I have been meaning to write something similar to this for a few years now. I envision it being the introduction to a book I one day hope to write. I hope it strikes a chord!
I was raised to be a productive, successful citizen of the world. My parents invested in my education early on and I was always involved in extracurricular activities like sports, art and music. My future was never in question. I went to an expensive boarding school for high school and then on to a reputable, private university. I never questioned the "reach for the stars", "the sky's the limit", "you can be whatever you want to be" mantras I was fed growing up until I graduated from college and was dumped in the real world. No one out there was invested in my success; it was all up to me and for the first time I had no idea what the hell I was doing.
My generation is the generation of the internet. We were the first kids to grow up with computers in our homes and a wealth of information at our fingertips. Instant gratification was the name of the game. It made it easier to keep in touch with loved ones, school projects got better, and boredom was harder to come by. But this great technological advance also made us lazier and more impatient. We came to expect that everything was as easy and quick as googling it. So, when our parents promised us the world we didn't doubt it because everything else had come relatively easily to us already. But in all this preparation, our generation missed the memo on the value of hard work. Everything had been handed to us so far. We expected the same to happen with money, our dream jobs, and a happily ever after. Well, the joke's on us because life had other plans.
I graduated from college in 2009, in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression. Jobs were scarce and for the first time the future seemed uncertain for kids like me. But I'm a white girl from the upper-middle class. What did the economic crisis mean for kids who grew up in poverty and weren't made the same promises I was growing up?
My first encounter with real poverty occurred in the spring of 2007 when I traveled to New Orleans to assist with post-Katrina rebuilding efforts on an Alternative Spring Break. Even then, what I saw only scratched the surface of what was really going on down there though. I fell in love with the city and its people, and went back on another Alternative Spring Break trip during my college years. By the time my senior year rolled around I had decided to apply to Teach for America and put New Orleans at the top of my list for cities I'd like to be sent to. New Orleans was considered a high need area for teachers, so when I was accepted that is where I was placed. I arrived in June of 2009 to be met with oppressive heat and a cockroach outside my dorm room at Tulane. I was completely unprepared for what awaited me. Idealism, a desire to reform the failing New Orleans education system, and my Northern naivety had gotten me there, but they weren't going to help me much anymore.
One of our first days of orientation, my fellow TFAers and I were introduced to some harrowing statistics:
- Every year close to 12 million students reach their senior year in high school not knowing how to read.
- About 44 million adults in the United States cannot read.
- The United States Justice Department uses the results of third grade reading diagnostics to determine how many beds we will need in prisons in the next ten years.
- The state of Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate of the industrialized world.
Hearing these disturbing facts just motivated me even more to make a difference at the time, and that was the intention. But once I was actually in a classroom responsible for the education of young minds it was a completely different story. In my first week, I saw a second grader get beaten with a yard stick for not listening. An eighth grader called me a bitch and told me to go fuck myself when I asked him why he wasn't in class. A seventh grade boy was dealing drugs because he figured it would get him farther than school since he was already fifteen and couldn't read. And my paraprofessional told me to just hit him back when one of my violent students continually punched me. I was lead teacher in a severe-profound classroom, a position I really had no business having, but it shows the desperation of the New Orleans school system at the time. All my students had severe disabilities--- autism, cerebral palsy, and mental retardation. The irony is that if they had been born into wealthier families like mine they would have received more early intervention & care and have been much higher functioning. But what I quickly learned was that poor African American children are taught life will fail you. There were no "reach for the stars" speeches in my students' homes. Education wasn't an avenue to success for them, it was a failed venture. Their parents didn't see the value in education because the system had failed them too, so the importance of doing well in school wasn't instilled in them like it was in me.
It was really easy for me to get angry about the discrepancy between my childhood and my students--- the achievement gap it's called. It is a term most of us are probably familiar with at this point. When a rich kid and a poor kid both start kindergarten they are most likely around the same level, but for each year that passes they will grow farther and farther apart. In a just world, every child would receive the same quality education regardless of race, class or geography. In fact, it seems like it would be in our economy's best interest to have a better educated workforce. Wouldn't we be competing better in a global economy? Wouldn't we all be better off financially if there were a more level playing field? This is all rhetoric we've been hearing a lot lately, especially with the upcoming election. But I would like to take the argument one step further and propose that the way I grew up isn't right either.
Don't get me wrong, I am grateful my parents made my education a priority, but I'm mad as hell that not all parents in this country are able to do the same. You should be too! I don't want to live in a world where the realities in which I grew up and the ones in which my students were raised both exist. And kids like me shouldn't grow up ignorant to the fact that not everyone is as lucky as them. Call me naive, call me idealistic, but in my mind there is no social or economic justification for it. And after witnessing what I did in New Orleans, I'm happy to still be idealistic.
I lasted seven months in my Teach for America placement. Since the required commitment to the program is two years I'm not proud I quit. I take full responsibility for my actions, but the truth is that I got overwhelmed in a position TFA never should have put me in and I burned out too quickly. I didn't make the impact I envisioned when I applied, all wide-eyed and eager to make a difference, but I'm done with the guilt that has been plaguing me for the past two and a half years. What hasn't wavered is my desire to change things, and nothing changes until we demand that it does.
So, this is my call to action. We all need to educate ourselves on the inequalities and injustices that exist right under our noses. We need to demand that our government and our country do better. And we all need to be the changes we wish to see because things are bound to get a whole lot worse before they get any better. It's true that ignorance is bliss, so let's stop being ignorant, recognize the system needs to change, and together we can figure out what to do about it. I can't turn back knowing what I know and now you know it too...
