reflection week eleven - problem solving

This Saturday, I had lunch with my high school French teacher and a couple of other people from the class. Anyways, she told us about her son, Dan, and how he's currently in New Orleans with the Teach for America program. The ideas behind this program are good - to provide quality education for children in poverty. Granted this program is (as the name subtly points out) only for children in America, but regardless, the standards that it wishes to abide by are in no way a reality. The schools are in shambles - money is sent to repair them but the school boards cant seem to get it to schools to make repairs. In early September, half of the electrical grid shut down at the school where Dan teaches and it has yet to be repaired. The classes from that section of the building are shoved in various other locations providing an unstable learning environment. The teachers have few supplies to work with and must purchase many out of pocket, which in an area such as New Orleans, is not a large salary. At the start of the year, they were expecting 600 children to come to school; only 200 showed up.

America may have a school system that can educate those in poverty, but if they cannot or do not go to school, then what help is it? If children must drop out of school as young as 13 or 14 to work and support their family, how can they have a good education? Besides having low attendance and buildings that are falling apart, the education that is provided in such areas of poverty is no where near that of the remainder of the country. According to the Teach for America mission statement, "Nine-year-olds growing up in low-income communities are already three grade levels behind their peers in high-income communities." This means that these nine year olds, who would in other places be at a third grade level, are learning at a kindergarten level. Nine year old kindergarteners. Even with programs sending more qualified teachers to improve the level at which the children are expected to learn, how can they do so without their basic needs taken care of - if they are hungry, tired, cold how can they learn? if they have no way of getting to school, have to work, or simply choose not to go because of societal pressures, how can they learn?

In class Friday, we argued over the value of education and how important it is for lifting people out of poverty, but I ask: if America, the so-called 'land of opportunity', cannot provide a decent education for those in poverty, how can we expect to spread this knowledge worldwide? Don't get me wrong- I think that at least achieving literacy in one's native language is incredibly important and we should definitely invest in providing that to all, but I'm curious as to how we can achieve these ambitious goals. I think that our class did a good job of arguing about which things, given limited resources, are the most important to repair, but the real - more important - question that we must face is how. How can we ensure that funding does not stop within the many levels of bureaucracy, that it actually goes to improving schools? So many non-profit organizations gather money to aid third world countries, but so many people remain in poverty, uneducated, unable to get to school due to a lack of infrastructure. Instead of talking about what needs to be fixed, lets choose a problem and discuss how to solve it.