What Are the Real Problems with American Public Schools?

Part 1 of 6

By Roberta

The documentary film, OT Our Town, the documentary John posted a while back about the play put on at Dominquez High School in Compton, California highlights everything that is right and everything that is wrong with public schools today.

What is right: teachers who care and who try and children and parents who want an education and who see education as the road out of poverty. What is wrong is the lack of resources in Dominquez High school to help them all achieve their goals.

I am going to break down the real problems with American schools into six key ones:
1.) Societal problems, 2.) Income wealth and inequality, 3.) Growth and stagnation of the economy, 4.) Racial politics, 5.) Aging population, 6.) Competing demands for dollars.

1. Societal Problems

Yes, there are problems with American public schools. But there are even bigger problems in American society. Often critics of public education conflate the two for political gain or advantage.

Consider the following:

- 1 in 6 American children live in poverty (for a family of 3 less than$16,000 yearly income) Source: Save the Children

-39% or 28.8 million children live in low income families; 18% or an additional 13.2 million children live in poor income families Source: National Center for Children in Poverty

- 20 million children (32%) now live in a single parent home. Source: Census Bureau of children live in single parent homes Source: childstats.gov & Census Bureau

- 1 of every 2 marriages end in divorce Source: Divorcerate.org

- There are 900,000 teen pregnancies annually; this represents 12% of all births in the U.S; 79% of these are to unwed teens Source: Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/National Center for Health Statistics

- 22% of teen age girls have been 'sexting' - that is sending out nude or semi-nude photos of themselves over the internets Source: Breitbarttv

- There were 3,000,000 reports of children beaten and battered in 2006 Source: National Child Abuse Statistics

- 12.6 million children were food insecure in 2008 Source: mason.org; 691,000 children went hungry in the U.S. sometime in 2007 Source: U.S. Agricultural Department **Be sure to take the quiz on hunger in America, link at end of post

- 1,626,523 arrests in 2007 were children under age 18-that figure was 15.5% of ALL arrests that year; there were 474,555 arrests under age 15 that same year; 98,117 in the 10-12 age group, and 13,420 under age 10 Source: Child Welfare League

- About 11 million American children have alcoholic parents Source: National Association for Children of Alcoholics

- In the next 24 hours 1,439 teenagers will attempt suicide, suicide is the 3rd leading cause of death for 10-19 year olds; this rate is higher than for deaths in the same age group as cancer, heart disease, AIDS, birth defects, stroke, pneumonia, and influenza COMBINED Source: National Youth Violence Resource Center

- Homicide is the second leading cause of death among teens 15-19 years old Source: Child Trends Data Bank

- 1.6 million youth runaway every year across all social and economic groups Source: Runawayteens.org

- Each year, a typical young person in the United States is inundated with more than 1,000 commercials for beer and wine coolers and several thousand fictional drinking incidents on television Source: drugs-statistics.com

- Each year students spend $5.5 billion on alcohol, more then they spend on soft drinks, tea, milk, juice, coffee, or books combined Source: drugs-statistics.com

- Underage drinking costs the United States more than $58 billion every year Source: teendruguse.us

- The average American child watches television 1500 hours per year, compared to 900 hours spent per year in school Source: TV Free America

- 3.5 minutes is the number of minutes per week that parents spend in meaningful conversation with their children each day Source: parenting-healthy-children.com

These are the children who walk through public schoolhouse doors every single day. These are the children teachers try to teach every day in our public schools.

We have less a crisis in public schools in America and more of a crisis in American society. The family appears unable to fulfill the traditional roles in the lives of many children. As a result, the school-not be consent, but by default- must deal with the tremendous problems of society. And it is teachers and schools who are blamed and are accused of failing when those social problems make it more difficult to teach our nation's children.

It is amazing that our public schools are doing as well as they are (see previous posts on test scores here, here, and here.) under these kinds of circumstances. Public schools and teachers are doing a tough frustrating, and lonely job. And they do it with little thanks or support from the community or from politicians, the media, and the public at large.

Our public schools and its teachers are a buffer for an adult world and a nation which has failed its own children. If public schools were to close their doors, these children will be on the streets. Public schools are the last alternative to abandoning millions of America's heirs to the streets.

So the first real problem of America's public schools actually turns out to be a societal problem and not a problem of education or schools or teachers.

Look at Dominquez High School in Compton, California. The school lacks good resources to put on a proper play. Nevertheless, both the teacher and the students rise to the occasion and manage to put on a play with heart and soul. But they should not have to do that. That is if we as a society truly believe in equal opportunity for all.

There in that short documentary you can see first hand, with stark reality and heart wrenching clarity the second real problem of American public schools. Children from poor families and who live in poor communities are cheated out of an education and a better future by grossly under equipped, understaffed, and under funded schools.

This leads us to Real Problem number 2.) Income Wealth and Inequality. I will talk about this in a subsequent post.


Hunger Quiz link in pdf format here.