The Adults are Worse Than the Kids

So I've been thinking a lot about how public discourse seems to be much worse these days, and then I read about a politician in Rhode Island who said that President Obama can "take his endorsement and shove it." My, my. How eloquent. What are we to expect from kids when the adults find it perfectly acceptable to engage in such vulgar speech? Makes me wonder what kind of speech goes on at home.

Free Higher Education

As college tuition continues to price itself out of the market, I wonder what would happen if no one had to pay for a college education. Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark all provide students with free tuition. Their thinking is that earning a degree is not so much a personal, private affair but rather a social good that contributes to the quality of everyone's lives. I suppose that as Americans, that idea would never fly. People talk about cutting taxes for the wealthy and for business owners because it helps create jobs; a recent report by a pair of economists concludes that investing in infrastructure and education does more to help raise incomes than tax cuts. Of course, having half of your earned income go to taxes may be difficult for Americans to get their heads around, but the benefits sure get me thinking....

Waiting for Superman

The new documentary about education has been out for a few days, and the national coverage continues in earnest. What an interesting time to be in education. We have huge budget cuts throughout the nation, and teachers have become the focus of the problems in our public schools. While it's true that graduation rates are embarrassingly low at many public, urban high schools, the reality is that so much of what Davis Guggenheim's Waiting for Superman covers is not the rule but rather the exception. When parents are asked to rate their children's schools, they almost always give them high marks. How do they feel about other schools? They report that they are not as good as their neighborhood schools.

Twenty years ago the governor of New Jersey signed legislation that closed the income gap between urban and suburban school districts. Inner-city schools were spending significantly less per student than their suburban school counterparts, so state funding formulas changed. So do we now have inner-city achievement that rivals that of the suburbs? No. Academic success is incredibly complicated, and simply spending equal amounts of money doesn't yield equal results. Sure, Waiting for Superman tugs at the heartstrings of audience members--how can you not sympathize with these children who deserve more? But parents in most school districts cannot relate to what's happening in those schools. Guggenheim should be commended for bringing the problems of urban schools to light, but at the same time he needs to make it clear that what is happening in inner cities is not happening in the majority of schools throughout the country. If it were, it wouldn't take a documentary to bring it to people's attention.

Tyler Clementi

It's 2010. But I'm brought back to November 27, 1985. That's when a former student of mine hanged himself from a tree at the University of Delaware. I still remember answering the phone and my colleague Pat asking me if I was sitting down. At the viewing, so many recently graduated classmates of Michael's were there, and they were all searching for reasons why. It wasn't until Alan said he thought Michael was gay that we all stopped in our tracks.

Next month it'll be 25 years since it happened. Has much changed? I'm not so sure. There was a time when I thought we truly turned the corner on how students express their opinions on gay issues in school. Although I still hear the occasional gay slur in school, which is still unacceptable, I thought that many have become genuinely aware that being gay is no different than having blue eyes. Am I naive? Has our effort to bring about awareness simply made people go underground in their sentiment? Are young people (and old) simply being secretly homophobic, and thinking up more creative ways to bully? I don't know what the answers are, but I do know that suicide is the third leading cause of death for young people, and when broken down by sexual orientation, it's triple that number. Maybe I shouldn't look at the teens and ask how could this happen. There are plenty of adults who continue to air their homophobic rants in public--so where do we go from here?