Excellent post and ideas :thumbsup:
Thanks. High School is a legal obligation, higher education is a choice, so a higher percentage of those making this choice will be motivated to succeed, free the slackers and class disrupters that populate the most dysfunctional of high schools.
I am under no illusion that many folks of color don't suffer immensely from the underfunded by low tax base, utter crap high schools located in war zones they have had little other alternative but to attend.
But those who make the choice to better themselves in college should be given every possible remedial assistance we can provide. It could be a legitimate way up and out for them, but only for those willing to put in the work.
Kids can do a ton of maturing in the years right after HS, as they face the hard economic realities of life on their own.
That greatest generation? They can home from WWII older, wiser and
motivated. The GI Bill led to the explosion of the great American middle class, which was our fundamental strength as a nation.
We owe every appropriately motivated young kid the best chance we can give them, no matter how far behind the eight ball they are starting from.
Sure, it
should start much earlier in the local schools, but that seems to be something of a lost cause for now, for an entire constellation of social and economic and political reasons, undergirded by the brutal property tax base disparities between rich and poor neighborhoods.
To paraphrase JKF, we
can choose to do this, not because it is easy, but because it is hard.