Official Welcome to Just Education

Dear Reader,

Hi and welcome to our humble little blogspot! Two days ago, this was just a little pipe dream the DC Reads Coordinators thought up. Now, thanks to a blogger.com tutorial, a 30-day trial of Photoshop, and a pot of coffee, that pipe dream is now a reality. The first two posts lay out why we think the DC Reads Advocacy Committee and this blog are important; we feel confident that the ensuing days and posts will prove their worth. In fact, thanks to our enthusiastic committee, we even have a bunch of great posts just waiting to be posted. (Yay, team!) I hope that this blog can become a resource for you—something to check out for videos, links, articles, and commentary about pressing issues in the District of Columbia Public Schools (DCPS) System. If you are interested at all in contributing to our blog or getting involved in the DC Reads Advocacy Committee, please contact us at dcreads.advocacy@gmail.com.

Happy DC READs-ing!

Best,

Hannah Klusendorf

Georgetown University COL ‘12

DC Reads Coordinator

Educating America in the New Decade

By: Jonathon Munoz

The new decade finds America traveling on the long road of economic recovery. It is hard not to ignore the immediate effects of such a crisis. For example, as of Dec. 2009, 15.3 million Americans were unemployed with an unemployment rate of 10%[1]. At the beginning of the recession in December 2007 the unemployment rate was 0.5% with 7.7 unemployed Americans. It is important to mitigate the immediate negative effects of the crisis for obvious reasons, but there is a big difference between the semblance of economic stability and the real thing. With so much money being poured into the economy to promote stability and increase consumer confidence it is easy to focus on the symptoms of the crisis while ignoring its causes.

The current crisis gives us a unique opportunity to fundamentally change the way the country learns. If fiscal responsibility is truly a long-term goal for America, it must invest in education. We must create educational policies that foster innovation while promoting accountability, both on the part of local and state officials. A study by the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northwestern University recently reported that students who dropped out of high school were 63 times more likely to be in prison than students with a four-year college degree. Also, “on average, each high school dropout now costs taxpayers more than $292,000 in lower tax revenues, higher cash and in-kind transfer costs, and incarceration costs relative to the average high school graduate.”

[2]

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, the most recent stimulus package, is a piece of legislation worth $787.2 billion.[3] Now, it is not certain if this will completely save us, but it is fairly certain that it will get the markets moving with consumers doing what they do best. A study by McKinsey & Company showed that if students in states that scored below-average on the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress) in 1983 had improved over a 15 year period, so that they performed at the national average, America’s GDP would be 3 to 5% higher. That amounts to $425 billion to $700 billion.[4] It is quite clear that educating students should not only be considered a moral or social responsibility but also an economic one.

Today only 40% of American adults earn a two-year or four-year degree and about 30% of students drop out of school without a diploma. That means that in a class of 20 students six of them will probably not make it to graduation, and only about eight of them will earn a degree. These are staggering results, especially in the light of the fact that education is the number one expenditure of states (21%).[5] Obviously, funds in the educational system are not being properly utilized. However, this is not only a state by state problem—it concerns the entire nation. In light of the economic situation, the Department of Education has been given $10 billion dollars in discretionary resources to incentivize state and local reforms. These state-oriented resources exceed all previous funding for any given administration combined. This is a great opportunity to improve our schools.

There are approximately 95,000 public schools in the U.S. Of those schools, about 2,000 high schools account for half of the nation’s dropout rates and three-quarters of our minority dropouts.[6] Knowing this, we should really begin to wonder why educational measures haven’t helped out much. We could blame student surroundings, and this often becomes a default response. In a recent article about Teach For America in The Atlantic, a local D.C. elementary teacher said this concerning her underperforming students: “The kids in Northwest [D.C.] go on trips to France, on cruises. They go places and their parents talk to them and take them to the library… Our parents on this side don’t have the know-how to raise their children. They’re not sure what it takes for their child to make it.”[7]

It is easy to blame parents, and it is even easier to blame socio-economic conditions. However, it is this very tendency of “localizing” the problem that is the cause for the discrepancy in performance. If America wishes to regain its edge in education it must counteract this blame-game by focusing on reforming the system. Education in the new decade should see a higher degree of cooperation between states. For example, sharing data systems that track student success and growth, or sharing results of schools which have modified the school structure (e.g. extending the school day). We should all work at innovating the system through purposeful reforms that reward high-performing schools instead of only punishing the bad ones (which is the current practice under No Child Left Behind). Education in the new decade should incentivize teachers, districts, and states to innovate. We can already see this happening with the Race to the Top Fund (a competitive fund rewarding states for educational reforms).

Even in this competitive apparatus we must not forget that education is a collective endeavor. We must not localize problems; doing so can only ensure that we keep treating the symptoms while never getting to the cause of the educational dilemma. We must interact with a student as if she were all students; her individual success is not without its global consequences. We have a social responsibility to educate America, and unless we realize that we also have a personal responsibility then we might as well give up now.

---

[1] Bureau of Labor Statistics U.S. Department of Labor. News Release: January 8, 2010. http://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm

[2] From “Lawmakers Who Lead-Secretary Arne Duncan’s Remarks to the National Conference of Legislatures.” http://www.ed.gov/news/speeches/2009/12/12102009.html

[3] From Track the Stimulus. http://trackthestimulus.com/Economic_Stimulus_Plan.aspx

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Ibid.

[7] Ripley, Amanda. “What makes a great teacher.“ The Atlantic. http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/201001/good-teaching/?pid=ynews

Mission Statement of D.C. Reads Advocacy Committee

By: Jonathon Munoz

As students of Georgetown University we find ourselves in a unique situation. Not only do we each bring with us a particular set of conceptual tools and personal skill sets with which to assess and solve problems, but as students in D.C. we also have an opportunity to use our individual resources to advance social justice issues both locally and nationally.

Our focus on educational issues does not only stem from its inextricable relation to the social sphere as a whole, but we choose to focus on it because it is a process with which all have intimate and familiar knowledge. Bringing with us varying personal perspectives formed in different local educational contexts, we have the ability to have a very diverse dialogue with others. It is this dialogue that is the kernel of social justice, and it is the extension of this dialogue that is the raison d’etre of this advocacy committee.

Already Georgetown University D.C. Reads has been tutoring students throughout the district, ensuring that underserved students have the same opportunities and resources as children in schools with more favorable socio-economic backgrounds. As our program expands it is important to not restrict our efforts to merely giving students on the margin a more pronounced voice. We must also give a voice to this process itself. It will not suffice to treat the symptoms of underlying educational injustices; we must seek to combat them at their systematic roots. However, no problems are solved unannounced, and we cannot even begin to formulate solutions to problems that we are unaware of. For this reason the Advocacy committee must focus on the stability of visibility. In other words, it is not enough to periodically make it known that every day D.C.P.S. students are dropping out of high school or that every year they are performing below the national average in the N.A.E.P., we must make it known what this state of affairs truly is: a crisis.

Also, as students in the capital of the United States, we also have access to state resources. Most of us come from a different state, with its own educational problems and economic woes. While we cannot change the state of education on a national scale, we can begin to advocate for the common good even if on a small scale. Advocating for educational justice in states would consist of research into current state policies, as well as contacting persons from your home states who can influence policy, and to make your views known. Also, when researching into state issues we also have a chance to interact with different educational models. As a self-sufficient educational entity D.C.P.S. serves as a sort of microcosm in which we can more acutely penetrate the social and educational problems that face many of our home states. Both the D.C. educational system and our state systems can gain from our assessments, comparisons, and criticisms.

For all the above reasons we set the following goals to guide our ideas and to measure our progress.

The seven planks of the Georgetown University D.C. Reads Advocacy Committee:

• Make the educational crisis in D.C. visible.
• Make the activities and resultant progress of D.C. Reads more visible in the Georgetown community and D.C. community as a whole.
• Conduct research into the impact of auxiliary educational programs in the district.
• Advocate for literacy education in underserved schools in the district.
• Research local and state educational issues and proposed policy solutions, taking note of the dynamic between the general standards of literacy and the available resources for their fulfillment.
• Advocate for particular state policies that benefit the advancement of literacy.
• Plan and execute programs that inform Georgetown students and community members about literacy issues and to provide them with tools with which they can confront them.