“I remember in elementary school – did you guys do this? – switching clothes every other morning with my best friends. That way nobody could tell we each only had one pair of jeans and a t-shirt.” Heads nodded in recognition at this meeting of DC public school seniors reflecting on their early years.
Students in our public schools are my best sources on what it is like to strive in a school system that has not given them an equal shot in life. With 70 percent of them receiving a free or reduced-price lunch and with DC’s child poverty rate well above the national average, poverty is a mountain that children in our nation’s capital climb daily.
This particular group of students had beaten the odds, and they were advancing to college. But they worried that they were unprepared. With only 9 percent of our entering high school freshmen graduating from college within 5 years of high school, and an unemployment rate that has more than doubled with the recession, they were right to be concerned.
I believe we can solve the problems of urban education in our lifetimes and actualize education’s power to reverse generational poverty. But I am learning that it is a radical concept to even suggest this. Warren Buffett framed the problem for me once in a way that clarified how basic our most stubborn obstacles are. He said it would be easy to solve today’s problems in urban education.
“Make private schools illegal,” he said, “and assign every child to a public school by random lottery.” Think about what this would mean. CEOs’ children, diplomats’ children, many would be going to schools in Anacostia and east of the river, where most of our schools are. I guarantee we would never see a faster moving of resources from one end of the city to the other. I also guarantee we would soon have a system of high-quality schools.
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