School Choice Would Teach Students to Be American

The public school system has “condemned the students of Providence to an attitude of ‘sit at home and collect a check.’” That’s among the startling insights to be found in essays by young adults submitted to the RI Center for Freedom & Prosperity for a “Friedman Legacy Day 2013” essay contest concerning school choice.

Bryan Morillo explains this statement from his entry with the personal experience of graduating “unprepared for the real world and with no sense of accomplishment.” Useful skills and information, he writes, “came from outside of school.”

One expects an essay contest with school choice as its topic to elicit commentary about the varying quality of education from school to school and between public and private systems, as well as the value that comes simply from the opportunity to have a say in one’s activities.  What’s startling is the degree to which the entries connect school experiences with larger political and civic principles.

To Morillo, public education prepares urban students for a life of public dependency. To Diany Feliz, a system in which students cannot pick their schools, instead relying on the judgment of employees in the school department, are learning that “they have no control of their future.”

“Freedom,” writes Diany, “is something that we should be born with, but also be taught to keep.”

If it is true that the American experiment is meant to give people control of the public policy under which they live, it behooves adults to consider what sort of society the public school system teaches children they are entering.  To students in Providence, it’s a system that deprives them of the rigor that would force improvement, and that then expresses compassion by deigning to grant them favors in order to take the edge off the consequences.  In urban schools those favors come in the form of social promotion from grade to grade, ostensibly to keep children with their friends.

“I didn’t know what a ‘social promotion’ was,” writes Pamela Dominguez, when a sixth grade teacher explained to her how she could fail the class but not receive a failing grade.  “Now, when I look back, I see why I never forgot [the teacher’s] words to me. It was the end of my school interest.”

If grades are not unambiguous measurements of a student’s success or failure at learning the material that a particular class intended to teach, then neither success nor knowledge appears to be of unique value.  The greatest deprivation, in such a system, is that it cannot possibly teach students to see life as a challenge.

“Trying again” becomes so many turns at an inconsequential game, rather than a fundamental principle in a creative society that allows its members to take risks, take lumps, and then take a bow when the challenges are overcome.

This deprivation is so thoroughly reinforced, in Providence, that the essay writers spontaneously transform Classical High School into a symbol of opportunity, with its entry exam as the school department’s method of sorting students into those with a future and those without one.   Tiffany Rezendes, who made the cut, reflects on a friend whose path seemed inexorably to lead toward dropping out of school altogether.  “I think she just gave up once she found out she wasn’t accepted into Classical.”

Providence students have figured prominently in the teacher-union-backed protests against the use of the standardized New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP) test as a graduation requirement. But reading these essays, one gets the sense that the real high-stakes test in Providence is the one to get into Classical.

With such limited options — admission to the district’s “good” high school, luck of the draw into a charter school, and limited scholarship opportunities for private schools — those whose circumstances include some of the greatest obstacles, those who most need to persist in life, don’t learn to try again.

In his essay, Kevin Nunes introduces a friend who set her sights on a career in medicine and was motivated in school because her path was clear and available.  Others, he suggests, need broad opportunities in an active curriculum, in order to experiment and find their direction.

Eduardo Garcia didn’t even know such things as private schools were a possibility until his sophomore year in high school.  The discovery of unknown and unavailable options made him feel “that the school system didn’t care for me because I was never told of the opportunities I had until it was too late.”

In Genesis Alicea’s neighborhood, many students see school choice as little more than an opportunity to stay together with friends.  Perhaps the lessons of social promotion have translated beyond moving from grade to grade to implicate moves from school to school.

If a constituent part of children’s education were consideration and reconsideration of where and from whom to receive it, young adults’ stories of their experience would be tales of exploration and discovery.  Setbacks wouldn’t have the weight of dreams deferred, but the insinuated question, “So, what’s the best choice now?”

Roy Bolden leads People United for Change, the Providence group that helped to gather essays for the contest.  In his view, “many among the inner city have no clue how destructive the system is.”  They see simply “going into a school as being empowered,” as if empowerment is a graduation robe that the government can slip over their heads.  It’s not, and neither is freedom a privilege bestowed with a diploma.

Without positive results, Roy writes, education “is just chasing the wind.”  The need to reach for and build something substantial must be taught and learned.  The American dreams that this younger generation is inheriting cannot be collected sitting at home; they must be earned.  But first, they must be chosen.

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