Educational opportunity is the key to success not only in the United States, but for the United States. While the quantity and quality of one’s education will no doubt differ by circumstance and specialty, what seems incontrovertible is that at least some post-secondary education will be a requirement of 21st-century life. College – from community college for basic computer literacy to brand-name colleges and universities – really is the new high school.
But high school – not to mention college – is predicated on successful primary schooling (and optimally pre-schooling as well). And that is not something that can be taken for granted in many parts of this country. Spending an hour in a New Orleans elementary school on the last morning of my Alternative Spring Break trip was evidence enough of that: after reading with a classroom full of first-graders for about 45 minutes, we spoke to their teacher, a 2011 Georgetown graduate and current Teach For America corps member. As adorable as his students were, by age seven or eight most were already well behind grade level; some read about a half-dozen words per minute when the national standard for first grade is 40. The school had received a score of 60 out of 200 on New Orleans’s city-wide public school performance test, in which a score between 80 and 100 means that most students from a given primary school go on to high school.
In the face of such failure, this country has tended to take one of two views: either someone is to blame (we can argue about whom), or the “system” is at fault (we can argue about which) and expectations should be revised downward.
Both of these analyses are easy ways out, and both are dangerously wrong. We can’t blame our way out of a bad situation, and we certainly should not admit defeat by re-drawing baselines. Either of these approaches reduces to the willful abandonment of a significant slice of the population by attempting to “disappear” it beneath the veneer of perpetual growth and hoping no one notices.
This cannot work. The resource of the 21st Century will not be mineral or petrochemical, but human. The very shift in the use of natural resources that will be demanded by virtue of scarcity and side effects in this century will itself demand tremendous human ingenuity to cope with. If the United States does not make a sufficient and sustained commitment to its students (at all levels of education), the “system” of failing schools, the invisibility of poverty, and class immobility will ossify. If we accept that outcome, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.
