In his inaugural address, Mayor Menino characterized education as “the civil rights issue of our time” (http://www.boston.com/news/local/breaking_news/2010/01/inaugural_addre.html). Forgetting the more detailed debate surrounding his larger statements on education reform in Boston which concern the potential to increase school funding and from where, charter schools versus public schools, the best route to improve/reform/eliminate consistently underperforming schools, etc., Mayor Menino’s linkage of education to civil rights stands beyond any debate. As we know, civil rights include protection from discrimination and equal access to healthcare and education, among other things intrinsic to our general growth and welfare. For Boston, whose public school system is still struggling and who has a large population of youth living below the poverty line, providing youth with a quality education becomes not only a natural right they deserve, but possibly the only proven key that they have to lead them down a pathway to success and out of the cycle of poverty.
Boston is a city with 19.5% of the population and 15.3% of families below the poverty line (United States Census Bureau, 2000), making access to a quality education especially urgent. Education is cited by many as one of the few proven pathways out of poverty (Sen, 2004, http://www.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/episodes/time-for-school-series/interview-amartya-sen/1477/; Smith and Ashiabi, 2007; Vinovskis, 1992; Schieman and Plickert, 2008), so the inequity and instability still found in the Boston Public School (BPS) system which serves many low income youth is a titanic roadblock standing before these youth’s natural right to progress.
According to a Nov 1, 2009 article in the Boston Globe by James Vaznis (http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/11/01/mixed_results_as_confidence_in_schools_appears_to_erode/), the high school dropout rate in Boston Public Schools “stands at 7.6 percent, more than twice the state average and similar to the rate when the mayor took office in 1993” and although “state standardized test scores have been rising in Boston... the gains generally have not been significant enough to meet improvement goals set under the federal No Child Left Behind Act, causing nearly three-quarters of the city’s 135 schools to be identified last month as in need of improvement, corrective action, or restructuring - one of the highest rates in the state”. There are some positive statistics found for BPS, like an increase in youth attending college, but these are tempered with new data that shows that most of those youth in fact do not graduate from college. Beyond these sometimes contested and controversial statistics, a simple conclusion can be drawn that much more still needs to be done to improve the Boston Public School system and the future of our youth.
All youth deserve an equal opportunity for success and research shows that education is the key. The National Center for Children in Poverty shows that:
The higher the educational level, the less likely they are to be low income. In fact, 75 percent of children whose parents did not complete their high school education live in low-income homes. For those whose parents finished high school, 44 percent are considered low income, but of those who live in a home with parents who have at least some college, only 16 percent are considered low income.
(December 25, 2005, Colorado Greeley Tribune: “Education Paves the Way out of Poverty” (http://www.greeleytribune.com/article/20051225/SPECIALB0411/112250053)
If we combine the sobering statistics from BPS with data above, a pathway seems clear. In order to effectively fight poverty, especially among youth, it is imperative that we find a way to improve our school system to ensure that youth not only get a competitive education but the encouragement to go onto higher education or training.
A quality education youth deserve should provide them with 21st Century skills of communication, collaboration, problem solving, technology, and innovation plus the factual knowledge base to support success and the skills to obtain a lifelong education beyond the classroom. This quality education will further provide these youth with exposure to mentors and success stories they can relate to which encourages further achievement, and more importantly with opportunities and choices for further education and success which will steer the outcome of their lives. Both common sense and research show that with an education one makes more money and increases their social network and mobility (Schieman and Plickert, 2008). More money means being able to afford adequate nutrition, healthcare, and shelter, among other things; all of which allows for increased quality of life and lifespan. These feed into the cycle of growth in that nutrition, healthcare, and security allow youth to be free of stress and allow for an increase mental acuity in children who are born into this upwardly mobile family.
The debate on how to achieve this quality education for all will go on, but the pathway out of poverty is clear. The cycle can be broken in both Boston and also around the world. Knowledge is power and with this knowledge it becomes our responsibility as citizens to help achieve this goal, which is the basic human right of all students to receive a quality education.
To educate yourself on the state of the Boston Public School system and the ongoing debate surrounding education reform, check out a few of these links:
http://multimedia.boston.com/m/26179745/the-charter-school-debate.htm
http://multimedia.boston.com/m/26976002/mayoral-debate-improving-city-schools.htm
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