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Good Schools vs. Bad Schools?

© R. L. Head

The federal government is getting involved in establishing the criteria for a quality education. They want to target poorly performing schools so they can provide a system of punishment and reward to improve them, but they can’t decide on a definition. I submit that, as usual, we are looking for solutions by creating more problems.

While I am sure that many schools could use some improvement, the real problem is not with the schools but with the raw material. Before you jump all over my case, hear me out. When my children started school, they both could read. They had traveled around the southeast, spent time in libraries, shared time with people, and had experiences that made them ready to begin their formal education. They had advantages that many children do not have including educated parents with enough financial resources to make life pleasant.

In contrast, many children are born into poverty and an environment that is full of violence. Parents, if they are even around, are often uneducated. To be sure, there may be a great deal of love to be found, but academic achievement and financial resources are limited. While disparities in intelligence are not particularly evident in the first months of life, once verbal communication begins, these children frequently begin to suffer intellectually.

Headstart programs can help to narrow the gap between the haves and have nots, but intervention is often too late to reverse the damage that neglect has caused in the first precious years of life. To make matters worse, these programs usually don’t continue long enough to solidify the gains that may have been made.

These are the children who compete with mine. How can they hope to succeed?

In the past, most poor children ended up in schools that isolated them geographically. Even today, it is no accident that the most poorly performing schools have significantly higher numbers of students on free or reduced meal programs. The free breakfasts and lunches the school provides are often the only decent meals these children get. In contrast, the school my children attend had to beg students to eat lunch in the cafeteria because most of the children brought lunches from home.

Now, because of changing school district lines which are often dependent on politics and political correctness, these poor children often enter schools where more advantaged children are to be found. As a result, the overall test scores suffer. The level of education hasn’t been altered. The influx of disadvantaged, educationally deprived children results in total lower test scores. Upper class families can no longer ignore the problems of poverty by providing a “separate but equal” education.