The Young Sentinel's Two Cents

by The Young Sentinel

Rishubhav: You are correct in your assertion that many educated Democrats snobbishly view their party as the sole location of intelligent people. Although I don't endorse this view, Disciple of Science has a point when he reminds you that Obama has a significant edge among the well-educated.

Education can't solve all our problems; I understand this. But it can dictate the future of a country. Remember that the first thing Mao did when he wanted to suppress China was to imprison or kill the intellectuals. An informed population is in the best position to make wise decisions about its future. Continued: Click "Read More"

Consider the millions of Americans in credit card debt. If our schools had mandatory (and decently taught) basic economics courses throughout junior high and high school, then all Americans would be safeguarded on some level against foolish economic decisions that mortgage their futures and the futures of their children.

We have to be careful with charter schools and vouchers. For several years I attended a high-need public school in New York's inner city where over 75% of the students lived in poverty.

One thing I of many that I learned from this is that the housing projects which surrounded the school had been gerrymandered such that the kids of the neighborhood didn't have to go to school with the kids who lived in the projects. It was de facto segregation. Predictably, there was a huge disparity in budget between the poor and rich neighborhood schools.

No Child Left Behind hurts schools like the one I went to: schools where there are 30 kids to a classroom, underpaid teachers and no art or science room.

Schools like this can't compete in standardized testing with schools in other neighborhoods that can afford fancy science facilities and better teacher-student ratios. Predictably, schools like mine, the ones that need the money most get their funding cut by NCLB.

Vouchers and charter schools reinforce the problem. Giving the best students a fast track out of these schools is a terrible idea. These students (often the more privileged ones) will leave (of course) at the first chance they get, giving the schools an added disadvantage (which inevitably results in more funding cuts).

This doesn't solve the problem; it merely exacerbates it. The solution is to raise teacher pay, invest in the highest-need areas, and create incentives by way of grants to teaching degrees and funding increases to attract people turned off by teaching's unacceptably low salaries.

More than anyone, teachers hold the futures of our youth in their hands. We should do anything and everything necessary to make sure that they have the pay, benefits, education, resources, and facilities so that they are adequately prepared to teach our younger generation.

I'll let Disciple blaze the trail on the Intelligent Design issue. He'll be able to articulate his opinions in a more articulate manner than I.

John Edwards, flawed as he may personally be, had the right idea about education. He understood that even more of this ridiculous standardized testing won't solve our problems, especially when everyone who looks at the numbers sees that it grossly favors certain demographic groups over others.

I know that standardized testing is not going away in the near future (there is no reasonable solution to replace it). I do think, though, that punishing the worse-performing schools is a fundamentally misguided idea: they are the ones that usually need the money most.

Our education system, as anything, should be judged not by its finest moments but by its worst. When we see our student's scores falling each year and decide to counter that by making the tests easier, we aren't solving a problem. It's a feel-good pretend solution, and things like that can't be tolerated when the future of our children is at stake .

When I took the SAT, my testing site was in a heavily black and hispanic neighborhood. Waiting in line with nervous (mostly black) juniors, I thought about the state of their education system.

Having read about the school, I thought about how they had had no other choice but to attend this place, an institution that could never compete with better-funded places elsewhere in the city, state, and nation. I thought about these kids' futures. They were, by and large, not prepared for college. I estimate that very few went on to higher education.

They were good kids: they studied hard and did their work. But the school system was stacked against them. The NYC Board of Education is universally despised. It's name in association with a solution for any actual problem will elicit a huge eye-roll from administrator and teacher alike.

These students, by no fault of their own, had had the deck stacked against him by a flawed education system. I was filled with righteous anger over this issue which persists to this day.

This, apart from being just plain morally wrong, will be a huge liability for our nation in the years to come. Gang violence in the ghetto and inner city is a direct result of a failed system which doesn't give many kids an opportunity to lift themselves up. That's not the American Dream (whatever that is), that's not my dream, and I hope it's not anyone's dream.

So the issue is how to fix the education system.

I await your comments.