By the Mississippi Delta, A Whole School Left Behind - washingtonpost.com

By the Mississippi Delta, A Whole School Left Behind - washingtonpost.com

If you have not seen Lalee's Kin - an HBO documentary on a poor black family in the Mississippi Delta region and the school district where they live - you must! The district in this article sounds a lot like it. The documentary has had a profound impact on my students. Two years ago, one class raised money to purchase textbooks for the elementary school there.

I wish we could have a serious discussion of how to fix our education system in this country. Until we address the inequities created by funding primarily from local property taxes, this problem will not go away. More standardized testing will not solve the problem. We need better teachers - with higher pay - and smaller classes. More and better preschool programs. More mentor programs. More and better after school programs.

If we don't fix this, we will continue to deny an embarrassingly large segment of our population the hope that life can get better, that the next generation can leave poverty behind. We will continue to deny ourselves the promise that some poor kid might invent a new source of energy or a cure for cancer. We will lower our chances for competing successfully with India and China in the coming decades, since only by tapping intot he full potential of all 300 million Americans can we hope to match their growing middle classes.

Like developing alternate sources of energy and forcing our government to stop adding to the $9 trillion federal debt, this is an issue of national security for the United States, not a liberal cause to be dismissed or ignored. We cannot afford to allow poverty and inadequate education to plague our country in the 21st century.