Ira Glass, spokesman for the podcast station “This American Life,” has a conversation with Jada about her schooling experience in her neighborhood. Similar to the podcast from the Education Radio, the topic on this podcast is also based on the public school system. But very different from the previous podcast, Glass focuses more on the differences of schools within the same districts rather than the reform on the public school system. One thing that makes this podcast slightly more convincing than that of the Education Radio podcast is that Glass and Jada are the main voices of the podcast rather than the many voices that are audible in the more homemade podcast. The Education Radio podcast seemed more cluttered with inputs from different perspectives. But because this podcast was not very long, I don’t that I can give a valid argument against one.
Jada’s experience sounds so familiar to many friends that I went to High school with. Many of them did not live in the district but because my high school was considered better than most high school in the area, many parents were doing whatever it took to make sure their children attended South High. This case sounds so much like the cases talked about in the film Waiting For Superman directed by Davis Guggenheim. Both stories focus on the lack of good schools in neighborhoods that then force students to look for other schools elsewhere.
Another issue this podcast identified was the idea of tax funded schools. Some of the reform ideas touch on this. When schools depend on taxes from their districts, one can almost predict what quality the school is going to have. A public school in a highly affluent neighborhood is more likely to be well funded than a school in an inner-city location. Is this fair to the children who live in such neighborhoods? Of course not. But how does one change such a tax system? How does one make sure that the quality of a student’s education is not based on the neighborhood in which they live?
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2 responses to “Quality Education is Based on One’s Neighborhood”
I went through a similar educational experience. We used my grandparents address most of most life so that we could go to a school we were not zoned to. Not that it offered a better education, but because my zoned school was very dangerous. Most schools in my area were failing schools, so I applied for a charter school that came into the area. It was here that I finally received the resources and support that allowed me to succeed and foster my education. Although, I continuously thought about my friends from my other schools who didn’t have this opportunity and would not be as successful.
Our schools were very over-populated and in a “bad” neighborhood. More money was spent on security for the school and the football team than on textbooks and SAT prep. I considered maybe collecting all of the property taxes within a high mile radius then dividing it equally among the schools. From the podcast we learned that people have no plans to change this and want to keep a quality education a high-priced commodity.
Hillary’s response about her experience using a different address for school zoning reminded me of a friend I had in high school whose parents gave a family friend’s address so that she could be in a different district. She lived in north Seattle, which is a part of the Seattle Public Schools. SPS is a relatively large district with about 90 schools and about 50,000 students. My mom works in the SPS, so I know firsthand that they are constantly having bureaucratic problems and the district is unorganized and poorly run. The suburbs just north of Seattle (Shoreline School District, about 15 schools; Edmonds School District, about 30 schools) are much better run and offer a lot more freedom to teachers and students. My friend went to middle and high school in the ESD because they offered better advanced courses (the IB program and Running Start), and generally have a better reputation.
Even between the ESD and SSD there are huge differences (I went to all of my education until 11th grade in the ESD, then switched to the SSD). The attitudes of the two high schools I attended were much different. In the ESD, students were treated more like prisoners, who needed a whole slew of qualifications and signatures to be allowed to cross the two-lane street to Burger King at lunch, were not allowed to dress up for Halloween (someone tried to sue the district over it when I was in kindergarten–that quickly ended Halloween at school), and couldn’t use a microwave without special permission. When I got to the SSD, I was amazed that I could drive my car to get lunch off-campus, could walk right into the Home Ec room to use the ovens if I brought lunch from home, and could celebrate non-religious holidays like Halloween. This gave students a whole different attitude about the school day, and made school feel less like a ‘punishment’ to attend.
Another facet of this are the attitudes and resources of teachers. While schools differ greatly between each other, the way the teachers are treated by the district goes a long way in creating satisfied, motivated, and enthusiastic teachers. It is obviously more work to run a 90-school district than a 15-school district, so perhaps changing the boundaries of these entities would help with the way they are run.