Category Archives: Politics

Mar 23

Ask Better Questions

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This week, the Providence Student Union (http://www.providencestudentunion.org/about-psu/) published the results of an experiment they conducted. They gave fifty successful adults a math test that was based on the sample New England Common Assessment Program. Rhode Island uses the NECAP as a high-stakes test where students must achieve at least “Partially Proficient” to graduate high school.

Who can argue with making sure that students are at least “Partially Proficient” in math?

Except, apparently you don’t need to be considered partially proficient to be successful, as the results show:

The results were: Four of the 50 adults got a score that would have been “proficient with distinction,”  seven would have scored “proficient,” nine would have scored “partially proficient,” and 30 – or 60 percent – would have scored “substantially below proficient.” Students scoring in the last category are at risk of not graduating from high school. (http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/03/19/sixty-percent-of-adults-who-took-standardized-test-bombed/)

Now, some folks will say that the adults didn’t have the time to study for the test, but that isn’t the point. The point is that these successful adults were no longer proficient in the math skills on the test because they did not use them in their day-to-day lives. And yet, Rhode Island is going mandate “Partially Proficient” as a graduation requirement for students starting next year.

Why?

If we are to have mandatory graduation exams, let’s base them on the skills that adults need in their world. What would happen if we asked successful adults what the math they used day-to-day was? Do most people use the quadratic equation or do they need more math skills that allow them to create budgets for their business, calculate interest rates on their mortgages, understand polling data in the New York Times?

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t teach skills beyond what may show up on a graduation exam. What it means is that we have to start asking better questions about what skills are necessary for a high school diploma. And we need to start asking better questions to our students too.

Mar 14

Disrupt Disruption

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With the publication of Disrupting Class in 2008, Clayton Christensen and Michael Horn introduced the idea of “disruption” to the education world, and the effects have been… well… disrupting.

The people driving school policy, from the Race to the Top architects at the US Department of Education to the Gates Foundation to the venture capitalists at GSV Advisors are now rushing to disrupt schools, pushing a faster rate of change and an increasingly corporatization of “the education sector.” And in states and districts all over America, the disruption has occurred as funding has dried up, leading to layoffs, school closures, and profound instability in what has been for nearly 100 years, one of the more stable institutions in American culture – the school.

But why were we – the tech-savvy educators – so quick to fall in love with the idea of disruption as Christensen presented it? Behind the idea that technology was going to change our schools – it can, it should, it is – was a market-driven vision of school that opened the door to “disruption” as a positive force in education.

When was the last time any teacher thought that “disruption” was a positive force in a child’s life?

The time has come for us to retake the language of school reform. Words like “Disruption” and “Revolution” create a mind-set among reformers that make it o.k. to cut budgets, lay-off teachers, close schools, and – at root – implement high-speed, high-stakes changes without fully examining the worst consequences of their own ideas. After all, there’s usually a body count in revolutions, and “disruption” always makes people uncomfortable for a little while. And we have to stop thinking that’s o.k.

Moreover, revolutionaries and disrupters have little use for history and context, after all, what they are creating will be totally new, right? Why would a disrupter have to immerse themselves in the history of education when what they are creating is so techno-saavy and new that will be unlike anything we’ve seen before?

The point is this: Those who think that they can come in from the outside of educational systems and “disrupt” schools are engaging in a profound act of hubris, only rarely are the reformers the ones who fall when the reforms prove less than successful.

The kids do. The reformers go back to the world of business or onto their next cause. And they get to throw up their hands and say, “If *we* couldn’t fix our broken schools, it’s not our fault. It just means no one can save them.” And that, of course, only serves to reinforce the notion that we should just blow the whole thing up and start over anyway.

We can aspire to more than that.

What we want in our schools is not disruption, but evolution. Our schools cannot stay static, on this we can agree, but disruption and revolution are the wrong models. We want our schools to evolve. We need to grow, we need to take the best of what we have been and marry those ideas to the new world in which we live. The patterns of the growth of our educational systems should make sense along a logical path with as few “disruptions” as we can manage.

We owe it to all of the people – students, teachers, parents – who bring the best of themselves to the flawed system of school every day to make our systems of school better tomorrow than they are today. But we also owe it to those people to make that evolution as painless as possible so that the upheaval and “disruption” does not mean the loss of dignity and learning and care for the people who inhabit our schools.

Dec 23

Poverty, College and A Dream Deferred

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[Influencing this Post: For Many Poor Students, Leap to College Ends in a Hard Fall.]

The New York Times had an amazing front page long-form story today about how three young women who grew up in poverty in Galveston, TX struggled with the transition to college. All three women were excellent high school students who should thrive at the next phase of their life. Those girls are the kids that a high school puts their faith in. At SLA, approximately half of our student population come from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, and many of our students will be the first in their family to either go to college or complete college.

But what is scary is how many students who struggle with staying in college. We have heard story after story of SLA kids who found that a college changed their financial aid or how a raise in tuition meant more loans or how the hustle it took to earn scholarships for 1st year was hard to duplicate once in college. We joke around about providing the Extra Care Card to SLA alumni so that they know they can still use us as a resource in college and we spend a lot of time in senior year Advisory on preparing kids for what they will face in college and overwhelmingly, SLA kids do navigate the challenges, but the reality is that, for many kids of poverty, there is little safety net once they get to college.

This is the problem that KIPP faced when they realized that only 32% of their graduates were also graduating from college. This is what we – as a magnet school – fear when we sit down with parents in January and help them fill out FAFSA forms and then again in April when we go over financial aid packages. And again, we’re a magnet school with a college-going culture that can prepare kids for some of these challenges, and I don’t think we’ve come close to solving this problem – merely mitigating it to the best of our ability.

And let’s understand this — this problem affects kids well before they ever get to college. Every kid in an economically challenged neighborhood in Philadelphia knows someone like those girls – the kid who did everything right and still ended up on the block, thousands and thousands of dollars in debt, without a degree and struggling to get by. The dream of a college education as the ticket out of poverty is dying a faster death in our cities than policy makers and college presidents want to admit.

And if that dream dies, we’re in trouble as a nation. As the New York Times article suggests, we are dangerously close to a permanent underclass in America, and as the idea of class mobility fades, we face questions that I don’t think we want to face. It was over eighty years ago that Langston Hughes wrote A Dream Deferred:

What happens to a dream deferred?

 

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
like a syrupy sweet?

 

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

 

Or does it explode?

Perhaps it is time we all take heed.

Dec 10

NY Times Room for Debate: Federal Standards and Federal Funding

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The New York Times Room For Debate asked me if I would weigh in on the following question:

The Common Core State Standards, adopted by 48 states and supported by the Obama administration, have worried liberals who question their quality and conservatives who fear they erode states’ traditional responsibility for education. At the same time, the budget pressure of the impending “fiscal cliff” could reduce federal support for education, which would add to the state and local responsibility.

As these trends collide, Americans can take a step back and ask: Should education standards and funding vary by state?

This gave me the opportunity to talk about an issue that too often goes un-talked about in the current education debate – inequitable education funding. Little did I know I would be debating the question online with folks like Pedro Noguero, Jeb Bush and Rick Hess. Here was the start of my response:

The Common Core standards are the latest federal educational initiative, making the argument that creating national standards will somehow raise achievement nationwide while ignoring what is a far more important state-to-state and district-to-district variability: funding.

Disparate funding levels in the United States are the single most anti-democratic policy in our society. Where children live should not have bearing on how much money is spent on their education. And the variability in funding levels is deep and profound.

The rest is over at The New York Times, please go give it a read. (And wow… the New York Times. I’m kind of really excited. Really, really excited.)

Nov 25

They Don’t Hate Our Kids

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Recently, I was at a edu-labor event, listening to some folks who I genuinely respect talk about the battle right now in public education. At the event, one of the speakers was talking about the corporate ed-reform  movement and said, “They don’t care about our kids.”

I get it. It is easy to think that the folks who are in the process of demonizing public education and the educators who have worked hard for the kids in those schools don’t care about kids. So much of the rhetoric they espouse is so counter to the way educators think.

But the thing is – whether it is Michelle Rhee or Rahm Emmanuel or <Insert Corporate Ed-Reformer Here>, they don’t hate the kids. There is, fundamentally, a battle between competing visions of the world. And that’s really important for those of us who are on the other side of the equation to understand.

Those folks who believe it is o.k. to pay education CEOs $500,000 / year or who believe that it is o.k. to create for-profit companies that can be contracted to run schools believe in the power of the market to create solutions that are better than public schools. It is not that they don’t care about kids, it is that they believe the market can better provide for kids and create wealth for investors. And, perhaps frighteningly to me, for most of those folks, this is not a cynical thought, but a deeply held belief.

I’ve detailed why I think the idea of for-profit schooling is fundamentally flawed, so where I stand on this argument is clear, but I also don’t think it helps to demonize or strawman the other side of the argument. We have to understand, what is going on in educational policy today isn’t about who loves the kids more. It is actually far, far more scary an argument than that.

What we are engaged in is no less than a debate over the intersection of the two dominant schools of thought in American society – are our children best served when the dominant ethos of schooling is based on the communitarian ideals of a democratic government or on the competitive ethos of a market system?

This is a real debate. This is the debate we need to have.

And no one wins when either side accuses the other of not loving the kids.

Oct 31

Sucking the Joy

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I don’t remember the twitter name of the Wisconsin principal who tweeted out that his elementary school had to “field test” some new state test today. On Halloween. But it was pretty clearly communicated in his 140 characters that he was pretty furious about.

I don’t blame him.

Who thought that was a good idea? Who thought that Halloween is a day to sit kids in silence to take a standardized test? I suppose when you believe in continuous testing (h/t Gary Stager for the term) then one day is like any other – a good day for testing. But for those of us who believe that school is not just about the tests kids take, this is a horrible idea.

It’s not that kids can’t learn on Halloween just because they are in (or thinking about) costumes – they can and they do. It’s that especially on a day like Halloween, schools should give time to learn with joy, celebrate the community, and make sure that every person in the community has a chance to smile. Personally, I think that’s a pretty good agenda for every day, but Halloween is even more special.

SLA spent today doing really interesting work in classes while also dressed as Dr. Who characters and Catwoman and Hunter S. Thompson and Waldo and a host of other costumes. I walked around the building, guitar in hand, dressed in black as Johnny Cash. Kids smiled and every classroom was able to take a moment and guess who I was, and I think I serenaded every class with the chorus of “Ring of Fire.” And at the end of the day, we had a costume fashion show that was fun and joyful and awesome.

But also, work was really done. It was a presentation day in 10th grade BioChemistry, I listened in on some amazing conservations in Mr. Kay’s English class, Mr. Block was helping kids dissect a complicated reading in a lovely housedress and Ms. Garvey’s class was working through equations even as Ms. Garvey was dressed up as a basketball ref. Kids smiled and laughed maybe a little more than a normal day and snapped a lot more photos than usual, but they also were fully engaged in the work of the day.

Some days lend themselves better than other to teaching the idea that we can teach and learn and laugh together in powerful ways. Some days are made to celebrate the idea that we can celebrate our individuality and our community. Halloween is one of those days. But somewhere in Wisconsin, some bureaucrat didn’t care about all that and told a principal that “field testing” some shiny new test was more important. So the kids in that school sat in silence, desks in rows, and took someone else’s test.

What a powerful mistake. What a way to suck the joy from what is supposed to be a joyful day. What a way to send a message to kids that joy and fun and laughter have little to no place in school.

What a powerful example of all the way our education policy in so many states and as a nation is just flat out getting it wrong.

Sep 25

Politics on Facebook

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So someone found my blog via a search for “Politics on Facebook.” I was really saddened by what I found when I searched on that phrase. Most of the articles were about keeping politics off of Facebook or unfriending the people who post their politics online.

That’s frustrating to me.

I’m frustrated because it bothers me that people are writing article after article about how to keep political views off of Facebook when that’s exactly what should be on Facebook. Because behind those articles is, I imagine, one of the following sentiments:

  • “I don’t want to see opinions that are different from mine.”
  • “I don’t want to be bothered by politics when I’m goofing around on Facebook.”
  • “I’m just sick of politics.”

Back in 1998, David Shenk wrote Data Smog about how people could use the internet to create a powerful information filter so that a person never saw ideas other than the ones they already agreed with. This year, Eli Pariser The Filter Bubble, talking about how the way data is parsed on the internet is actually changing what information is being delivered to us. Those are powerfully dangerous trends that we see every day in the increasingly acrimonious and polarized political arena. Our politicians and, worse, our media are mirroring us, not looking to listen or build bridges or find common ground. That cannot be good for us as a nation.

Into that fray comes Facebook… where one may have to deal with the fact that their third-grade soccer teammate is now a huge Tea Party supporter or a died-in-the-wool liberal Obama fan. And I say that’s a good thing. But only if we seize the opportunity for what it is. It is a chance to talk and listen – a chance to argue to learn, not just argue to win. When old friends actually have to deal with each other’s differences and still find ways to reconcile themselves to the friendship, that has to be good for us as a nation.

So I say, keep politics on Facebook. Let’s learn to listen to one another. Let’s learn to debate and discuss with people who believe in ideas different from our own. And let’s remember that spending time discussing what we think and how we feel about the direction our nation is taking should be time well-spent.

After all, it has to be more important that Farmville, right?

 

Aug 29

Why I Am Against For-Profit Public Schools

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[This stems out of a conversation that happened on Facebook, and I want to capture the thoughts. And now that I've written this monster, I realize there could easily be a part two.]

I’m against for-profit companies running schools as for-profit ventures.

I’ll explain why.

A really simple economic truth about profit is this: The amount you make in revenue minus the amount you spend equals your profit. Yeah, that’s an incredible oversimplification, but it’s true.

With public schools that are managed by for-profit companies, what they take make in revenue is, with very few exceptions, static. It is the per-pupil expenditure they receive from the local, state and federal buckets of money for education, as determined by the district the child lives in. And because the input is static, this makes it a very different kind of market than the market for any of the goods and services that schools use which have the ability to change their price point.

Now, some for-profit education providers to work to raise other revenue. The other sources of income for for-profit schools are essentially one of three things – the ability to monetize services such as professional development or curriculum and sell them to other schools or parents, VC funding or grant funding. I don’t really have a problem with schools finding ways to provide a service to other schools or parents as way to raise money, after all, that is what SLA does with EduCon. But venture capital money comes with a need for a return on an investment, and as for grants, I’m uncomfortable that for-profit groups would receive grants to run a school. When was the last time Coca-Cola got a grant?

I want to touch on the VC money for a moment more. I’ve heard several well-respected folks in the world of disruptive innovation say that increased VC investment in the education sector is good for education because it means more money coming in. But I admit, that doesn’t make sense to me, because the only way that money will get invested is if investors believe they will eventually get that money and more out of education. It strikes me that whatever seed money gets invested in the world of for-profit public education, sooner or later, either the schools need to spend less per pupil than they receive to be able to create a return on investment for their investors. I can imagine that another way is for that VC money to create vertical economies of scale where textbook / curriculum / assessment companies would start running schools so that they could have a market for their own goods and services, but that seems to border on the world of the robber barons for me.

Moreover, I have a deep, deep concern that what we saw — and continue to see — in the tech sector could happen in education, where VC companies dump an insane amount of start-up / seed funding capital into educational entrepreneurship companies of all kinds, only to realize that very few of these companies have a real business plan that can create any sort of ROI. That will be a bad enough education bubble if companies that supply support to schools through curriculum / technology / etc… suddenly crash and go out of business. That bubble will be devastating if those companies are actually running schools.

So that leads us to the most obvious way for for-profit public schools to make money – reduce expenditures. According to a speech made by Michael Moe of GSV Ventures at the Education Innovation Summit, 90% of expenditures in public education is in personnel, and Moe stated that if one wishes to make money in the education sector, one must find a way to reduce personnel costs. And most of those personnel are teachers. If schools are to reduce that expense, they can only do so in one of two ways – more students per teacher so that you need fewer teachers or pay teachers less. (And for the purpose of this argument, I’m considering benefits as part of the compensation package for teachers.)

Why would anyone think either of those things a good idea?

And yet, that’s exactly what’s going on. Student loads for teachers in K12.com’s for-profit schools are far higher than they are in non-profit and publicly run schools. Places like Rocketship are hiring fewer teachers and paying education aides $14 / hour to monitor students working online.

When one of the goals of universal education in this country is to help students prepare for citizenship which includes the ability to create a sustainable economic future for themselves (and a tip of the hat to Jose Vilson for reminding me that the famous 1963 civil rights march was officially entitled the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom), how can for-profit schools justify reducing the number of sustainable middle-class jobs so that a few wealthy investors can make more money? And when you consider that most of these for-profit schools have a high number of low SES students, and that teaching has long been a pathway to the middle class for students coming from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, how is this o.k.?

Another problem is that there is the thought that technology can replace teachers and create a more personalized education for students. I’ve already written about how that definition of personalization could lead us to a very reductive view of what education looks like, but a quick summary is simply that most of the technology I’ve seen that folks say can do that would simply take kids through standardized content at the student’s pace. And as I have written before, that’s not a model of education we should embrace. Technology allows students and teachers to do more, create more, learn more and share more than ever before. If there are efficiencies that edu-tech creates, through work-flow improvements, record-keeping efficiencies, etc… we should use whatever savings realized to find ways to reinvest in the school, and making sure there are always enough caring adults to for all the kids who need them is a good start.

To recap, here’s one problem:

  • The per-pupil input is fixed in education, so the way to make money is to spend less per pupil than you receive from the government.
  • Therefore, according to one of the leaders of the for-profit education movement, the way to make money from the public education sector is to reduce personnel expenditures.
  • You can reduce personnel expenditures one of two ways – pay teachers less or increase the student:teacher ratio so that fewer teachers are needed.
  • Many of the people in the for-profit education sector use language that their solutions will help students from low socio-economic backgrounds be more college and career ready.
  • One of the best jobs for upward class mobility over the last 100 years has been public school teacher.
  • The long-term effect of the for-profit education sector will be to a) reduce the total teaching positions and/or b) lower the pay for teachers while increasing profits for executives and investors.
  • Which raises the question – is the very notion of these schools paradoxical toward any hope of an altruistic goal?

Here’s a quick recap of another problem:

  • The ramifications for an overvaluation of the market or of the ability to monetize public education could cause an Education Bubble that, if it burst, could do irreparable damage to thousands, if not millions of kids.

And another:

  • For-profit education assumes a thin value proposition of the promise of educational technology, using these tools as a way to automate and teacher-proof teaching while having the effect of creating a more standardized curriculum (which will most likely be tied to a standardized assessment) that may allow students more ability to proceed at their own pace but will, in the end, be more restrictive in terms of student ownership over their own learning. That is a profound failure of the promise of educational technology.

Finally, the last argument is, for me, a philosophical one. Let’s agree that schools are not always the most efficient organizations. And let’s assume that there are business practices that the for-profit world uses that schools could learn to do to create business efficiencies to save money. And let’s even engage in some magical thinking that there is some as-yet-uncreated online tool that could allow schools to have some subjects taught online through assistance / adaptive technologies and therefore use fewer teachers for that subject with no depreciation of student learning.

If we find innovative ways to save money in our schools, do we really think the best thing to do with that saving is to give it to investors? Shouldn’t we always be investing and reinvesting in the students in our schools? And while schools buy stuff from for-profit companies all the time, shouldn’t the institution itself always remember that the most important investment is made by the parent who sends her child to the school, not the VC fund? And given that most parents I’ve ever known – myself included – would want the money a school takes from the state to be spent on our children, shouldn’t we have an understanding that the parental investor and VC investor have a natural conflict of interest, and it is a conflict the profiteers should never win.

May 07

Why Divide Your Thanks, Mr. President?

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Dear Mr. President,

I’m not one for the Hallmark Holidays. I don’t make a huge deal over Father’s Day. My wife and I agree every year that Valentine’s Day is a good excuse to have a nice dinner and not much more. So I wasn’t going to make a big deal over Teacher Appreciation Week. It’s a lovely thing, especially this time of year when teachers are pushing through to the end of the year, but it isn’t usually the kind of thing I usually really think that much about.

Except this year.

This year, you chose National Teacher Appreciation Week as the week you also chose to declare as National Charter School Week.

Why would you do that, Mr. President?

I’ve wracked my brain all night long trying to figure out why. It’s not like you didn’t know it was National Teacher Appreciation Week – after all, Secretary Duncan posted about it on the Department of Education blog. So why conflate the two, Mr. President?

This is the week we could be celebrating all teachers – public, charter, parochial and independent. All over this country, every day, teachers in all kinds of schools do their best to help America’s children, and this could be a week where we don’t care about the management divide of schools, but rather took the time to simply be thankful that over four million Americans choose to make their career’s work teaching America’s children.

But that idea – or at least the idea that your Administration supports all teachers – rings hollow now. When you – in the same week – celebrate one kind of school, when you say that one management structure serves “as incubators of innovation in neighborhoods across our country” to the exclusion of other kinds of schools, you – intentionally or not – send the message that the rest of us count less, matter less, innovate less, teach less.

And you did that the same week that we could be elevating all members of the profession. Why?

If this was not a deliberate attempt to marginalize those of us who choose to teach in the public school system, then it was exceptionally poor timing. If it was a deliberate attempt to do so, why would you choose to do that? I really don’t know how many body blows public school teachers are supposed to take. Here in Philadelphia, for exampe, we are feeling more than a little frustrated lately, so these kinds of mixed messages are particularly hurtful right now.

Most teachers do good work in anonymity. Every now and then, we get mugs or ties or thank you notes, and honestly, they make a difference. You, as leader of our nation, could have simply said thank you to all of the wonderful men and women who teach America’s children. Instead, you let us know that some teachers are more equal than others, based simply on the kind of school they teach in.

And as a public school educator, all I can say is this:

Duly noted.

Yours truly,
Chris Lehmann

Jan 11

Guest Post – Response to “If I Were a Poor Black Child”

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[This is the first guest post I've ever had on Practical Theory in eight years of blogging. Today's post was written by SLA senior and co-founder of Phresh Philadelphia Rashaun Williams. There's been a lot of talk at SLA about the Gene Marks piece and how angry it made us. Rashaun's piece speaks to how I've felt better than anything I'd written, so here it is. You can follow Rashaun on Twitter at @DJReezey.]

A Response to If I Were A Poor Black Kid by Gene Marks

by Rashaun Williams

If I were a wealthy man, I would ensure my children go to the most prestigious schools available. I would move to the suburbs, because then I could ensure safety, excellent property value, and always surround myself in beauty. I would be financially comfortable enough to take time from my work schedule, and participate greatly in my child’s schooling, help my children with their homework every night, cook breakfast, lunch, and dinner for them daily, and help them financially all the way through college. I would show them the importance of home equity, maintaining great credit, balancing a check book, and how to be a man or a woman. In conclusion, they would be fed. They would be safe. They would be supported in every way imaginable. They would be American citizens. But I’m not a wealthy man. I am a “black kid” in the inner city, and by some standards, you could even say I’m a “poor black kid”. Considering all the experiences that have created my current station in life, being a model of success in a broken community hasn’t seemed anything close to possible. But I still try.

There are parts of my city that are chronically susceptible to unemployment, low property value, illegal activity, informal markets and so many other things that plague minority communities in American cities. Unfortunately, decades of black settlement in the inner cities after the Great Migration haven’t yielded the promises of success so many people dreamed of when they fled an inhumane South. Many cannot afford to send their children to prestigious schools, and due to the mismanagement of public schooling, ensuring their safety is literally no longer in their hands. Our communities, the ones you allude to being a “world away” from you within the very same city, suffer in ways you and your children will hopefully never know. After all, you said you have been lucky enough to live an economically comfortable life, nor do you suffer from the generational struggle to ensure the education, well-being and proper growth of your children. You have had the luxury of not focusing on the bare essentials and the time to contemplate options beyond simply making monthly bills, paying rent. As you suggest, your salary has been more than suffice to set up a future.

As a people, African Americans have remained strong-willed, even after losing some of our greatest leaders in the most tragic and sickening ways. We’ve continued to fight for success, even though barely a mediated allusion in our own Constitution, to the point where “one of our own” is able to sit in the White House. But what does one man’s success, albeit empowering, mean to millions of others who are simply not afforded the same fundamental opportunities to pursue such lofty aspirations. Being black in this country, in 2012, still does carry a heavy weight. This has not been an easy struggle, and quite frankly, many of “my people” are tired of fighting. They are tired of being numb to daily reports of fresh violence against our own people. Tired of various forms of oppression, which now seem to be ever so invisible because a black man is at the helm of the nation. But this is no excuse for us to quit, and quit we have not. Being an inner city black kid in Philadelphia, I know that education is my liberation, but the journey to such a thing in a neighborhood where poverty grows almost exponentially with each seems less than possible.

In order to have a mind stable enough to interpret information, receive knowledge, and regularly apply oneself to school, one must have the proper necessities of living. When talking about those who are poor in the inner city, we must understand that they are experiencing multiple levels of poverty. A body without nourishment is a brain out of commission, and a brain without knowledge is a body without a mission. In response to what the number one priority is for most people living in poverty, it is a hot meal every time. Without it, it’s impossible to progress both as a student trying to learn without food, or as a teacher trying to nurture knowledge in those who simply cannot concentrate on the task at hand.

Yes, it does take the ability and the know-how to use the resources that are available to make progress, but what resources do individuals in poverty truly have? How can one be well- informed about what the Internet truly has to offer if they have no in-depth access to the world-wide web? Why would one even consider making time to go online when their mind is preoccupied with simple things like their next meal and/or survival? How can one think of a future via college, when simply traveling to high school is an issue? When does a school have time to give students external opportunities when overwhelmed with the process of teaching basic reading, writing, arithmetic to maintain foundational federal funding? How can a teacher help nurture a future citizen when their evaluation of progress is enslaved to standardized testing? Where does a school get the money to purchase the resources necessary for learning when city, state and federal governments consistently apply severe austerity measures? How can a city hog tie their most important resource to a property tax system when the property they tax is left to rot? How can a child utilize recreational facilities when their Mayor wants to cut funding that makes them available? How is a “poor black kid” supposed to access the Internet when their public library is closed more often than not? The answers to these questions lie deep within the structure and development of unsupported communities that struggle to develop conducive environments for learning, economic opportunity and business development.

Above all things, the most important question is, how do we restructure? This will takes brains. This will takes hard work. This will take a little luck. And a this will take a little help from others. Most importantly, this will take reform and action. In order to restructure communities where “poor black kids” live, education needs to be based on individuals. If our government creates districts to section regions of the nation’s states based on the individuals’ living in certain areas, why wouldn’t the school system work the same way? If the needs of citizens vary based on their location and living essentials, why wouldn’t the approach to education be fit for students as individuals? After all, we will eventually become engaged citizens.

Citizens develop jobs. Citizens become teachers. Citizens become parents, business owners, civic association members, citizens start for profit and non-profit organizations, citizen become politicians and citizens become our future leaders. If impoverished minority communities don’t have the schooling that supports this type of localized citizen-growth and eventual harvest, we will still have people writing blogs about “if they were a poor black kid” from the inner city. Citizens aren’t just the very fabric of America, they are America. The real problem is that “poor black kids” aren’t treated like citizens. Maybe we should change that.