equal opportunity is only half of it...

This post is about education.  Specifically, the very toxic educational environment we provide for low-income students.  Students from economically disadvantaged backgrounds face a huge array of barriers to their success.  They attend failing schools.  Their personal safety is often in question.  They suffer disproportionately from depression, anxiety, AD(H)D, diabetes, asthma, obesity, malnutrition.  Their parents cannot give them the social capital or specialized knowledge necessary to make it in today's society.  We (all of us) have failed them in all these respects.

But, along with all the systemic disadvantages these students fall victim to every day, we add insult to injury.  We tell them that they don't make it because they don't work hard enough, their families are dysfunctional, they dig their own graves.  To me, this may be the most damaging of all.

I know students who have struggled against the odds.  Raised their siblings along with their predicted test scores, worked minimum wage jobs along with making honor roll, found incredible inner strength in surmounting the challenges they face.  But, sadly, they climb out of poverty to find that the world hates their mothers and their fathers, blames their pastors and their friends for all the struggles they worked so hard to overcome.  They have to navigate a world in which their opinions and experiences are marginalized, deemed overblown, or rejected.  In my mind, this is why there are so many first-generation college students who drop out within their first year.  Sure, their schools have probably not prepared them adequately for the challenges of college.  Sure, they have fewer friends and family members who can share the shell-shock of the transition to college.  But, in the socioeconomically- and racially-charged atmosphere of debate in college classrooms, low-income students encounter peers who have radically different life experiences.  And when they speak out they have (proportionately) very few peers to back them up.  They are isolated and under attack in the very places which should reward them for beating the odds.  We have to change our minds as well as our institutions in order to truly give these kids a chance.