Cultural barriers and teacher quality in American education

Educational Injustice in America: What Money Can’t Fix The United States of America spends an enormous amount of money on education each year. Even so, many disparities continue to thrive, widening the gap between those who succeed and those who do not. This paper will examine one of the more insidious reasons that education continues to be stilted in America and will break it down to a single word: culture. This paper will examine how a pervasive culture that devalues educations lowers the level of achievement, as do how racism continues to thrive, infecting the culture with inequality. One of the main reasons that the United States of America continues to fail at education is largely cultural. Our culture doesn’t value education that way that it should and our country continues to have vestiges of racism influencing so much of the ways that educational resources are spread around. Ripley’s book, The Smartest Kids in the World makes several very startling findings about education. One of her findings is in regards to how the selecting and training of teachers can have a tremendous influence on education. One thing that Ripley suggests is that if teaching were met with as many standards, challenges and obstacles as a profession such as practicing law or being a physician, we would be much better off as a nation. Ripley cites Finland as an example in the book and how one of the teachers in Finland had numerous obstacles to confront before starting a career. This teacher first had to gain acceptance from one of the few elite teacher-training universities in the nation: “She had high test scores and good grades, but she knew the odds were still against her. She’d wanted to teach Finnish, so she’d applied to the Finnish department at the University of Jyvaskyla. In addition to sending them her graduation-exam scores, she’d had to read four books selected by the university, then sit for a special Finnish literature exam. Then she’d waited: Only 20 percent of applicants were accepted” (Ripley, 84). This is an example of a nation that takes education very seriously and knows what a vital role teachers play. Teachers are in charge of educating the youth of the nation and fostering their critical thinking skills. This is a job that should be earned and won by the brightest in the field and those who are so dedicated to the strains and challenges of the profession they are committed to competing rigorously to win a spot as a teacher. In the United States, in comparison, it’s a field where the bar of entry is set very low and can appeal to literally all walks of life given the appeal of the summers off and the generous retirement plan. Culturally this is why in America we have the expression, “those who can do, those who can’t teach.” This phrase summarizes the collective perspective that so many hold regarding teaching: that it’s a profession for burnouts and failures, who couldn’t make it in any other industries. Ripley does seem less certain about the exact reasons that American schools are always faltering behind the rest of the world. Rigor and intellectual curiosity have something to do with it, most likely. Many teachers in high-scoring nations give their students more demanding pieces of work to do, and in doing this they get more support from parents, teachers and the entire school board. Bringing back such a high level of intellectual curiosity would definitely be worthwhile for American schools, while challenging students to loftier levels of accomplishment. However, another major issue that attributes to the problem of education in America is that so many schools aren’t properly integrated. Racism has had a long legacy in America and one way that this legacy has manifested was how race has been treated within the public school system. Many children in the most impoverished areas of the nation live in segregated neighborhoods and go to extremely segregated schools. “In the typically colossal high schools of the Bronx, for instance, more than 90 percent of students (in most cases, more than 95 percent) are black or Hispanic” (Kozol). As Kozol points out, sometimes these divisively segregated schools emerge in areas where the neighborhood is very integrated, something which indicates it would take a proactive and conscious effort on behalf of the school board and the parents at large to engage in segregation.  Segregation is divisiveness and it means that matters of education continue to separate and unequal. One of the reasons that the Supreme Court case Brown vs. The Board of Education ruled segregation to be unconstitutional was because it was determined that “black children gave them \\\\\\\"a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect their hearts and minds in a way unlikely to ever be undone” (Nps.gov). While segregation might not be legal anymore, what we are witnessing with regional and social segregation is no doubt having a tremendously negative impact on children. This negative influence is something that Kozol readily uncovered in his research. He interviews a solemn minority youth in an inner city neighborhood that asserts, “‘If people in New York woke up one day and learned that we were gone, that we had simply died or left for somewhere else, how would they feel?’ ‘How do you think they\\\\\\\'d feel?’ I asked. ‘I think they\\\\\\\'d be relieved,’ this very solemn girl replied” (Kozol, 2005). This statement is uncannily similar to the issues at the heart of Brown vs. Board. This youth is expressing one of the more poisonous elements that undermine the American educational system: informal segregation that makes students feel lesser: less cared about, less valued and less wanted by the society they inhabit. Part of the issue is that equal funding is not provided for all schools. Schools with wealthier kids and parents are able to inspire and incite aggressive political action and lobbying needed to get the school the funding it demands. Schools in the inner city that are mostly full of minority students don’t receive the same benefits. As the director of   the nonprofit, Educational Priorities Panel in New York, explained, “ ‘When minority parents ask for something better for their kids, she says, ‘the assumption is that these are parents who can be discounted. These are kids who just don\\\\\\\'t count—children we don\\\\\\\'t value’” (Kozol). This is a clear example of racism pure and simple. Non-white children are getting the short end of the stick because city governments feel entitled to give them less and there is no one to check this injustice. In conclusion, this paper has attempted to show that it doesn’t matter how much America spends on education: the two issues described in this paper attempt to highlight how education will continue to falter if they are not addressed. Culturally, education and teaching is not given the level of priority and the primacy that it deserves. We as a society need to raise the bar required to become a teacher, and reward teachers better. Furthermore, we need to make aggressive moves to unravel the social segregation that permeates public schools in every major city, so that integration is able to occur naturally, because funding for education is distributed equally.