Last month I started a series on improving our public schools -- and due to work/life/time I'm just now getting back to this. Sorry. In part 1, I layed out some of the issues that affected why our school system stinks (not as much of it is the school's fault as you might want to think) and talked about how public transit could help improve the performance of our schools. In Part 2, I layed out how community imvolvment can help make changes that will improve the school district at large.
In part three, I will talk a bit about the changing of the culture that is going to be necessary before our schools will be successful. And I realize that this is one of the more ambiguous posts I'll ever do -- so I'll appologize in advance.
One of the main things affecting the school district is that the culture of many of the people in the KCMO School district don't put an emphasis on education. To them, it's not important - -and in many ways, they view it as succombing to the societal norms that have for so long intentionally excluded them. In my volunteer work, I see countless kids that are actually ENCOURAGED to skip school by adult family members. I've also seen many kids who are allowed to play video games 3, 4 and 5 hours a night instead of doing their homework. It's disheartening. For the forseeable future, we will always have cultural influences that encourage some of the wrong types of behavior. While we can and should speak out against many of these influences, we shouldn't stop there.
Many of these kids in inner cities have few positive influences...and these positive influences certainly don't over-ride the negative ones they're surrounded with. Virtually every troubled part of Kansas City (and most other urban cities) is completely riddled with low-income/lowly educated people. At some point in the 40s and 50s we decided that it was cool to move away from these people and leave them all alone in one area together -- and the further away from us, well educated people, the better.
Meanwhile, the government has been more than happy to accommodate rich people's desires, by allowing concentrated areas of low-income housing, and designating entire 300-500 unit buildings as low income, often Section 8, housing. This ensures that the all poor children ever get to see in life is more poor people. They don't see people who are able to make the system work....people who have found life beyond government support.
If these kids are never even exposed to the POSSIBILITIES that exist for them -- if they're willing to work for it -- they can never achieve it. And so we perpetuate the problem by isolating them.
While HUD (Housing and Urban Development) has changed their guideline to some degree on concentrated areas of low-income housing, they are still creating more problems. There are certain standards for Section 8 housing -- one of which is that they cannot lower the total number of low-income units. So when a property comes off of Section 8 status, they either have to a) renew it (causing another 20 year continuence in vertical segregation) or b) find more Section 8 housing to supplement the lost units that come with making a building mixed-use. The only problem is that our NIMBY mentality doesn't allow for creating Section 8 developments in developed neighborhoods. We believe in it in theory, as long as it's not in my back yard. For all you NIMBY"s out there, let me say this: poor people are never the problem. Poor people, in large concentrations, that only see more poor people and lose hope, are the problem.
So this has created a scenerio where 300+ appartments were recently renewed as Section 8 housing along Armour Boulevard -- a single Boulevard that currently contains over 20% of the city's Section 8 housing stock.
We have to integrate lower-income people into society. That, more than anything, will help change their culture. At the same time, we need to have more people, and more incentives, to get people with means to move into poor neighborhoods -- and then take on the mentality of it being THEIR neighborhood -- shopping at the shops, eating at the restaurants, walking their dogs, etc.
This isn't rocket science -- but we must do every little thing to fix it. And it's all baby steps. Without exposing these urban youth to anything other than what they know, they will only perpetuate the lack of desire for education, and the subsequent low income/poverty/crime, etc that follow. We cannot allow our society to fail another generation of urban youth. It's already been too long.
Next time, one quick step schools can take to start the improvement process now.
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