Local politician Mark Funkhouser hosted a press conference at Central High School today to talk about the importance of improving education in Kansas City, MO. His opponent for the mayoral race in Kansas City, Alvin Brooks, attended the press conference.
I've been thinking a lot about education recently. It's one of the many issues that faces Kansas City, MO and many other urban core communities throughout the country. The KCMO school district epitomizes the problems. In the Central High School area, only about 25% of the students that enter High School there eventually graduate. Of those 25%, only 15% ever even try to go to college...and of those, only 15% of them ever make it out with a college degree. For those of you counting at home, that's approximately 1 student out of every 200 kids that enter the Central High School going on and getting a college degree.
My friends over at the Flogging of America do a nice job of breaking down the root cause of the problem. However, the solutions are much harder than they appear.
One day a week, I go down to this general area and help with an after-school program for junior high kids. The problem runs much deeper than just fixing the schools. Many of these students come from families that don't believe that school is important (one of my students just spent the past 2 weeks skipping school with his grandfather and one other student missed almost half of his days of school for nearly 2 months at the encouragement of his mother). And these are our best kids.
Many kids drop out of high school because they have to decide whether to get a job to support the family so they can eat, or finish high school. In a society so fixed on just surviving week to week, long-term thinking like -- if I finish school, we'll make more money in the long term -- seldom crosses their minds.
So not only is our problem more of a social problem, than a schools problem, it's also cyclical. If parents don't care about school, and the kids aren't graduating, the schools get bad ratings. If schools get bad ratings, people who care about schools try to get them out of those schools, which make the school ratings worse. Well, now, we have the problem in reverse. No self-respecting parent with an option of where to send their kids to school would even consider sending them to a KCMO High School. So no one will move in and help be part of the solution to the problem.
In the old days, when something was wrong in a community, the community banded together and fixed the problem. Now, people just move out to community where the problems are already solved.
So the problem is cyclical...and it's gotten to the point where everything needs fixing. The schools, economy, roads, and social structures are all broken. And you can't fix just one thing...you have to fix them all together. The best schools in the world will fail if parents continue to not encourage their kids to go there....or if kids drop out in order to get a job to put food on the table.
Over the next couple of weeks I'm going to lay out where I would start in forming this solution. But as a culture, we have to decide that this is important to us...it won't work unless everyone wants it to.
I know I'm a month after in commenting on this, but I'm going to anyway.
My husband teaches at Central and for the most part you're very correct with the problems faced. He has kids that don't show up for weeks at a time for various reasons. I know it frustrates him to see smart kids who don't know they should care about their education.
Another problem with KCMO schools is teacher pay. Dan took a pay cut to teach there, but our balloon income keeps us going, and he really enjoys teaching. Other people don't have the entertainer's income to supplement their teacher's pay. Most of the other districts in the area pay more and have better benefits, so KCMO loses a lot of good teachers to surrounding districts. (heck Roger's Arkansas pays 10k more than KCMO for beginning teachers)
The lack of supplies in the classroom is an ongoing problem. We buy the copy paper Dan uses for worksheets and tests out of our own pocket.
And yet, I don't think throwing more money at the problem will fix it.
I think the changes have to start with improving the neighborhood. When things go ok at home the kids can decide to go to school.
Posted by: Stacey | April 03, 2007 at 09:28 AM