Having graduated from college without a job offer, I decided to hit the road and document what young people talk about when they talk about politics for my blog Across the Great Divide.. My first stop was to Washington D.C. where I met up with an old friend, Matthew Segal, 22, the director of the Student Association for Voter Empowerment, which in Segal's words is "the only youth non-profit that I know of here in Washington or perhaps even in the country that is working explicitly on election protection."
Segal's involvement in politics began at a young age when he witnessed first hand the longest poll line in the country at Kenyon College during the 2004 election. As students waited in line for 10 hours due to malfunctioning voting machines, Segal felt violated. He committed himself to the job of making sure institutions of higher education were devoted to educating young people about the election process and getting them to the polls.
"We ought to make voting participation something as fundamentally taught as literacy in this country," he said. "You can't navigate throughout society unless you can read. You need to read to do almost anything. But you can live in this society, unfortunately, without voting, and we ought to set the precedent and institutionalize the value that if you don't vote you're not a valued member of society. Democracy is contingent on healthy, thoughtful, democratic participation to ensure all of our wellbeing."
Segal has written pledges for college presidents to sign (12 have signed on he said) that indicate a commitment to orienting students about the voting process. "It's amazing what people will do once they have signed a document saying they'll do it," he said to me.
Getting young people to the polls is all well and good, but is educating them just on the election process enough to create a thoughtful voter? As I headed into the South, I sought to examine exactly what issues motivated young people to get out to the voting booths. What I found was that almost regardless of political affiliation, upbringing, or geographic location, young people had education on their minds.
In Charleston, South Carolina, I stopped for mango Italian ice just down the road from the oldest Unitarian church in the South (1772). The vendor, Britney Bryan, an 18-year-old African-American with short tight braids told me she was an aspiring elementary school teacher and taking classes at nearby Winthrop College.
"I feel that, coming from a disadvantaged background, going to school in the inner city, we need better education in our cities," she said. "For people here who can't afford to go to private schools, the education sucks, especially for minorities. I think education should be a value that people want to do for themselves. It shouldn't just be that people go to college because mom and dad went to college; it should be because they want to and they recognize the value of school. The only way that can happen is if the government values school. We need more money and yeah, better benefits for teachers so they stick around."
Crossing South Carolina on highway 26 and down into Atlanta on highway 85, I ended up on the Georgia Institute of Technology Campus, surrounded by Teach For America members in training. Teach for America has its critics. There are plenty of people who say that there is a reason for teachers to require a master's degree before taking over a classroom (it was pointed out to me that many members earn their master's while working for TFA). Who is to say that a student just out of college is ready or at all qualified to be a teacher, and why are inner cities being stuck with so many untested educators?
In fact, the TFA corps members I talked with seemed to agree with these critiques, but find the blame for the problems belongs to the government, not with the organization. They realize that they are not the best teachers, but they also know a TFA teacher is better than no teacher at all. Quality may be better than quantity, unless that quantity is zero.
Most of the people I talked to on the Georgia Tech campus shared similar stories about why they joined TFA.
"I grew up in Florida," Sarah Linzy said, "and I grew up really lucky. I lived in a neighborhood without any poverty at all. I went to a private high school and a good college at the University of Miami. I got all the education I could ask for, and why? Why did I deserve it and others not. I was just born there, so I felt like I had to help give people something of the opportunity I had."
Everyone talked about equity and achievement gaps, and how institutionalized inequality needed to be changed.
"The most important thing to me politically and personally and in terms of making this country a better place is creating equality," Kacie Versaci from Marrietta, Georgia. "This country needs to be a place that regardless of race, gender, socio-economic background, or geographic location, you are given the same rights and opportunities. I'm here because I think that education is a good place to start."
It was really no surprise that the TFA corps member would talk about education as one of their top priorities, but when I moved into Nashville, I was surprised to find that young people on both sides of the political spectrum were talking about the same kinds of things.
In a park adjacent to City Hall, beneath the shadows of what appeared to be prison guard towers, I met two young women (sitting on opposite ends of the park). The first, Lucie, grew up in a democratic family; the second, Tayloe, grew up with her father and mother only watching Fox News and listening to Rush Limbaugh.
Despite their upbringings, both of these women said they were still unsure of who they were going to vote for come November. (Tayloe even said, "Now that I am not in my parent's house, I have the chance to think for myself about what's important. All I know is that the country is not in a good place right now.") When I asked these two young undecided voters where the country most needs a change, they each pointed to education.
"I'm not exactly sure what the answers are, but I am most interested in education policy," Lucie said. "If we are going to make this country a better place, it's best we start with the youngest population. I feel as though our public education system is our greatest opportunity as a country, but it is also our biggest failure. You can't even talk about the achievement "gap" because the word "gap" is so misleading. If 80% of the country fall below the gap, then we need to find a more meaningful word."
For Tayloe, the issue was slightly different. About to return to graduate school to get a degree in athletic management, Tayloe is mostly worried about the cost and efficiency of schooling in this country.
"After studying abroad in Australia, I realized that our education system is flawed," Tayloe said. "In Australia, if you want to be a doctor, you are in med school by 18. This saves a lot of money, and a lot of time. If we could model this country on foreign school systems, more people could become more educated quicker."
Regardless of exactly what the worry is, both of these young women said they would pay special attention on proposed educational policies when November rolls around.
"It's hard for me to vote exactly on policy," Tayloe said, "since policy is usually over my head. But if a candidate is talking about education, I will at least listen to what he or she has to say."
Inside the offices of the Huntsville Times, in Alabama, the city paper with a circulation of 70,000, a wall pays tribute to the most important front pages through the decades. With Huntsville having been at the forefront of space exploration, it is not surprising that many of the banner headlines have to do with aerospace. "Man Enters Space," says one from April 12th, 1961. "Jupiter-C Puts Up Moon," and "Eisenhower Dedicates Marshall Space Flight Center" say two more.
Steve Campbell, a reporter for the Huntsville Times with a disarming southern accent says, "Well, I guess these are all the things Huntsville finds important."
Campbell, who is 24, has been working for the paper for more than two years, and has essentially been put on an education beat (in fact, he had just come from covering a school board meeting). For him, "what's important" seems to be slightly different from what's on the wall. Slender and dressed in his words, "like [he] is trying to sell us real estate in the suburbs" in a blue button-down and khakis, Campbell talks earnestly about how important fixing the country's educational system is. Having spent years reporting on the local schools, Campbell has become an expert on what works and what doesn't in Huntsville.
Campbell says he is not exactly sure how policy in Washington can fix the problems of individual schools, but he has seen what works on the ground level. He talks about a school named Lincoln Elementary, an all black school where almost all of the 150 students have free or reduced price lunch. Yet, despite the poverty, it is one of the top performing schools in the area.
"What makes this school perform so much better than Martin Luther King Elementary, a school with the same levels of poverty only 2 miles away?" he asks. "The reason it works is because dedicated group of volunteers nearby church. This group comes in and not only tutors the kids, but acts as the parental figures they don't have at home. High levels of poverty inherently have high levels of dysfunctionality at home, and these volunteers help level the playing field.
"I don't know how you have the government do that, but that's the way to do it. I had parents that pushed me hard in school, but plenty of people don't. And not just poor people. Plenty of wealthy kids ignored by their parents too. There needs to be some kind of incentive, monetary, tax, to be a volunteer at a school, and there needs to be these same incentive to keep good teachers around."