Yes, Inequality in Funding...How to Fix It?

The first four chapters The Flat World and Education by Darling-Hammond were very frustrating for me and it was a struggle to process the data. Understanding the need to support her stance with significant data, I wondered why I reacted so strongly and realized that besides the repetition and the data driven text, I was so frustrated because I could see her point but wondered about the solutions to the issues; the issues are not new to me, yet for me, I come back to struggling with visualizing change – what is the solution and how to go about getting it to commence? What is the purpose of education in the U.S. – whose vision are we working from and does it meet the needs to students or does it perpetuate at cycle of have and have nots?

I agree the U.S. needs to educate students for the future issues/challenges they will face socially/economically/environmentally and it is stated the U.S. is falling behind other industrialized countries that invest in human capital and because the U.S. is “one of the most unequal in terms of inputs”, describing the disparity of funding between wealthy communities and poor communities. Additionally, education budgets are being reduced while budgets for prison systems grow since the U.S. “represents only 5% of the world’s population” yet “has 25% of the world’s inmates”. This was staggering to me, especially when the majority of the inmates are “largely…dropouts and functionally illiterate young men”. Couldn’t more money be invested on early childhood development and insuring families have social supports to help lift them out of poverty? If more was spent on the front end, would we see less need for prison dollars on the back end since there is a “strong relationship between under-education, unemployment, and incarceration creates a vicious cycle, as lack of adequate investment in education increases the need for prisons.” At the end of chapter 1, she does provide a few bulleted ideas about what could be done and I hope to hear more about the solutions later in the book.

The U.S. is founded on the theoretical idea of equality, which should include education, yet there has been a struggle for not only access to education, but access to empowering education, “one that can enable people to think critically and powerfully, to take control of the course of their own learning, and to determine their own fate” (p.28). Darling-Hammond states while the U.S. does much to study the achievement gap, perhaps more attention should be made to the “opportunity gap” (p.28), especially as it relates to inequity in funding issues. Perhaps one of the most striking comments in chapter 2 is: “Students’ willingness to commit to school and their own futures in interwoven with their perceptions about whether the society, their schools, and their teachers believe they are worthwhile investments—perceptions that enable them to invest in themselves” (p.30). She lists and explains five factors (poverty with low levels of social support, unequal allocation of school resources, lack of high-quality teachers for all children, effects of tracking and lack of access to high quality curriculum, and factory-model schools) which she believes contribute to the inequities in education. I agree with the five factors listed yet again I am left wondering how we can move toward change for the benefit of U.S. students?

It is interesting and perhaps very telling to me that there have been multiple lawsuits, and probably many more to come, which try to force the issue of inequitable funding and it makes me wonder why it has to be such a fight? If we truly care about the children in our society, all of them, and want them to be able to move into jobs which will lift them out of poverty – which in turn lessens the economic strain on the rest of society – then it seems like a wise investment of money, especially if we work to address the issues facing kids from disadvantaged situations and potentially keep them out of the expensive and overburdened prison system. Not sure about you, but I’d rather educate than incarcerate.