EdMonth kicked off with “SparkED” panel
USG kicked off USC’s fourth annual EdMonth on Monday night with “SparkED,” a panel featuring activists who spoke about their work promoting educational justice for traditionally marginalized students.
The panel addressed grassroots initiatives and obstacles to education reforms, particularly within Los Angeles and Chicago. It was moderated by Assistant Director Nnenna Ezeh, a senior majoring in health and humanity.
Malcolm London, a freshman at University of Illinois and a poet-activist known for his spoken word piece “High School Training Ground” performed at TED Talks Education, explained the resource disparities within Chicago’s public education system.
London explained that the problem is not that schools in poorer areas are not producing results — the problem is that those schools do not receive proper attention and funding.
“When on the opposite side of the city [from where the mayor’s children attend school] you have one teacher for every 40 kids, you replace counselors with policemen, and then you underfund these schools and say, well they aren’t being used correctly,’ well whose fault is that?” London said.
London helped organize protests when Mayor of Chicago Rahm Emanuel closed 50 schools, many of which contained a high proportion of minority students, because those schools were labeled as “underutilized.” The protests included up to 15,000 people demonstrating in the streets weekly.
Emily Almendarez, a high school activist involved in the Coalition for Educational Justice and Schools that LA Students Deserve, expanded upon the discussion of inadequate resources.
Almendarez noted the differences between the predominantly Caucasian middle school she attended in the valley and the high school she attended in Koreatown.
Almendarez’s high school had five campuses that shared one nurse, one college counselor and one library.
“There are no resources that indicate that you’re worth going to college,” Almendarez said.
Jose Lara is the vice president at El Rancho Unified School District and a founder of Ethnic Studies Now Coalition, a grassroots group that is working on asking unified school districts in California to require a Ethnic Studies class to be a high school graduation requirement.
Increased efforts to include Ethnic Studies in high school curricula has lead to the implementation of the course in four school districts in California.
Lara discussed that minority students are not exposed to education on the histories, cultures and languages that affect their every day lives and communities because curricula are western-centered.
Director of EdMonth Hannah Nguyen also explained that this year’s panel speaks to the theme “Spark a Movement” because it highlights the power of the student voice so that education reform is approached from a different angle.
Easiest to blame the public schools or teachers, or maybe even urge the “parents” to care for the child and motivate the child to learn. But the father is unknown and the mother has to work or – worse – is mentally absent through drugs or alcohol. Some parents. What happens then? A gang and the street that raise the child. When children grow up this way, their ability to learn and be productive is rare. So what is the solution? Throwing money at the problem is a waste.Better funding cannot make up for the horrible non-parents. A potentially effective solution would be for the children to grow up in orphanages, but that is politically not possible. So, in fact, there is no effective solution. Get over it. In our culture, this is what must be.