Blog Action Day: Education is the Key to Escaping Poverty

I should know. It got me out.

I was born to a seventeen-year-old mother, a high-school dropout with minimal education, no full-time job, and little support from her family. Though my parents were married when I was born, they separated when I was four years old. When my mother left my father's household, she had a couple of hundred dollars, a couple of boxes of crackers, two small children, and her car. 

We all know how a life story that starts that way is likely to end.

I spent my earliest years of schooling bouncing back and forth between my parents' homes, moving from neighborhood to neighborhood, from underfunded public school to underfunded public school, while my mother struggled to work, complete her college education, and raise her children all at the same time. 

My fifth grade year, I wound up in a school with broken windows, intermittent heat and no air conditioning. The playground consisted of rusted equipment directly over cracked concrete.  The cramped basement cafeteria was infested with roaches; the bathrooms, with waterbugs.

My classroom was so overcrowded that the each row of desks butted right against the next; in order to get to their assigned seats each day, students literally had to climb over the other desks in their way.

When my fifth-grade teacher handed out history books during the first week of school, she passed a roll of tape and bottle of cheap school glue around the room so that those of us whose ten-year-old books had disintegrating spines could try to put them back together.

The school had no library.

Many of the kids in my fifth-grade class had no books at home. Some still read on the first- or second-grade level. The teacher had little time to help them. Nor did she have the time, or the resources, to offer extra work to the students, like me, whose reading skills were advanced. She spent most of her day trying in her cramped, dingy, overcrowded classroom just trying to keep order.

And keeping order was challenging. She screamed herself hoarse almost daily. Sometimes, out of frustration, she'd climb atop her desk and start yelling that we were all worthless idiots bent on destroying our own futures. In another district that sort of thing might have gotten a teacher fired, I suppose, but in this place of desperation her behavior did not seem unusual.   

Children were injured in violent fights on the concrete playground almost daily. Students were sometimes caught prying bricks from the school building's crumbling walls to use as weapons against on another. Many of the students at the school had family problems at home; some had untreated learning or behavioral disorders; some were chronically hungry. But the school did not have enough staff to give children with special needs special attention. The school barely had enough funding to keep its doors open. In fact, occasionally in the wintertime the ancient radiaint heating system would break, and the whole school would be forced to close for a day or two at a time. 

It didn't feel very much like a school to me. It felt like a prison. I hated that school. I sat every day with a public library book propped under my desk and read to escape, occasionally raising my hand to answer a random question that had slipped through my reverie to keep up the pretense that I was paying attention. I counted the minutes until I could board the bus for home each day. I considered running away from home almost daily, just so that I'd be able to escape that school.

The very next year, I won a scholarship to a private school 30 minutes away, in the wealthiest part of town.

The library at my new school was roughly the size of my old school's gymnasium.

The class sizes were less than half of what they had been at any of the public schools I had attended.

For the first time in my life, I was able to eat enough food in the school cafeteria at lunchtime that I didn't spend the second half of the school day hungry.

By some inexplicable stroke of grace, I had landed at one of the best-rated, most academically rigorous schools in my hometown, and yet, what mattered to me most during my first year there was the fact that I could walk onto the playground without checking first to see whether someone had a brick ready to lob at my head.

When I graduated high school from that same private institution, I graduated with immaculate English grammar, a firm grasp of a second language, solid foundations in English literature, European and U.S. History, biology, physics, chemistry, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus.

Not only was there was no question in my mind that I would be going to college: there was no question in my mind that I would be going to one of the top universities in the country, even if I'd have to earn a scholarship and take out loans and work to pay my own way through school.

I know from personal experience that the difference between an impoverished high school  dropout and a university graduate with a decent middle-class income can be one good school. A good education is the best and most enduring way to break the cycle of poverty.

And when impoverished children become educated, productive adults, their whole society benefits-- from lower violent crime rates, from more competent, more efficient workers, from more qualified doctors and scientists and engineers and businesspeople.

No child in this country should have to go to a school with no books, or a school with no heat, or a school where she has to fear violence daily. But in the two decades since I attended that impoverished elementary school, many public schools, and students, across the country have continued to suffer under similar conditions.

Some argue that Americans can't afford to offer every child in this country a world-class education. But, as more and more students in industrialized nations around the world surpass our own students' scores in reading, science, and math, even as more and more research and technology-based jobs move overseas, I often wonder how much longer we can afford not to. 

Jaelithe also writes at The State of Discontent.

Comments

[lildb]

that there are currently people suffering this indignity - it's abominable. we have to change this.

(thank you so much for sharing your corageous tale here, Jae.)

[bridge]

Wow, what a meaningful post! Meaningful to me as a child who was born to a teenage high-school drop out mother and a father who made his living in a factory. I attended a small rural high school where I received a great public-education from teachers who were allowed to be creative and paid extra attention to me. I attended New York State Colleges, where the education was top notch and the scholarship system generous.

Of all the gifts my life has brought me, its my education. Now living here in Colorado, my children are required to purchase a significant amount of school supplies including some books, computer paper and renting musical instruments. I think of all the kids who are being raised in families, like mine, who would not pay (or cannot pay) for these items. I wonder where the equal is in education?

[rebecca]

your story always strikes a chord with me. perhaps because i'm from your hometown and know which schools you're talking about. perhaps because i grew up not far from that first school you wrote about. perhaps because i went to private-- albeit parochial-- schools my whole life, despite my solidly middle class upbringing and solely because of my grandmother's financial generosity.

but also perhaps because i'm so personally proud of you, individually . . . but I'm also so frustrated that it had to take a scholarship, which are so few and far between, to give you that opportunity; that it had to take a stellar student to get out; that many other stellar students were no doubt left in that first school and the many like it; that many average and below average students didn't even have the opportunity of a scholarship to get them out.

no child should have to rely upon a scholarship to receive a decent education (and I'd settle for decent at this point) in a safe school where an average-sized classroom holds an average-sized class.

[isabella mori]

hi - came here through the blog action web site. i totally agree with your post. it reminds me of a radio interview i heard the other day with some economics person in ireland. she was asked what the reason was for ireland's economic success. she kept coming back to "human capital", and how the best investment in it was education.

[Alex]

Great post, Thank you for sharing, I myself wrote about it here: http://www.guruofsales.com/general/427/fight-poverty-its-blog-action-day-today and got a huge respond from readers and other bloggers. Would you please honor us and share your thoughts by leaving a comment on out post? I am trying to come up with something new tomorrow and I will include and encourage readers to visit your blog back so we can all unite to fight poverty.

[day...]

go to Free Rice! (a way to take action against poverty on Blog Action Day)

[Liz]

Thank you for such a personal example of how we all benefit when children get a good education and can go on to become productive members of society. This should be available to ALL children, not just the lucky ones.

[Lawyer Mama]

Bravo! And thank you for that personal example of the difference an education can make.

[cynematic]

Love what you've written here--am with you 5,000%.

As with Senator Obama, your amazing mom nourished your hunger to learn and guided you to a school that could give you the opportunities you needed. Kudos to those wise moms who value education. And you and Obama made the most of that education (each in your own way; wouldn't be surprised if you were heading up your local school board or city council in years to come!).

We need to reproduce your example--help more parents instill that thirst to learn in their kids, and fix problem schools so even those who aren't as academically talented as you can still get a good basic education. Once you make learning your own, no one can steal that from you.

For these reasons, I absolutely believe that Obama will make education a priority in his administration. His schooling helped refine his considerable gifts too, and gave him tools to achieve his goals. His values are deeply rooted in his life experience.

By contrast, McCain's legacy appointment to and class ranking of 894 out of 899 students at an elite military school tells me he sailed in on his family connections and squandered his time there.

[digitalsista]

Hi Jaelithe, this is a great post. It is ironic how similar our stories are. It is also very sad that many children don't get that lucky turn around the corner to change their circumstance. They are always blamed when things go wrong and preyed upon when the economy is good. In my story if my mother would have said yes to give up her student college fund I would still be in the projects in NY.

http://www.womenwiredin.com/2008/10/what-does-poverty-look-like-it-can-look-like-me/

[Gunfighter]

Brilliant, Jaelith!

Your story is much like mine... but I was just a middling student, so instead of a scholarship, I got a rifle, courtesy of my uncle, Sam

[love-ely]

You absolutely right. Education is the key.
Hope this global action will raise the awareness to fight poverty.

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