FOCUS: Opportunity for the Poor, Not Spare Change

Everyone is generous when they have nothing to lose. We’ve certainly seen in America’s overwhelming response to Hurricane Katrina that the American people have a great potential for kindness and generosity, demonstrated by how many opened up their homes and their wallets for hurricane survivors. But many of these people needed help long before the storm ever hit, and before the storm, none of us seemed to care—and it’s unclear if we care even now. It is ironic, then, that for many of New Orleans’ poor, the hurricane did not take anything away from them, for they had little to begin with. It is a much bigger tragedy that every day, children not only in New Orleans, but also in cities and towns across America, are denied the right to a future, simply because this nation actively denies them the education they need to escape the poverty into which they were born.

Perhaps the root of this injustice is that Americans only feel compelled to respond to natural disasters, whereas poverty is a societal disaster. The American dream is so ingrained in our society that the majority of Americans believe that we live in a complete meritocracy. A study last year by the Economist, however, showed that the incomes of those in the bottom quintile of earners in America has increased by less than 7 percent since 1979, while the incomes of those in the top quintile has increased by 70 percent. This indicates that there are barriers to social mobility that cannot be overcome by will alone, and the most significant of these barriers is our unequal education system. Poor children in our country do not deserve what we have forced them into simply because they were born into poverty instead of affluence. Their teachers do not deserve to see them evolve from innocent, bright-eyed children to apathetic, angry teenagers with no hope of ever achieving what to us practically fell into our laps. A change is needed, and quickly.

Every year our hypocrisy grows as we fight against measures that would equalize our school system—an infrastructure that funnels substanially more funding for the schools in wealthy neighborhoods, leaving schools in poorer areas, be they urban, suburban, or rural, to literally rot away. Johnathan Kozol’s book Savage Inequalities makes this argument, graphically illustrating the funding discrepancies with stories of children being forced to learn in completely racially segregated schools, in closets and bathrooms, in condemned buildings, or with outdated books. But the most upsetting part of Kozol’s book isn’t the accounts of deteriorating buildings that literally have sewage filling the hallways, nor is it the speeches made by children who already, at the ages of seven and eight, are aware that they don’t matter in this country. It is the publication date: 1991. One would hope that 14 years might be enough time to correct the growing injustices of our education system, but public policies enacted since then have simply worsened the problem. Our schools remain largely funded by local property taxes that disproportionately fund affluent school districts, and our urban schools are just as racially segregated now as they were in 1954. Now, under No Child Left Behind, schools in poorer districts are also punished monetarily if their students do poorly on standardized tests, essentially taking away resources as punishment for not being able to teach in under-funded schools. This is like asking one child to start 10 feet behind the others in a race, and when he loses, forcing him to start a mile behind for the next one.

I recently got an e-mail from a friend who is teaching in an inner-city public school in Philadelphia. The e-mail was pages long and full of stories about children whose only siblings had been killed, or whose parents were unable to care for them, and about a school system that was unable to do anything for them other than shove them, 30 or more to a class, into a room with a 25-year old teacher who doesn’t even have her master’s degree yet and who doesn’t understand what she is supposed to be teaching them. If you ask her what our country’s schools need, she will not answer “better testing,” or “stricter laws.” What our schools need is more money, and they need it equally distributed. But that may never happen while our schools are also so segregated by race and class. For those with power in our country, the school system is a problem for other people’s children, and never their own.

One hurricane laid bare that poverty is abundant in our country. When we have children of our own, will we do what our parents could not? Will we change the tax structures and other policies that under-fund school districts in the poorest areas of the country? Will we allow our kids to be bused in an effort to desegregate our nation’s schools and force education to become everybody’s problem? Asking parents to sacrifice, in effect, the advantage their children currently have is a difficult task, but if we truly believe in equal rights, we should care enough about every child to give them all the same opportunities that we all want for our own. Hurricane Katrina may have changed the way we think about poverty, but if we actually care, donating to the Red Cross will never be enough. We must begin to take the steps needed to change the systems that perpetuate poverty in America.

Kaya N. Williams ’07 is an anthropology concentrator in Eliot House.