I’m reading a book called Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol (read it there). It is a brutal look at the American public education system, and how it reflects racial inequalities and the inequities of how our tax dollars are applied to the school system. It covers the Chicago Public School system circa the late 1908’s and early 1990’s, and discusses the atrocious conditions and lack or resources faced by our public school students.
It made me wonder, are we any better off today?
I am a regular reader of the District 299 Chicago Public Schools’ Blog, and I came across an article stating that nearly 10% of Illinois schools could be classified as drop out factories. It turns out that Wells High School, my neighborhood public high school, has a drop out rate of almost 50%.
While seemingly we have massive gaps in education today, just as in Kozol’s 1992 look at the schools. While we live in a world where 50% of our students, at any institution, FAIL to even graduate… we cannot consider ourselves successful as a society. By any measure, education is failing. Kozol comes back a number of times to recount the expenses in wealthy school districts versus poor districts. I don’t have the research behind me to show if this is still true or not, but it is probably safe to presume.
So while the public schools still struggle and the environment has shown little change, the context of what is available, for very cheap or free, has grown immensely. I ask this question, what resources can now be replaced? How much do we spend, per student, on books and libraries in school? Public school libraries are a waste of time and money, they are inadequate and outdated. Replace them with cheap computers and internet access. Provide free English tutoring (I guess I will plug TinyLanguage here). Give students Wikipedia.
Maybe instead of trying to find resources that aren’t there, and seeking help that just is not coming, we need to reorder how we think of the resources we already have. We may have to let go of some things that we hold as sacred.