The Right To Education

All children have a right to have an education. The bottom line is that all children, no matter who they are, what they look like, where they are from, or what they identify as deserve access to education and to be treated equally. In 1974 Congress passed the Equal Education Opportunities Act which states “no U.S. state can deny equal educational opportunity to any person on the basis of gender, race, color, or nationality through intentional segregation by an educational institution” and is meant to create true equality in our education system. If you’ve been reading the news recently, however, you know that students with wealth still have a leg up in this country over their less wealthy counterparts. Being born into a family that’s been going to a school for generations, even an Ivy League school, puts you at the front of the line for acceptance to that school no matter what your grades are, which is not fair for hard-working and less wealthy students. The path to a good education should be that if you work hard and get good grades, you can go to any school you want to. However, if you come from a financially disadvantaged family, hard work may not be enough. There is still a huge percentage of first-generation college students in America every year, and I feel that we should be past that at this point. 

The system is simply not fair or working well anymore. We are at a point where if you have enough money you can pretty much go to any school that you want, and as a husband to a new public school teacher that breaks my heart. My wife is teaching all these students who will never have opportunities that are truly equal to their wealthy counterparts. No matter how hard her students work, they may not be able to go to their dream schools just because they can’t donate that extra money or afford their textbooks or whatever it may be. In the end, I just think that the American education system needs to think more about what Congress passed back in 1974 and do a better job of integrating those values into our current education system.