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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us September 26, 2005 Case In Point: Poverty, Part II (Click here for part one of this two-part series) A new purpose, a new direction By Chris Honoré Tidings Correspondent So what can we do? How do we even begin to grapple with the issues of poverty and race and inequality, problems that have eluded us as a people for more than a century? These difficult questions rise from the recent United Nations report on poverty, which broke recent precedents and turned its attention to the U.S. The findings made it clear that abject poverty is not only in third-world countries, but here within our own borders. Something must be done, but where to begin? Well, we can indeed begin with our children. One source of hope resides with our public schools — and this is not said lightly. Education is the panacea. Our public schools could be the great leveler of what is now an uneven playing field, if we had the national will to make them the rigorous, effective and fair. Instead they now mirror the inequality and de facto segregation of our society. Author Jonathan Kozol, in his just released book, “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid,” write that 48 percent of high schools in the nation’s 100 largest school districts graduate less than half of their entering ninth graders. Nationwide, from 1993 to 2002, the number of high schools graduating less than half their ninth-grade class in four years has increased 75 percent. Clearly, we are losing generations of young people who will live their lives without full access to an ever accelerating information-driven economy. What we take for granted, reading this newspaper, is Everest for thousands upon thousands of children. It isn’t fair and it isn’t right. Consider how our schools are financed. There is no greater inequality than that which exists between school districts, between the rich and the poor, between inner-city schools and those in the affluent suburbs. Simply testing children ad infinitum does not address this inequity. Our schools should be financed nationally, not locally. Let us begin there. Every school district in every city, small town and burg, should have equal resources and funding, meaning books, buildings, number of teachers, class size, and so on. Currently they don’t, the scales are not balanced, and it’s scandalous. Three years of preschool should be universal, open to every child. No questions asked. It’s only fair. We should also call for a curriculum and organizational review of all of our public schools, asking ourselves the question: Are they designed to meet the needs of the 21st century? For too many kids, the system is broken. It suffers from an anachronistic organization, devised when America was in transition from an agrarian economy to an industrialized economy. How we move kids through the grades is, for many, ruinous, representing an industrial assembly line. The model for all grades after elementary school should be the college system. The standard should be mastery — of course material — and designations such as frosh or sophomore or senior should be eliminated. Students only move through the system when they demonstrate competency and have met certain prerequisites. Testing, as currently implemented, should only be one tool, not the high stakes monolith it’s become. We should do this because we know that of all the institutions available to us, bar none, our schools can make the most sweeping difference in the lives of children. Are we not long overdue for a health-care Manhattan Project? No one in America should be without health insurance, no child, no mother and no family. Prenatal care should be SOP. All of our children should be immunized, and they should see a healthcare worker as often as needed. That we have not brought to bear the resources and intellect of our great country to ensure that our children, not to mention all of us, are healthy represents a staggering failure of leadership. And then there’s the idea of fairness and equality for all people in America. The civil rights movement is long behind us. But are we not ready to discuss race and people of all colors in America in an open and frank forum? Was race a factor in New Orleans? Clearly it was. Perhaps not in the rescue (the black community would disagree), but certainly in the racial makeup of those who were left behind. If there is a correlation between race and being left behind in America, then we should honestly and forthrightly examine what those connections are and how they came to be. To do any less is to lapse into stereotyping and bigotry and to miss a momentous opportunity. There is no plan to raise the minimum wage, which is being outstripped by the cost of living with devastating consequences. Since 2001, America has lost 2.7 million manufacturing jobs. Minimum-wage jobs cannot support a family. Far too many people in America are working grindingly hard and are still being left behind. America is one of the most remarkable countries ever to have graced our planet. And freedom as an idea, as a guiding principle, may be one of the most profound and revolutionary ideas of the last two hundred and fifty years. But we can do better. It is in our national character to do better. We need simply leaders with the courage and vision to point the way. It is time. Part 1 of Case In Point’s analysis of the U.N.’s “Human Development Report” ran last Monday and is available in the Tidings archives at www.dailytidings.com. Case in Point is a weekly editorial column designed to provide in-depth commentary on current events. 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