Nicole Ware's Blog
February Newsletter / 02.09.10, 05:13 PM
Hey Guys! It’s February!
I’ve been trying to decide what uplifting story I could write for this month, something about love, and the beauty that I’m seeing in my neighborhood, but I’ve also been thinking about the hardships that I see. The injustices that I’ve witnessed, that just can’t be explained away with a sappy story about happy children, and loving neighbors. True those things are good, amazing even, and they happen regularly, but they aren’t my only experiences. I’ve been struggling a lot lately with the state of education in my neighborhood. I never understood what people were talking about when they would say things about the state of education in America. I always just envisioned my own school experiences, and sure school wasn’t always the best, but I mean the teachers around me seemed qualified, and I got an education, and so did my classmates. We were all offered a fair chance at learning, and so I just thought that that was how it was everywhere. I knew that there were exceptions to that thought, that some teachers in fact did not know how to teach, and that some students had no support at home, but I just assumed that that was overcome by the amount of teachers who did know, and parents who did care. But here it’s not that easy to assume that that is how it is. Here I’m faced every day with students who can’t put together a paragraph, five sentences without basic grammar and spelling mistakes, for a college application! Here they had to find a way around a literacy test that college juniors take because too many students were failing it! Here the class valedictorian has an 80 out of 100 for her GPA. A lot of these students have the drive to succeed and just aren’t, and that breaks my heart, because isn’t that what we’re always told, if you’re determined you’ll go far? I just don’t see that happening for a lot of these kids…they are determined, they want to do well, they want to succeed, they know the importance of getting an education, but if all of those things are in place then what is the problem? Somewhere down the line our system is failing them. Is it elementary school, is it passing students because of the social stigma assigned to repeating a year? Are they just not smart enough? Are they doing the best they can, should we be happy with mediocrity for these kids, because they are growing up in the inner city, or should we tell them, you can do better. There’s a teacher here who told her ‘A’ Students that if they were in a white school they would only be pulling C’s, how can that be OK? How can we have separate standards for White and Black students, how can we say that according to black standards you’re the top of the class, but according to white standards you are barely the middle. Why so many years after integration are we still so separate?
I’m leaving you with my questions, if you have any answers send them my way. If this has somehow caused you to question what you thought you knew let me know, if you think I’m wrong tell me that too! Communicate with me while I’m here, I like to know that you are all on this journey with me.
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