Our educational system is broken and therefore our future as a republic of freethinking women and men is in jeopardy. By recent accounts, Florida has the unflattering distinction of being near the bottom of the educational attainment list when it comes to the number of students who meet reading and writing standards.
It gets worse when we break down the data by race. This lag in educational attainment means that Florida will fall behind an already pressing deficit.
In 2005, the National Academies of Science, the National Academies of Engineering and the Institute of Medicine sent out an SOS to the nation – we are not producing enough scientists and engineers to lead and innovate ourselves into the next century.
In Florida, however, it seems our students – especially those from minority populations – are starting from behind. Add to this the forces of bias that push girls and boys from diverse backgrounds off the paths to science, math and engineering before they even complete kindergarten and we are faced with a crisis.
My daughter entered kindergarten 13 years ago, ready to take on the world of blocks, shapes and finger-painting – and the wonders of learning. After the first week, I noticed something odd in her afterschool play.
Since before she could walk, she was a tumbler, climber and thrill-seeker. I nudged her to experience the joy of risk-taking by climbing to the very top of jungle gyms all over New York City. Now, she stayed close to the ground, wanted mom to buy her dresses and didn’t want to dig for worms or look under rocks. When I asked why she wasn’t climbing to the peak of the jungle gym, she replied, “Dada, girls aren’t supposed to climb to the top.”
And with that, my heart broke. During recess, boys in her class told her she was a girl and wasn’t supposed to climb to the top of the jungle gym. Where did these boys learn these rules and why was it powerful enough to override her abilities?
As an educator, I knew what was going on, but I had arrogantly assumed that all those pre-K years of inoculation through immersion in building block towers six feet tall, wading through rivers to fish, gazing at the stars through telescopes and imagining life on Mars would, like flu shots, stave off the implicit and explicit gauntlet of gender and racial roles my child would have to surmount.
Our educational system is broken because we have our heads in the sand about the impact of the racial, gender, sexuality and socioeconomic biases that we continue to tolerate as educators, parents, business owners and politicians.
As a nation, we are at risk of squandering yet another generation of talent We are gutting public education funding at precisely the time when the largest wave of racially and gender diverse students is moving through our school systems. Fortunately, the Alachua County School Board is taking important steps to address the inequity in our local schools through initiatives such as its work on an Equity Plan. There are successful models, such as the Harlem Children’s Zone, that demonstrate when an entire community embraces the fundamental premise that every person deserves a quality education – starting with prenatal care and continuing through lifelong learning – great strides can be made.
Santa Fe College and the University of Florida have some of the best programs and initiatives in the state to ensure we will have a multicultural workforce ready to take on humanity’s greatest challenges.
We are diverse, but not diverse enough. We will continue to struggle if the pathways that begin in kindergarten aren’t broadly expanded, and if the safety nets aren’t in place to let our children try, fail and try again with the encouragement and rigor that builds resilient bodies and minds.
No one entity can fix this wicked problem and yet all of us will suffer if we collectively fail to create a broad, truly collaborative system to save our children and, through them, our republic.