Edu-mucation

This weekend I attended Teach For America's 20th Anniversary Summit in Washington, DC. It was a rah-rah, feel good affair, but there was also much talk of the work still to be done, a volume of work that far overshadows the progress already made.

As much as movements like Teach For America have grown and shed light on the failure of public education in many parts of the country, the efforts to fix the problems - while impressive - are underwhelming given the scope of the issue. Teach For American and organizations like it recognize this, and while they are justifiably proud of their achievements, this pride is tempered by the realization that the fight for educational equity is only beginning.

So, as I celebrate 20 years worth of the fight to achieve educational equity, I also reissue the call that I heard this weekend and that I myself have issued before: a call to reinvest in education and to provide the best possible education for all the students in our great nation.

America can and does provide world class educations, we just don't provide a world class education to everyone. This is obviously bad for the children who don't receive great educations, but it's bad for everyone else too. It means fewer educated workers and it means more people who receive support from the safety net. Educating everyone is not just a moral imperative, it is also an economic imperative.

America was founded on the idea that everyone is created equal. We may not all end up equal, but we should have the same opportunities...we don't. Unfortunately, far too many people in our country never really have the chance to succeed. Denying these people a shot at the American dream goes against everything our country stands for morally; it also hurts the national checkbook.

Fixing public education in America will not be an easy task. We must begin to treat and compensate teachers as the important members of society that they are; we must demand results from them, but not while belittling the profession as second class and treating teachers as second-tier professionals. At a time when we here about the dire prospects of a runaway budget to our future, we'd do well to think about the prospects of a future with an uneducated and thus unemployed workforce. It's a far scarier proposition.

Teach For America is only one of hundreds of networks and organizations fighting to reform public education so that we can provide all of our students with the education necessary to build themselves better lives and build a better America for us all. But the burden cannot fall on these groups alone. It falls on our entire nation to make education a national priority. Only we we decide to completely invest in our future will the generations that follow us live up to their potential. To make America better tomorrow, we must invest in students today.