My Thoughts on Kozol

Recently, I had a discussion with my one cousin about schools. He is getting ready to send his three triplet boys to school and is still deciding where to send them. He lives in the Red Lion School district however, he went to Dallastown (rival of Red Lion). He refuses to send his boys to Red Lion because he went to Dallastown. He also refuses to send his kids to Central York because they recently built a new high school and the day the high school opened it was already overcrowded. So, he is looking at sending them to a private school. This really upsets me because I feel as though he has lost faith in the public school system. Red Lion is a great school and his boys would do fine there. However, he is going to spend lots of money a year to send his kids to a private school because when he went to high school Red Lion was full of nothing but "rednecks". To be fair when I went to high school there was still a fair share of them, but there was more to Red Lion then that.  This is the problem with our society. People don't want there kids around certain people and so they pay to send their kids to a private school. Why not let your kids learn to deal with different kinds of people? What makes your kids so much better that they can't go to the same schools as everyone else? Why not support those public schools and make them better rather then just avoiding them? Why not support Central if they need to expand their school instead of just getting upset that they were not able to predict the increase in students? It makes me so mad that everyone isn't offered an equal education!! It makes me mad that private schools exist to give some kids more of a leg up than others! Kozol talked about how this was a way to keep the poor, poor and the schools segregated. I 100% agree with this and I believe that it may take another Civil Rights movement to change it. I do not know exactly where I will be teaching but if I am in an urban school I  will make sure that my students are aware of how they are being kept down by our society. This should not be a secret. Parents need to start demanding an equal and AUTHENTIC education. No more teaching for the test! It is really frustrating how much reform needs to take place in education. I know it won't be changed overnight, but I am just glad that we are learning how to teach around the standards and provide students with authentic learning. My goal is to make a difference in as many students' lives as I can and maybe if we all have that same goal education will change for the better someday.