Lau said:
However, I can't speak for the rest of the world, but I know in the UK the majority of kids in private schools are well off, and a lot have parents that are interested and concerned in their education. The problem I have with them is that it siphons these richer kids and their interested parents into one system, creating a kind of elite, while the 'other' kids go to the local school, and the local school gets a bad reputation, and less well-off parents send their kids there, and it gets worse and worse. There's a similar problem here with the grammar school/comprehensive school mix, where you take a test when you're 11 and if you 'pass' (5% do) you go to a grammar school, and if you 'fail' (95% don't), you go to a comprehensive. Again, it creates an artificial elite.
I think it's pretty similar here in the US. Middle and upper class families get the good "public" schools. Even if a poor, urban family cares about the eduaction of their kid (and our system of public schools so failed these parents when they were students that they too often see little value in education), their kid is still going to get the raw end of the deal (older books, fewer books, fewer resources generally, run-down buildings, poor administration, etc.).
I'm starting at a new school in two weeks -- I'm working with drop-out risk kids in a suburban system (used to work in an urban system). The high school I'm headed to is only 30 kids, and parents have to apply to get their kids in (in other words, the kids have to be failing school miserably
and the parents have to care enough to do something about it). The district is very "high performing" (read: few ESL kids and thus high test scores), so that begs the question: what about the drop-out risks who don't have parents who care about their education? Who don't get to enroll in the "alternative" high school? What happens to those kids?
Sad answer is they'll probably drop out. Which isn't to argue that education is everything, but is to argue that these kids -- forgotten by their schools
and their parents -- well ... they've got no safety net.
It really gets me, because they're invisible and because nobody cares (at least nobody cares enough to fund programs to innovate education
for these kids). The kids I was working with in the urban district were just numbers to our administration -- they were walking test scores (and failing at that). I'll never forget my first year there -- we gave a standardized test and one of my kids -- a really good kid -- dedicated, cared about learning, rarely in trouble and always
trying -- I remember him opening his test book and reading the first passage. The defeat he felt was immediate and obvious in his face -- all that work, and here was the test to flaunt his inadequacy -- to tell him just how "stupid" he was. What could he do? The only English he spoke was at school, he hadn't been in the country long and he was reading on a third or fourth grade level (he was a 10th grader at the time). But he
knew that this test was important and worse, he knew he couldn't even understand the passage, let alone the questions.
Who would willingly -- forget eagerly -- return to the site of their failure 182 times a year? Who would keep trying to do something, every single day, over and over, even though it's obvious that you don't reallly know what you're doing? Who volunteers to feel embarassed and stupid for 6 hours a day every day? Think of the courage it takes not to give up -- not to drop out -- but to come back into that room, in front of those same peers and that same authority figure -- and to be "wrong" again and again.
I don't know where this was meant to go. I'm not even sure where it came from -- my own guilt for leaving an urban district for a suburban district, my own sense that I let those kids down by leaving them (though I fully recognize that I was burning out, and that another year in that system probably would have broken my back as a teacher -- add
me to the list of urban school drop-outs, then). My festering frustration that, no matter how hard I (and other teachers committed to teaching as a vehicle for social justice) try, "public" education will still give every advantage to kids of privilege, money and power. Worse -- too rarely do we cultivate in those kids an awareness of their privilege and their power (in most cases they're certainly aware of their money).
To speak more directly to your point,
Lau: You're right. There are so many people -- not just kids -- there are so many people everywhere who need so much, and so many of our resources are devoted to those who already have.
What really makes me really bitter, though, is just how intractable that fact seems to be.
