CITY STUDENTS IN SUBURBAN SCHOOLS

A local newspaper asked whether our City's school district should be subsumed by neighboring suburban school districts as a way to address the problem of sub-par performance by inner-city students. This was my response:

Those of us who live in the suburbs around the City might be tempted to think that the problem of underachieving students in the City school district is the City's problem and not something that concerns us, but the education of every child in this Commonwealth is mandated by state law and funded in part by state taxpayer dollars, so the education of those students is every bit our business. When City students succeed and become productive members of our society, we all benefit from their contributions. Conversely, when they fail, every one of us pays a steep price for that failure. If we who live in the suburbs turn our backs on City students, in doing so, we become complicit in their failures.

I do not pretend to know the exact reason for what has become an annual and unacceptable event - underachieving standardized math and reading test scores by inner-City students. I surmise it involves some degree of many factors, including but not limited to a lack of parental involvement in the student's education, a lack of educational resources in the schools, the City's higher poverty rate and a high truancy rate. What I do know is that students who attend schools in the suburbs perennially achieve acceptable standardized testing scores, which means that whatever the suburban districts are doing is working.

I refuse to accept the notion that City students are dumber than their counterparts in the suburbs or any less capable of being educated. It behooves us then to insure that inner-City students are given the same education afforded students in the suburbs. If that means absorbing City students into the suburban districts, I'm all for it.

As I type these words I can imagine a host of complaints in opposition to such a plan. Some will moan that they don't want drugs, violence and teen pregnancy infiltrating suburban schools, but they'll be kidding themselves because the schools in suburbia already face those problems. Some City residents will complain that they'll be losing a voice in their child's education, but that argument lacks merit because residents will continue to vote for school board members who make those decisions.

Unfortunately, what are really at the heart of many objections are racial biases and the discomfort created by the specter of racially integrating our suburban schools to a much greater degree than already exists. We cannot allow these kinds of objections to stand in the way of our students' educational progress. We owe that much to inner-City students. We owe it to our own students too.