Quality Education for All

By the end of Waiting for Superman, Davis Guggenheim’s new documentary about America’s failing education system, I – like the parents and students in the film – was trembling on the edge of my seat, heart palpitating, breathlessly awaiting the lottery results, wondering “Which lucky child will make it into the charter school of her/his choice?”

It wasn’t until days, maybe weeks later, that I began thinking the Oscar-winning director had only scratched the surface. A child’s fate should not be decided by a lottery.  Quality education should be available to all families – not only to those who are fortunate enough to have their number drawn, or who can afford to attend private school or live in a community where money talks and policy-makers listen.

I then realized that the real questions I should have been asking at the film’s conclusion were, “Why are our schools failing our children?” And, “What can we do to fix them?” (Our schools, not our children.)

I was heartened by Mayor DeStefano’s announcement last week about New Haven Promise, a program primarily financed by Yale that would pay college tuition for our city’s eligible students – those who maintain a 3.0 GPA and a 90% attendance rate.  But I started to wonder again, “What about the ineligible ones? The ones who are graduating with a third-grade reading level? Or the ones who aren’t graduating at all? How can we help them stay in school and get to a 3.0?”

And again, I found the answer staring me in the face: it’s about strengthening our public schools to ensure that every child receives quality education.

As Executive Director of Youth Rights Media, I am constantly inspired by our youth. Through their work in our Media Lab program, they have built self-confidence, developed leadership and honed video productions skills – but it could not have happened without support from United Way, as well as our other funders and individual donors.

A highlight of last year’s Media Lab was our youth-produced documentary, Lost in Transition, which premiered at the Yale Art Gallery in June. The film’s critical look at New Haven’s transitional schools is, I believe, one of the reasons why one of the city’s alternative schools realized significant change at the start of this school year.

But perhaps the greatest change occurred within the youth themselves, who learned to find and assert their voices.   Near the film’s end, one of our youth, who attends a transitional school, states:

“As students, we don’t see how much potential and power we have to make change, especially in school…we feel we could, you know, change our friends to do this and change our friends to do that, but when it comes down to education, we really don’t know how strong we are, especially as students.”

“It is hard…because I don’t have all the same resources as a kid in [Wilbur] Cross or a kid in James Hillhouse [New Haven’s mainstream public schools] will have, but at the end of the day, what I do is up to me, how I succeed is up to me.”

But how we help her and all the other young people of our city – of our country – succeed is up to us.  Together, we must strive to make our public schools places where quality education for all is the mandate, and anything less is unacceptable.  We need our youth to feel appreciated, nurtured, challenged and engaged by education, so that truly, no child will be left behind.