Where have we gone wrong?

All of my professional experience has been in secondary settings, so for the remainder of my volunteer experience I wanted to spend some time in an elementary school. I have this one nagging group of questions that has been circling my brain since I started this course: Where does the disparity start? Do underprivileged kindergartners get just as excited about the first day of school as suburban kids with their pigtails and backpacks waiting for the school bus at the white picket fence? Do those kids in line for the subsidized lunches look forward to telling their mommy about what happened in the cafeteria as much as the kid with the neatly packed turkey sandwich and 100% apple juice box with an “I *heart* you” note attached?

In other words, all other things being equal (the inequality, that is), is the excitement and novelty associated with school and learning intrinsic and inherent in all kids, regardless of their background?

Without doing any research or scientifically valid study, I went to an elementary school that is the most urban I can find in my area to see if I could find the anecdotal answer to my questions. 80% of the kids in this school are on free or reduced lunch. Most, according to the teacher I spent my day with, are from single parent families. Open house nights and parent conferences are poorly attended and SAC and PTA are almost nonexistent, which, she qualified, is not because parents don’t care, but because they lack the time and resources to attend. Many of these single parents have multiple children and multiple jobs, so evenings off to attend school functions are luxuries to which they can’t afford.

In spite of all those adversities (that were not new or surprising information to me, and likely not to any of the readers of this blog), the kindergarten teacher with whom I spent my day described her students as “thirsty for knowledge” and “eager to learn” and said that they are “a pleasure to teach.” She went on at length about individual students and their personal circumstances and obstacles that they’ve overcome, as well as how she’s been humbled by the fact that they come to school on a daily basis ready and enthusiastic about learning.

I left the school feeling encouraged and overwhelmed at the same time. This basically confirmed what I thought I knew, but also put the ball back in our court as teachers and forces us to look at where we are dropping this proverbial ball and turning off this love of learning. What are we, as a collective group of educators doing, sometime after kindergarten and before they are supposed to graduate high school that changes things so dramatically so that one out of every three kids ends up not finishing school?

That’s a humbling question for self reflection.