Education for Americans: Black White and everyone

I’m back from my business trip and there are just so many things I want to touch upon. From the terrifying thoughts of 1984-esque visions of the future - ala employees at CityWatcher.com being embedded with chips to monitor their movements, to short-comings in the education system - as shown in the multiple modifications to the No Child Left Behind Act and the rising cost of retiring teachers, or the comparisions that can be seen from the over 50 years of desegregation in schools. There is more but for now, I think education takes precedence.

Education has been and will always continue to be an important factor in the growth and continuation of this nation. It is something we give to our children in hopes they will live better lives, or in the least lives as good as our own. There is no one, of any credibility that I am aware, that disputes these tenants. Yet it is a fact that as a nation we spend more money on incarceration than education. Police and sheriff’s patrol officers median income in 2004 was $45,210 as compared to the estimate for teachers being $30,496. That’s a difference of $14,714 or 32% less. I call that significant.

I also believe there is no credible question in that America has fallen in comparision of educating the youth. The simplest support of that is the need for a No Child Left Behind Act. Yet again the emphasis seems to be on appearance over substance. Both Republicans and Democrats have pounded their chests on how there needs to be reforms and education is important while test scores have floundered. The mild improvements that have occurred recently do nothing to fill the gap of the drop prior to those improvements. And this is no sudden shock. As I have made some reference to in my post History in America when I was in high school I had a physics textbook that was older by 5 years than myself. And that was a class that only the college bound students were provided. The best in the school, so to speak. My Chemistry 101 class at NY City College (125th street campus as I recall near Baruch) gave me more information than that class did. [To clarify I was in a special program, Bridge To Medicine, that allowed me to take college courses while still in high school.] That was just about 21 years ago and I’m not aware of improvements.

Education costs money. In textbooks, facilities, and faculty. I can only speak of a small number of schools that I am aware of but I find them all lacking in the above. Whether in the ‘inner city’ or in the suburbs and small towns there are real problems on all levels. The cost of providing textbooks of adequate use often is balanced against providing security, or trying to recruit new teachers. That’s absurd. New teachers will be frustrated by the lack of tools needed to teach, and the fact that since 1983, in NYC in this example, they could make more money more quickly and with less effort by being a sanitation worker - the gap has never gotten closer to my knowledge. The fact that schools spend increasingly more money to police students as opposed to providing music and arts programming is disturbing.

The stop-gap answer for many areas has been to provide better ‘packages’, incentives for medical and retirement needs. Of course, as noted above, there is still a price to be paid and that cost is rising. Foreseeably it will continue to rise, while textbooks and new teachers suffer. The net result being a loss to our children. Most severely affected will be the Black African American, Hispanic and other minority children found in our cities. Already bombarded by constant and subtle suggestions of inferiority and separation [See any of my posts at Black Entertainment USA on commercials] with the media driving the thought that rather than getting an education focus on fast money as an entertainer, and cultural attitudes suggesting more and more that illegal activites are desirable, Black African American, Hispanic and other children are opting out of the system.

In any society, when any portion of the citizenry is denied access to education and the arts, the entire whole suffers. When that society forgets the benefit of educating its people, it must act on protecting them from the inevitable deterioration. And thus we are in America today. I clearly see this correlation. Worse yet I see that we are regressing in some ways to actions of the past. Without education we must suffer the mistakes of the past over and over.

I mean that in the last decade to 15 years, as schools have failed our children en masse there has been a move to a more elitist structure similar to that of segregation. In recent years, efforts to remove Affirmative Action [a program I dislike, but understand the need for] have intensified. At the same time America has become more technology intensive, requiring higher levels of learning to provide better paying jobs. This is coupled with deteriorating education, specifically in the urban areas, which creates a class-based segregation. The fact that urban populations have high Black African American, Hispanic and other minority populations creates racial-based segregation. Media and culture only react to the pressures that create them thus further fueling these factors. All of this then shows in acts like the Rodney King, Abner Luema, and other riots, the Columbine massacre, and in reactions to Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans.

At the root, education is the common factor that affects everything to some degree or another. I would hope that a return to the 50's cannot happen [for those of color they were never ‘happy days’] nor would I invite the riots of the 60's. But without taking a stance to improve education, for every child in the nation, elements of our past will haunt us again. Considering the more violent and paranoid nature of the world today, such regression will bode badly for the nation.

I can say more, but...

This is what I think, what do you think.