It’s not likely we are going to agree any time soon about how to best address the crisis in education. It’s likely we will continue to battle our way through privatizing public policies, the self-protectionism of teacher’s unions and administrators, see-saw court rulings and Band-aid fixes that backfire. But at least we should attempt to agree that there is a crisis and what it means.
Missouri has three unaccredited public school districts, two of those in St. Louis County. Accreditation for public school districts is achieved and lost through a bureaucratic process. However flawed this process might be, no one doubts that the districts deemed as failing by the state have dire problems in terms of academic performance. A bright student with a supportive infrastructure can have some degree of success under almost any conditions, but the conditions in our failing districts should not be tolerated. Even a provisionally accredited district like St. Louis Public Schools shows academic performance and graduation statistics that must be improved if our public education system is to provide what our youth need and deserve.
So that is the crisis: too many of our children are not learning. The plural personal pronoun – our – is essential to an understanding of the crisis: these are our children. Parents in a St. Charles County school district made national headlines recently with the ugly way they rejected youth from one failing St. Louis County school district, and a venerable columnist at St. Louis’ only daily newspaper offended many by standing up for those angry (white) parents. But we disagree that it is possible to erect barriers, mentally and demographically, that exclude the children (many of them black) who are being failed by our educational system.
There is no need to feel especially warm-hearted about people unlike oneself to come to this realization. The youth we do not properly educate are not – in an increasingly competitive global economy – going to become productive members of the workforce. They are more likely to become costly and, indeed, dangerous drains on the rest of us. It’s not an exaggeration to say that we can educate them now or incarcerate them later, and between the failure of education and the onset of incarceration there will be damages to people and property and the destruction of innocent lives.
This is everybody’s problem. We can no longer ignore it or fail to recognize what it is and what’s at stake. Our public education system is leaving too many youth unprepared to enter the mainstream of our society. The education inequality responsible for these outcomes is devastating to our region and nation’s well being. It is more burdensome to the people most directly impacted, who are not being properly educated, not enjoying all the bounty of this rich nation, and in many instances doing damage to themselves and those closest to them. But it’s burdensome to all.
Keeping “those kids” excluded from more successful school districts is not going to solve this crisis. Shipping some of “those kids” to more successful school districts is not going to solve it. We believe a less politically fragmented metropolitan area and a more unified school district would make it easier to achieve long-term progress in educational outcomes in this region, though fierce political battles await any reformer pursuing a merged St. Louis city and county or a unified regional school district. Whatever we do, as we have often urged, we must reach all of our children at the earliest age with quality education – ideally, as an extension of the child’s experiences at home with their prarents, their first teachers.
