For my final post, I decided I wanted to look at the public schools directly in the city of Pittsburgh which is where I’m from. I lived in a suburb right outside of the city where I attended a school with a graduation rate of 98% which is not the same whenever you go to some of the schools in the heart of the city.

A program that I have heard mentioned in the years that I permanently lived there was The Pittsburgh Promise. I never fully knew what the goal of this program was, but I knew it benefitted students in the inner city schools. I decided it would be appropriate to investigate this program and its effectiveness for my final blog about this issue.

When visiting their website, I quickly discovered that their main goals are to “send all eligible urban youth to college or trade school with a scholarship, promote the reform of urban schools so that our young people are prepared for successful and meaningful lives, invest in [the] region’s workforce by preparing the next generation of workers, and raising $250 million to get this work done.” All positive actions to take in order to send more inner city students to receive a higher education and put them on the right path towards a successful future.

However, another thing I constantly heard remarks about in Pittsburgh were the flaws regarding The Pittsburgh Promise, so I then decided to figure out what those actually are. Basically, in 2006, The Pittsburgh Promise received its first donation of $10,000 a month after announcing its launch. A year later, UPMC donated $100 million and another $150 million over the time span of 10 years from different donors. The program then found itself with a lot of money that they could most definitely use to send hundreds of inner city students to college.

They first started to implement the program with the class of 2008, offering them up to $20,000 over 5 years to continue their education following high school depending on GPA, attendance and city residency. By the class of 2012, the maximum scholarship was increased to $40,000 with which students could receive up to $10,000 a year with. This is where the program got ahead of itself. For years, they added benefits to the lives of inner city students, but as the program continues to fund these students’ educations, they are beginning to reduce these benefits.

The program then admitted that if they kept providing the same benefits to students they would only be able to help students up to the graduating class of 2022. They have made changes in hopes to be capable of helping students up to the class of 2028 and are continuing to raise the full $250 million, for they still have $73.4 million to raise which they expect to eventually reach.

The goals of The Pittsburgh Promise are reasonable, and they worked to raise enough money to truly help hundreds of students move on past a high school education. However, the problem they ran into was poor management and distribution of money. I truly think they were giving these students too much money for the amount they had. They should have done more calculations to ensure the money would last them longer than it has.

I am by no means stating that The Pittsburgh Promise is not effective. I just believe since it is run at such a local level it is hard to run it properly to the point that it will continue to benefit students for many years to come. I do think that the changes they are making, and the money they still plan to raise are a good start to making the program last longer.

It is smart to start making changes at the local level. This allows people to see where their money is being donated to which makes people more inclined to donate in the first place. These are the kind of programs that the federal government should look into funding if they want to see substantial amount of changes in the schools where there are currently problems. There is still much more the federal government would have to do on their own, but I believe it would be a good use of their money and budget. It would also help these programs stay afloat, for local programs often end up struggling financially after a period of time.

Overall, I think the implementation of The Pittsburgh Promise was successful. Like many other locally run programs, it has just struggled to continue to benefit those it is supposed to help, but with more recognition from the federal government, it could change this.

Do you think that fixing inner city schools is an objective the federal government should work harder to fix? Do you think starting at the local level is the true way to find a solution to the problem? How could we implement these kinds of programs successfully in other major cities across the US?

The process of walking into school for a majority of suburban teens is an easy, subconscious task. Open the door, walk in, and go to whichever classroom you are assigned to for homeroom or first period. Whatever comes first. Inner city school students have this same subconscious behavior, instead a majority of the time they cannot simply walk through the door. They are greeted by metal detectors and police and go through the process of being searched every morning before starting their school day.

While schools most likely enforce these security measures for the safety of their own students, I cannot help but think what effect this may have on a student’s attitude towards school. Being greeted by a line of police officers and huge machines that are able to detect everything that is on you is not the most welcoming environment.

This idea sparked my mind whenever I came across an article in the Huffington Post written in October of 2014 by Alan Singer on the pipeline between inner city schools and prisons. It was something that triggered some memories. I’m from a suburb of Pittsburgh that’s only about 15 minutes outside of the city. My high school was ranked as one of the best public schools in the entire state. Students drove in their cars to school and walked right through the door every single day. From time to time, the principal or a hall monitor would be at the door greeting everyone but there was no real daily procedure we went through to get into the school.

Now you may be asking how does this trigger any memories for me. Well, being 15 minutes outside of Pittsburgh I had a fair amount of knowledge as to what other schools were like including those in the city. Living in the actual city of Pittsburgh is not a very ideal place until you’re a college student at one of the universities in the city. There are some schools located in the city that are actually pretty well received, however, there are others that are what you would expect of an inner city school.

My teachers in high school frequently reminded us how lucky we were that we walked through our doors every day without being questioned and learned in a way that was not strictly to pass a test. The curriculum in my high school was open to change and leniency. If we did not reach a subject one day, we would get to it the next, and my teachers often told us that in many of the inner city schools the teachers were required to meet a certain expectation every day so that all the students could pass the course assessments given by the Pennsylvania Department of Education at the end of the year to certain grade levels.

In Singer’s article, he discusses how he was once a teacher in the city of New York for 14 years in some very difficult schools. He goes onto answer a series of questions about this pipeline and explain why it even exists in the first place. Some of the main points he touches upon are as follows:

1. Both Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program and Obama’s “Race to the Top” program left children behind and made it unclear as to what direction the students and schools should be running. Schools can only reflect society; they are not capable of transforming it.
2. In inner city minority neighborhoods (African Americans and Latinos), students are treated like prisoners as they are greeted by metal detectors every day with armed police officers on sight. They sit in overcrowded classrooms with teacher’s main objective being to have them perform well on student-assessment tests, which they are taught to for the most part.
3. There are a lot of events in history to blame for this pipeline existing. The main, to me, being the crack epidemic of the 1980s, effecting many inner city families. Jails began to fill up and instead of looking at the social problem aspect of it, the solution was to only make laws stricter and put more people behind bars. Also, the security changes that occurred following 9/11 only worsened the pipeline, changing the security measures taken and how the schools operated as a whole.
4. Gangs are only a “symptom” of the problem and are what students turn to when they are driven out of schools for poor conditions and operation.
5. It is difficult for children to escape the system because it is a problem that is very deeply rooted in racism. Conservative groups do not want to see Blacks and Latinos mobilizing and becoming politically active.
6. To rehabilitate the youth located in struggling inner city neighborhoods, we will have to address the lack of opportunity that exists in these areas, making it impossible to motivate a majority of students to stay in school and perform well.

If you would like to read the entire article, you can do so here. I find many of his points extremely compelling. Looking at inner city schools and relating it to the prison problem that exists in the United States as well. The United States has the highest prison population in the world, and maybe by beginning to make alterations with that problem we could also see improvements in inner city areas.

If students are going to be treated like prisoners when they go to school, how do we expect them to want to be there? A school needs to be a warm, welcoming place with a positive learning environment. If there is a possibility that the country could potentially fix two problems simultaneously, someone has to take action on it.

When education and politics meet, it almost always leads to some form of debate. Whether it’s about Common Core, affirmative action, standardized testing or student loan debt, Americans usually have a lot to say regarding such issues. In my previous post, I discussed the issues occurring in the inner city schools of Detroit. These problems don’t just exist there; they are problems nationwide.

From what has been discussed among presidential candidates during this race, it seems as though the topic of education is one that is not frequently spoken upon. Issues have focused on immigration, national security and our economy, not to mention debates filled with absurd remarks having no value to the election.

According to a recent Gallup poll, only 4% of votes see education as their top issue, with more voters believing that the economy and “poorly run government” as a more pressing problem worthy of further discussion. While words are said from time to time about what each candidate plans to do about education whenever they are in office, I want to look at why exactly the issue is worthy of being discussed and debated more often.

In a recent article written by the Harvard Political Review, it stated how part of the reason why education is never discussed during debates is because economic issues and international affairs do better for cable ratings. There have been whole entire debates devoted to these issues and only a short statement, maybe, for education. In the article, it is said that part of the reason for this is because education reform effects those who cannot vote, and those who can vote may not be directly effected if they don’t have children or if their children have finished their eduction.

Because of such a low coverage on education, I wanted to just touch upon each remaining candidates’ stance on the issue.

Hillary Clinton: 

• Make community college free, but not free college for all
• Refinance all college debt to help 40 million new grads
• Get more teachers into hard-to-serve areas
• Transfer tax cuts from rich and corporations to student aid
• Vouchers aren’t constitutional; charter schools are okay

Bernie Sanders: 

• The 1950s “high school for all” is now “free college for all”
• Vouchers redirect public education dollar to private schools
• Charter schools are okay if held to the same standards as public schools
• College loan payment is regressive; refinance and forgive
• $18 billion to fund two years free tuition at state colleges

Both democratic candidates share fairly similar views when it comes to education. In general, they both want to make education more accessible to those who would otherwise not be able to afford it. The difference, however, is because Sanders is a socialist he wants to send people to college for free for at least two years. This money would obviously come from taxes on the rich which would most likely be a difficult act to pass in a Republican congress.

Donald Trump

• Cut Department of Education and Common Core
• Comprehensive education instead of limiting subjects
• Bring on the competition; tear down the union walls
• School choice will improve public schools

Ted Cruz

• Abolish the Department of Education
• Give school choice to the poor; the rich already have it
• End racial preferences for college admissions
• Local control of education instead of Common Core

John Kasich

• $120 million student debt relief fund; plus online college
• Create competition in public schools
• More after-school programs with federal plus local funding

In both parties, there are many splits when it comes to education. There is not just on Republican approach and one Democrat approach; a reason why the topic is so avoided because it causes parties to argue amongst themselves. Cruz and Trump both believe that the federal government should not be overseeing as much as they do. They want to hand over the power of education to the local levels of government and allow them to decide what is the best approach to teach their students.

Clinton and Sanders both seem to agree that by making higher levels of education more available to US students and implementing more common standards we would see improvements in areas of our educational system. This would involve more oversee from the federal government, something that Trump and Cruz are both extremely against. With Trump and Cruz, they would like to take education out of the hands of the federal government and giving the job to the local governments. This does not necessarily make education more available to students, however, for it would be up to the local government to figure out how to fix the problems they see in their local public schools.

These problems are issues that must be discussed at greater length because no candidate has come up with a solidified solution to the problem as a whole. Inner city schools are still suffering extremely, and just fixing that problem in general would improve graduation rates. While education does not effect every American, it is an issue that effects every ethnicity that candidates try to pull voters from. If we want to see improvements in America’s education, we must make the candidates speak on these issues by using our own voices so then they can use their own.

It is no secret that inner city schools in the United States struggle to compete with suburban and private schools. Kids struggle to remain motivated and frequently come from less nurtured backgrounds than students in the suburbs. Parents often work multiple jobs just to support their family and just simply don’t have time to closely monitor their children’s performance in school.

While the support of a family plays a large role in a child’s performance in school, so does the role of the state and the federal government. Mainly, states control the funds they provide for the schools within its borders, and some states choose to fund education more than others.

Schools that are not well funded are not able to supply their students with the necessary materials and technology to properly teach them in the modern era we live in today. Along with supplies that students need to learn, without proper funding, schools are unable to keep up with the dilapidation of their buildings in order to create an environment that encourages learning.

Throughout my posts to this blog, I will be looking at the different issues that are found within the inner city schooling system in America. I will answer questions as to why the system is the way that it is, what and where the main issues are and how we can possibly fix the problems. I want to make this as current as possible, so I will be looking at extremely current examples to use in this blog.

A recent example of the neglection of inner city schools is the posts by Detroit teachers on a Twitter account revealing the awful conditions of the schools in the city that students attend daily.

The twitter account (@teachDetroit) is quite active, so if you are interested in reading tweets or looking at even more pictures definitely check it out. It’s quite disturbing.

The teachers have filed a lawsuit claiming that the district allowed schools to deteriorate “to the point of crisis” and have put the health and safety of students in jeopardy. The suit claims that the district has allowed buildings to reach a state containing: “black mold, bacteria, freezing cold temperatures in classrooms, rodent and insect infestations, exposed wiring, hazards that could lead to incidents of tripping, and falling debris to name a few.”

Teachers have been striking, causing all Detroit schools to close on January 20 when teachers called in sick. However, it is still unclear as to what will be done to resolve the problem. In mid-January the Mayor of Detroit, Mike Duggan, took a tour of schools where he said he saw “a dead mouse, freezing classrooms where students were wearing coats, and severely damaged rooms, according to the Associated Press.”

Darnell Earley is the emergency manager for the Detroit Public Schools and has recently resigned and will be officially stepping down from his position at the end of the month. He is also the emergency manager of Flint, Michigan; a city that has found itself at the center of a public health disaster with elevated levels of lead in its water.

Detroit has been struggling financially for a few years now. And Mayor Duggan holds a strong belief that students need their teachers in the classroom. While this is true, teachers do not want to continue teaching in the conditions of Detroit schools. The deplorable conditions are not of which that encourage a successful learning environment. Students have barely edible lunches and must avoid holes in the floor as they walk through the building.

This problem will definitely not go unsolved, but it will require money and patience. Two things that are sometimes hard to come by. Inner city schools throughout the country lack the funding to meet certain standards, Detroit being a district that has reached a certain state that it is sparking national attention.

Unfortunately, children who just so happen to live in cities are now suffering because of government funding. All things that are out of their control.

In future posts, I hope to look at solutions to this problem and other issues that have arisen in other cities and school districts due to the distribution of funding, eventually coming to a possible solution.