Suffer the children

The United States government is going to spend $720 million rearranging rubble in Iraq today. It spent $720 million yesterday, and it will spend another $720 million tomorrow. At this rate, 262.8 billion of this year’s tax dollars will be spent by Dec. 31, lining Dick Cheney’s pockets with blood money. \nMeanwhile, in a recent study by Johns Hopkins University, it was determined that 1,700 American high schools – almost 12 percent of the total – have earned the dubious distinction of “dropout factories.” This label applies when consistently less than 60 percent of freshmen get to the end of their senior year.\nClearly, Dubya couldn’t care less whether children are left behind or not. If he did, absolutely no “dropout factories” would exist in America before anyone even considered committing the nation to something that costs $720 million per day. Sure, education is the responsibility of individual states, not the federal government, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Part of the reason the federal government exists is to help states solve problems that are too complex or too expensive to be solved internally. \nIt is difficult for bad schools to improve in this country. To begin with, most teachers do not want to teach in depressed schools. Teachers’ salaries are shamefully low even in wealthy districts, but impoverished “dropout factories” simply can’t afford to pay teachers a competitive wage. When combined with the enormous frustration of not being able to get through to their students, there is no question why job satisfaction among teachers in poor school districts is so low and turnover is so high.\nAlso, the government has created a monumental Catch-22 for America’s poor schools with the No Child Left Behind Act. The act rewards good test scores with federal funding, and punishes poor performance by removing funding. Thus, in order to get much-needed money, a poor school must simply improve its performance and collect its reward, right? Wrong. It costs money to improve performance; students need textbooks, quality teachers and adequate facilities to learn. “Dropout factories” have none of those necessities. \nAmerican education is aching for reform. In Indiana, schools get their funding primarily from the local tax base. This explains why Carmel High School, where I went, and schools like Roosevelt High School in Gary, which only has a 42 percent graduation rate, can exist in the same state. But, as always, there is a racial component. Welcome to America; that’s how we roll. According to Johns Hopkins’ numbers, there are nearly twice as many minority students per capita in “dropout factories” as the national average. These schools also give out nearly twice the number of free lunches. They are typically found in depressed urban areas, and by allowing them to exist, the government is literally robbing hundreds of thousands of children of a quality education.\nThe government has a responsibility to its people above all. Even if the motives for the Iraq war were pure, or at least based on fact, that still does not excuse the government from its responsibility to the American people. Consider how much a “dropout factory” could benefit from even 1 percent of one day’s worth of war funding.