Does money matter?

Education is a right. Good education is a privilege. Our children are our future. If children are our future, why isn’t it a right that all children get a good education? What determines if one child deserves proper schooling over another? These are all questions that crossed my mind as we discussed inequalities in the school system during lecture. The question, as always, is who has the money. It is the schools that are doing well, the schools in good neighborhoods with mostly white student populations, that have the money. If the parents in these communities have good schools to send their children to, why would they bother to fix the schools that other children go to?

According to “Hitting them Hardest When They’re Small” the US can afford to provide equally-equipped and clean schools, with green spaces and playgrounds, but we refuse to do so by arguing that we are in a crisis even though we continue to spend more and more on the judicial court system each year. This is the judicial court system that many of the students from poor schools will end up in, as was pointed out in “ . . . And the Poor Get Prison.” I think that we should be focusing on preventing the problem not just punishing it. By putting money into our school systems we can begin to give all children an equal opportunity for higher education and for higher paying jobs.

Some people argue that money doesn’t matter. In “Children of the City Invincible: Camden, New Jersey” Marilyn Morheuser points out that if this were true, people would not be willing to spend so much money to fight in court and argue that money doesn’t matter? The author, Kozol also pointed out that money does matter. It not only attracts better teachers, by offering better pay, it also makes it possible for the students to have an acceptable environment to learn in.

Reading about the conditions that some of the students in “Life On the Mississippi” and “Children of the City Invincible: Camden, New Jersey” have had to go to school in made me sick to my stomach: Out-dated sewage systems causing leakage into the schools, broken heating system causing some rooms to be unbearably hot, lack of books let alone up to date ones, and lack of lab equipment. This sounds more like a school in a third world country than the US. Why would citizens allow such horrible learning conditions? If I had gone to a school like that, I think it would have been near impossible to learn. These depictions are a good example of how money does matter. My high school lacked funding, which was apparent when my teachers had to pay for simple teaching materials, like paper, out of their pockets. This said, I always had a clean, safe, and somewhat comfortable environment to learn in.

One final thing that really made me think was “The Ordering Regime.” This article describes the “School reform” passed for historically underperforming schools (schools with mostly black and Hispanic students). As I read it, I began to think that perhaps this new stricter form of teaching was meant to instill “decent” values into “street” children from troubled school systems. I was thinking that it might possibly be trying to instill a value of respecting authority. But as I read on, this new structure of teaching seemed slightly militaristic; the students were rated on how well they walked down the hall and how well they could restate information rather than how well they could think critically. When the children were asked about things they had learned in class under a different context they were unable to understand it (The Ordering Regime”). This militaristic approach to teaching, and the fact that most of the teachers and administrators at the schools in the article were white, made me wonder if instead of instilling a respect of authority this was instilling an understanding of suppression and being controlled by whites.