On the other side of town, the graduation rate is arrestingly low. There's not much enthusiasm to bake cookies for the PTA. The crime rate is staggeringly high. Businesses are moving out of that part of town. The property values are the lowest in the city. There are many other issues here: alcoholism, drug abuse, prostitution, teen pregnancy, unemployment. I'm not minimizing these problems or trying to castigate these communities, I'm simply connecting the issues. These problems are cyclical and intergenerational. Lower property values results in less money for the schools. This results in a discrepancy between how much gets spent per child in the affluent versus the not affluent parts of town.
• "School budgets are tied to property taxes. This is why schools in poor neighborhoods get about half as much money per student than schools in affluent neighborhoods" (dosomething.org).
• "Dissatisfaction with the size of the spending gap between rich and poor runs high. At New Trier High School's Northfield campus, where per-pupil spending tops $17,000 compared with $10,400 in Chicago" (Paulson).
This is a terrible analogy, but it's one that has been applied to similar situations. In the 80s, as long as AIDS was a gay disease, most people didn't know or want to know about it. It wasn't until it "moved to the suburbs" when heterosexual people contracted the disease did it gain attention. If I remember correctly, it took a 10 year old girl who contracted the disease from a blood transfusion and become a spokesperson for the disease did it start receiving funding for research and testing. So the analogy and the prediction: until these atrocious drop out rates move into the suburbs, this issue will be buried along socio-economic lines.
14 Nov 2008
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