In preparation for Camden, NJ

What was your high school experience like? Did you go to a big school, little school, affluent school, poor school, private school or public school? I thought I went to a school with limited resources - we quickly outgrew our building, our books were old, and we didn't have a real lab space for experiments. But, after reading a chapter from Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol, I was forced to re-evaluate both the level of my education and that of my community.

I come from a 80% white community (according to the latest Wikipedia data) in Ellensburg, but I attended a private school in Yakima. Yakima is 42% Hispanic (at least from the best data I could find, number is from 2009), however my school was almost 100% white. So, I can't speak exactly to the level of public education in my community, but after reading Savage Inequalities, I can safely say that we can and do support our students more in Ellensburg than they are able to in Camden, NJ.

This Christmas break, I'll be traveling to Camden to work with a group called Urban Promise. Camden is one of the poorest areas of the country - 80,000 people live in 9 sq miles. The community is close to 98% non-white and a large portion of their community lives below the poverty line. 50% of Camden is under the age of 25 and something close to 85% of births are to unwed (presumably young) mothers. With this much stacked against them, who would expect a stellar school system? Even so, reading about their education system was devastating. Though the community taxes themselves a higher percentage of their income than the neighboring suburban areas do, they still can't provide the same resources for their students.

I haven't had to deal with much racial reconciliation in my everyday life, even at SPU, we're 80% white. While there is nothing wrong with investing in a quality high school education, there is something wrong with allowing some school systems to fail their students, just from lack of resources. I don't think the cycle of poverty can't be broken without raising the level of eduction of a community, but raising the level of education takes funding - so how can it be done in a poor community? Honestly, I don't know, and Savage Inequalities doesn't offer a solution. I think, however, any solution a book like this may offer would turn into a 'cookie cutter' solution that would probably only fit 1% of the real-world situations. There are multiple factors that need to be addressed to change a system and each situation differs from the next. I am interested in learning how Urban Promise is working towards breaking the cycle of poverty by providing a higher level of education for students, for it sounds like they have a very holistic mission that seeks to better all aspects of their students' lives. I am also interested in learning if the presence of Urban Promise has affected the education in the public school system in Camden.

There will be more thoughts on this book coming soon, possibly along with other articles and group discussions that happen. In the meantime - click on the link below and watch the clip entitled "I am not a statistic" to learn some about what Urban Promise is doing in Camden, NJ.

http://www.urbanpromiseusa.org/media