s own control. It is an inequality of opportunity that runs counter to the American dream,”

(Hanushek, 2019)

Throughout the book “A More Beautiful Question” by Warren Berger engages his readers with stories of people who took their passion, asked a question and went on a journey to solve it. They turned an idea or an impossible thought into a reality. So here is mine how do we let all children have a fair shot at education. I’m not naive and I recognize this is not going to have a simple answer. It also can’t be solved by one person or even one community. It requires our society to admit there is an issue in the structure of our school systems that effects all of us. It’s something I’m afraid we are scared to acknowledge because it would mean restructuring a system that has remained basically the same since its inception. It would mean no more head starts and that success is based off of hard work and merit (Mathis, 2005).

This is not to say my students can’t succeed. On the contrary, I am able to work with extremely talented ,creative and hard working students. But why must they work so much harder on their educational journey? It makes me angry that these kids don’t even realize how many more their peers have that they don’t. What makes me even angrier is that the adults in charge aren’t doing anything about it. At the end of the day, they are all kids who are relying on us to take care of them. Let’s start living up to that expectation.

References

Berger, W. (2014). A More Beautiful Question. Bloomsbury Publishing.

Hanushek, E. (2019, May 31). The Achievement Gap Fails to Close: Half century of testing shows persistent divide between haves and have-nots. Retrieved July 16, 2019, from https://www.educationnext.org/achievement-gap-fails-close-half-century-testing-shows-persistent-divide/

Mathis, W. J. (2005). Bridging the Achievement Gap: A Bridge Too Far? Phi Delta Kappan,86(8), 590-593. doi:10.1177/003172170508600807