That Time My Thesis Suddenly Seemed Relevant to All of My Classes....

Oh wait.
That's almost always.

So on one of the days I was doing research for my thesis (not sure which day, they all blend together now), I found an interesting tidbit of information that I thought would be worth sharing.

The author of The Public Assault on America's Children, Valerie Polakow, noted how the reconditioning of how citizens think of children by law enforcement, legislators, policy makers, teachers and school administration, and the community has shifted the paradigm.

While many children are not fortunate enough to attend a private school equipped with well-educated teachers and state-of-the-art technology, they are attending the public schools in urban areas with very little resources and sit in the classrooms of burnt out teachers who want nothing but a glass of scotch by lunchtime. The consensus is that public schools obviously receives more funding than private schools.

Here's the twist though. Polakow found through research that the funding of punishment was much greater than the funding for education.

Maybe most of you already knew that, maybe you didn't, but I found it incredibly.... mind blowing, for lack of a better term.
I am thinking that the punitive approach is not working out so well for the government for various reasons and one of the biggest reasons I think, is that education can do much more for a child than a detention center or court involvement. What happens if Joe, an inner-city student goes to school and gets reprimanded by one of those teachers on the verge of ditching their class and heading to a bar or the nearest psychiatrist? He doesn't want to read the book he was assigned because the school was given old, cheap paperback books that don't need to be physically unappealing for kids to not read them. Particularly at large city schools, the administration doesn't want to deal with those kids who are getting in trouble -- they are already concerned about keeping their test scores up to par with the more notable schools. So the kid is sent to juvenile court as as a "stubborn" and "disorderly" student that is out of control. Do you think a kid who witnesses the front page news headlines every day is going to be receptive to any punitive approach? Those kids have seen everything and yet somehow make it to school. So how does it make sense to allocate more money towards punishment rather than education? What if more funding towards education actually gave students the tools they needed to get out of the environment they are in? Quite a few people believe that one is born into their social class. Others believe that they can work their way up. However, no one is 'born into their social class' (at least not in my opinion) and they can't necessarily work their way up either because of all of the extra obstacles that are placed in front of them -- this being one. If that inner-city kid could attend a generously-funded public school with teachers dedicated to working with them and helping them learn, they would be in a much different position than they are now.
I am always curious as to what must be done to change the policies that enable this to happen. . . and then I realize that a.) there are too many conflicts of interest with politics and b.) too many talk about change, but do nothing to catalyze it.