Productivity Amidst Chaos?

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Productivity Amidst Chaos?

The Tragedy of Urban Public Schools

Urban America has been deteriorating for decades. Plagued with poverty, crime, and unemployment, it is a wonder that educational institutions exist at all. The present state of urban public schools is quite disheartening. With issues to face such as inadequate facilities, widespread violence and rising drop out rates it is no longer a question of who will succeed, it is a question of who will survive. Urban schools have become institutions well skilled in the desensitizing of its students to the importance of the qualities that an education should embody: idealism, imagination and creativity. Author Jonathan Kozol suggests in Savage Inequalities that public schools promote nothing but inequalities among students. In actuality, finding the root of this problem is much more involved. The problems in urban public schools are as interconnected as a spider's intricate web. Every strand connects to another and so on, until the problem is not merely one segment of the web, but the web itself. Every problem facing urban public schools is intrinsically related to one another. In order to isolate the underlying issue it is necessary to define the one element broad enough to encompass the widest possible range of solutions. Kozol's analysis depicts inequality as the blanket that covers every single problem in urban schools. More realistically, inequality is merely a strand in the overall web of problems in which America has become entangled.

The most pressing issue in today's urban public school system is the decayed state of the environment in which students are forced to learn. The scenes are nightmarish, "One would not have thought that children in America would ever...

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...l speaks of "savage" inequalities: "there is a deep-seated reverence for fair play in the United States… but this is not the case in education, health care, or inheritance of wealth. In these elemental areas we want the game to be unfair and we have made it so; and it will likely so remain" (Kozol 223). For the past several decades, America has pushed the problems in the education system out of the public eye. The web of uncertainties has since grown so large that it becomes impossible to escape one without charging headfirst into another. The only escape is to start for the beginning: cut all ties, and although it is discouraging, allow the old system to fade away. By consciously placing the failure in the past, it then becomes possible to take responsibility for the damage done and move decisively toward building better learning environments for future generations.

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