The State of Education in Burlington

Mike

In 2006, the Burlington, VT school district commissioned a task force made up of community members (administrators, teachers, and citizens) to investigate the widening achievement gap in Burlington's city public schools. Burlington is a microcosm for the education problems happening throughout the country. The Task Force's findings are summarized here.

Since the resolutions were made public last fall, there has been major opposition to socio-economically integrating the city schools. Here is my response.



A year ago the immigration question was the hot topic of debate. “They take the jobs the rest of us don’t want,” or so the maxim went. In this country, though it’s rarely acknowledged, there’s an accepted faith in the reliability of our poverty-level workers, American citizens or not. They clean our hotel rooms, pump our gas, and pave our highways. Our economy is based on their invisible strength, and their unsung devotion to the most basic of job skills. It’s also based, though, on growth, and it is to their children, that rich and worldly cache of diverse cultural knowledge, that we look for the future. It is the American children of our legions of poverty-level workers on whom we will one day lean for economic stability. There are countless reasons why people are forced into wage slavery, sub-blue collar work, and even unemployment. The lack of quality education is a factor, but it doesn’t have to be a requirement.

It’s been said it takes a village to raise a child. The idea has never been more pertinent. Raising a child raises the village itself, because a community is a living, self-supplying thing, and its most valuable resource is that which it seems to take most for granted, and keeps most repressed. Educated children, especially at the poverty level where they are most neglected, mean a higher community wealth in the future. By increasing the quality of education for every single child in our community, thereby enriching our labor pool, the very basic charge and aim of the Burlington Task Force, we’ll notice a vast difference. Business owners will see increases in the productivity of their workers. Doctors will see increases in the health of their patients’ families. Financiers will see increases in the community markets. Better education for all isn’t a Utopian ideal, it’s an essential part of our growth economy.

Recently a friend’s 4-year-old brother came up in a conversation. His play habits weren’t at all peculiar, he moved from toy to toy and from one activity to another like any child does, and learned many things through this diversity of attention. His social interactions, though, teach a far more valuable lesson because they play against commonly held assumptions. His friends, like his toys and his activities, varied in color, size, and caste. These interactions, along with the rest of his cognitive development, benefited from the diversity!

I went through the public school system in a higher income area, succeeded academically, and saw many others around me succeed. My schools regularly passed state and federal standards tests. My experience, though, supported a serious deficiency. Throughout school I knew only a handful of people who were Jewish, Black, Native, Hispanic, Gay, Refugee, or otherwise culturally diverse, and I suffered for it. Among the handful was a black friend of mine, the child of a single-parent home, who graduated top in our class, and went on to receive Phi Beta Kappa honors at Stanford University. He’s a professional now in the field of human resources. I visited him in California last year and learned an important lesson about the real value of diversity in this world. His girlfriend, the daughter of Chinese immigrants, was another high-powered professional. His daily phone conversations regarding the hiring of personnel ranged from midnight calls to India and China to meetings about an African branch. It struck me that the real world was far more culturally diverse than what I’d experienced in my quaint, “successful,” schools, and I see now how unprepared for it I was.

According to professionals, we identify culture in various ways, but the first level of recognition is through surface traits. The first thing we associate with a culture is what it looks, sounds, and tastes like. We see skin color, we hear language, and we taste foods. It’s a lack of depth that leads to stereotypes, labels, racism and classism. Only through deeper interaction do we start to associate more complex levels of cultural identity, such as behavior, community values, and morality. As the son of a Task Force member put it very nicely in his college essay: “You can learn something from anyone.”
In today’s world, low-income communities produce thriving internet businesses, African interests represent seats on the boards of American companies, Indian workers dominate jobs in the technology sector, and Chinese markets hold an integral stake in our daily lives. Learning the “three R’s” isn’t enough anymore. Our children’s futures don’t depend on Bilinguality. They depend on Biculturality. Burlington has the resources right here in the diversity of our communities. Integrate the schools and we all benefit. Just like the refugee parents of our Somali Bantu students learn English from their children, our business owners will learn about productivity from their workers. Like the single mothers in our poorer communities learn to quit smoking and pay more attention to nutrition, our doctors will learn from their increasingly healthier patients. Like our minority populations succeeding economically where their historically repressed parents were never given a square deal, our financiers will learn from the new economic feedback in the community. We’ve got to learn how to grow, and we’ve got to learn in order to grow.

Traditionally, the public school systems seem to have worked well in keeping communities thriving. My school had a high success rate, and my community reflects it. Times have changed, though. This country is in the waning days of an industrial revolution. The last decade produced an amazing period of economic growth, but it’s slowing. Globally, though, the revolution is just getting started. Smaller economic powers (though no less important) are catching up and becoming players in the global economy. Countries such as China, India, Russia, and the Middle East are filling industrial niches, and our undereducated workers can’t keep up. There are many reasons why the American blue-collar population is disappearing in favor of an outsourced labor force. The deficiency in quality education is a huge one. Comfortable middle class citizens in Burlington may not realize the change that’s happening. If it ain’t broke, why fix it? Well, the country’s not breaking, but it’s certainly dividing. Burlington doesn’t have many of the problems apparent in rich/poor communities like Long Island, Hartford, and East St. Louis, but we’re not far off. Business owners will see a decline in the productivity of their workers. Doctors will see a decline in the health of their patients’ families. Financiers will see a decline in community investment. If we don’t keep up a long tradition of progressive thinking, and take steps toward integration, then the future will most definitely see us in a similar shape to any one of those communities.

Opposition groups have tabled the initiatives proposed by the Task Force to integrate our schools. It’s obvious something needs to be done, though. In the name of social justice, our community needs to provide a model to the rest of the country that minority groups can be given an equal chance to succeed. Unless you’re an outright racist, you cannot for one second believe that students of color inherently achieve less than white students, as the statistics represent. Unless you’re an outright racist, you must agree that there is a systemic problem. There are many assumptions about the quality of family support in low-income and high-minority areas. Parents in these communities don’t care enough about their children’s education? Here’s a better assumption: For every parent out there that doesn’t care, there’s another that cares desperately, and is mutely crying out for a fair chance to help his or her child. Parents in low-income and high-minority communities don’t care about their children’s education? If the well-to-do families in Burlington don’t take into consideration the Task Force’s findings and recommendations, then obviously they don’t care about those children’s education either.

In 2006, two Burlington-area schools failed to meet adequate yearly progress standards for the fourth year in a row. Edmunds Middle School and Milton Elementary School include populations of the lowest income and highest minority students. They’ve been put on corrective action status and with our two Old North End elementary schools not far behind, it’s clear what the future has in store for our labor population. Now is the time for action. The Task Force has done the work, and now it’s up to the rest of the community to accept the charge. Not only will our business owners find they have better workers, our doctors see health increases in their patients’ families, and our financiers see a more valuable community market, their children will also gain an immeasurably rich social education, and be fully prepared to enter the vastly diverse “real world.” We need to throw off the stereotypes, erase the assumptions, and begin to strengthen our community from the bottom up. In order to do this, though, it’ll require some support from the top down.