[Tsuwabuki]

I've written several essays on various topics relating to the quality of America's educational systems.

Yes, systemS. Plural. Due to the structure of the constitution, education, despite measures like No Child Left Behind, is essentially a state run endeavor. This means fifty sets of standards, fifty philosophies, fifty curriculums, and a completely uneven level of education.

The absolutely best thing to happen to the American system would be for it to be federalised. I am well aware that those on the right of the political spectrum would balk at my audacity to "socialise" yet another aspect of American life, but really, at this point we simply don't have a choice. We have such a hodge podge system now, with already increasing interference from the federal government (under Republicans, no less!) that I simply don't see how we can guarantee and equal level of education to all citizens.

I have, personally, experienced three different types of schools in America:

Private schools
Inner City schools
Large Tax Base Suburban schools

The private school system is something to be addressed elsewhere, although I will say I found my private school periods to have exceeded expectations now that as I teacher I can look back at them- of course, they were also very expensive.

Briefly, in junior high school, I left my private school to attempt to go to a public school. My junior high school was an inner city school in a fairly large city. As such, most students were poor, minorities, badly taken care of. The tax base of the area was very low, and since schools rely on the tax base of their district, not really the state as a whole, we had awful facilities (the school was falling apart in some places), the textbooks were badly out of date. I was there in... hmm... 1995 or 1996... and I think recalling that the history textbook, for example, still stated that the USSR existed (weakened and ready to fall, perhaps, but not yet gone). The library was a joke. Most of the books from the 1970s. Then I got shoved in a locker (that I was far too large to actually fit into, so you can imagine the bruises and cuts), picked up and dropped on my chin (I still have the scar), and a friend of mine got stabbed in the front parking lot as I watched. My mother sent me right back into private school, as you can imagine.

However, we moved to the suburb of a different city, and my parents had always had very good jobs. This suburb was, and still is, exceedingly wealthy. People owned large lots with McMansions on them. Some even owned ranches. When I started high school, the school was brand new, and they were adding wings. Before I graduated one wing had become six, and included a computer lab in every wing on every floor and a complete radio and TV station full of Premiere and Final Cut pro editing stations and Canon DV cameras that cost $5000 each. Everyone had a car, and the rich kids drove BMWs or Mercedes. One of my good friends (not all the rich kids were stuck up, it wasn't like Mean Girls all the time or anything), Lauren had a white Mercedes. As you can imagine, the tax base was large, there were only three or four people of color in the entire school (odd to me, since even my private schools always had a large mix, I think my mother, who had lived in the civil rights era and remembers when her school was integrated was more shocked than I was), there was hardly any violence, and we got the best of everything. Always. I attained an outstanding education at that public high school.

The fact that these two schools are in the same region, only about 200 miles apart from each other, and in the same state, says much more about the fractured state of a public education in America than any general overview of how the system works ever could.