In his State of the Union address, President Obama spoke about his grandparents, who were part of the World War II “generation of heroes” who “built the strongest economy and middle class the world has ever known.” The President said, “My grandfather, a veteran of Patton’s Army, got the chance to go to college on the GI Bill. My grandmother, who worked on a bomber assembly line, was part of a workforce that turned out the best products on Earth. The two of them shared the optimism of a nation that had triumphed over a depression and fascism. They understood they were part of something larger; that they were contributing to a story of success that every American had a chance to share—the basic American promise that if you worked hard, you could do well enough to raise a family, own a home, send your kids to college, and put a little away for retirement. The defining issue of our time is how to keep that promise alive.”
For decades, the cornerstone of fulfilling the American dream has been getting a good education. But that cornerstone has crumbled for millions of America’s children. The President said making sure students graduate from high school and are able to go to college must be a priority. He said, “Higher education can’t be a luxury—it is an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford.” The economic imperative of graduating from high school and college is especially critical for the 16.4 million poor children if they are to have the best opportunity to lift themselves out of the cycle of poverty. But instead of leveling the playing field, inequities in funding, resources, and access to high quality teachers for public schools place millions of poor children in low-performing schools with inadequate facilities and often ineffective teachers. Thirty-five percent of Black and 29 percent of Hispanic high school students attend the more than 1,600 “dropout factories” across our country where 60 percent or fewer of the freshman class will graduate in four years with a regular diploma. For these students, the cost of tuition might be just one more thing on top of poor preparation that makes college seem like another impossible barrier separating them from the rapidly disappearing American dream.
Eighteen-year-old Toni Thomas, who gets up each morning in the small room she shares with her mother in Mom’s Place, a transitional housing shelter for the homeless in Detroit, Michigan, is a role model for all the struggling young people like her who continue striving and trying their best despite the overwhelming odds stacked against them.
Getting a high school and college degree and achieving the American dream could easily have seemed impossible to eighteen-year-old Toni Thomas. Toni gets up each morning in the small room she shares with her mother in Mom’s Place, a transitional housing shelter for the homeless in Detroit, Michigan, and takes the bus to Wayne County Community College. She plans to transfer to Wayne State University in two years to study engineering. Her goal sounds a lot like the President’s definition of the basic American promise: “having a good job and my own house and my own car and my own money.”
Unlike many teenagers her age, Toni has had none of these. As Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Julia Cass learned when she met Toni and her mother while on assignment for the Children’s Defense Fund, Toni grew up moving from place to place in poor neighborhoods in a once booming but now poor city. Her mother, Linda Dinwiddie, describes herself as “lost in drugs for a long time.” Toni said, “Until last year, until I was 17, pretty much she’d been on drugs most of my life. I wanted her to get off of it. Her using meant we had to get up and move. Sometimes we didn’t have food.” Extended family gave what support they could—especially Toni’s grandmother, who died several years ago—but Toni and her sister, who is now 26, often scraped by on their own. Throughout it all, Toni kept one goal in mind: “I wanted to graduate from high school on time.”
During Toni’s junior year, her mother Linda was gone—first hospitalized with asthma attacks and blood clots, and then staying in a residential drug treatment facility. “She gave me and my sister her food stamp card so we could eat and everything,” Toni said. “She’s a good person, a caring person. She just got hooked on drugs.” Before their mother left, they’d been living in an abandoned house that their cousin had lost in a foreclosure. Toni and her sister continued to live there while their mother was gone. The utilities had been shut off although someone in the neighborhood illegally hooked up the electricity for the stove and small heaters. “In the wintertime, we’d scoop up snow to get water, put it in pots and boil it so it would be like sterilized,” she said. “We put sheets up around the windows to keep the rooms warmer. The beds and stuff had got moldy so we slept on the couches.” Her sister cooked. At the end of the month when the food stamps ran out, “we tried to get food any way we could or go to somebody’s house,” she said. Sometimes, Toni would spend the night with one of her two closest friends and go to school from there. “They had a better environment in their house than I did.”
She stayed in school and tried to keep up. At one point she failed three classes but took them over in summer school so she could graduate on time. Then she got in trouble for fighting and transferred to West Side Academy, an alternative school. “It’s a school for a second chance. It helps you get your grades up and do better,” she said. There, she got on the student council, went to Lansing for a student government meeting, and met the governor. “It was fun. It was interesting,” she said. A science teacher encouraged her to join the robotics team where students build robots and compete with teams from other schools. “I’d go after school and on weekends helping build the robots,” she said. “I learned how to use tools. That’s how I got interested in engineering.”
In May 2010 after Linda got out of the treatment facility, Toni and her mother moved into Mom’s Place, part of Cass Community Social Services. “I’m proud of her. I’m proud she got off drugs,” Toni said. Linda said she is very proud of Toni for not getting into trouble and for finishing school “in spite of what I put her through. She kept herself together.”
Last summer, Toni got an AmeriCorps job with the Detroit Parent Network, going door to door giving information about the organization. “It’s about helping parents get their kids in better schools,” she said. It provided a salary and $1,100 towards college.
Toni has a distance to go to graduate from college with an engineering degree. West Side Academy is one of Detroit’s 44 persistently low achieving schools, and in her first year in community college, she is taking mostly remedial courses, including pre-algebra. “I’m not sure I can handle it, but I’m going to try my best,” she said of college. “That’s what I been doing, trying my best.”
Toni is a role model for all the struggling young people like her who continue striving and trying their best despite the overwhelming odds stacked against them. Countless other struggling children have not been able to overcome the same odds the way Toni has and have been sucked into our nation’s Cradle to Prison Pipeline™. We must reroute all children into a pipeline to college and productive work with investments in early childhood, education, out of school programs, and youth and parental jobs. Each child should have a chance to reach their God-given potential. The AmeriCorps program and a caring teacher made a difference in Toni’s life. How many young people will never get the chance to see how far their best can take them? We don’t have a moment or a child to waste.
Follow Marian Wright Edelman on Twitter: www.twitter.com/ChildDefender
Mark Yzaguirre: Don't Blame Liberal Arts Majors for High Unemployment
Sabrina Stevens Shupe: Why the #EdSOTU Matters
Russell Bishop: Soul-Talk: What Can You Do With All That Upset?
Remembering Fred Shuttlesworth: The Most Courageous Man in America
Hello Marian!
I love your blog! You are always writing about thought provoking things that we need to dialogue about. I particularly loved this article because so little is known about Fred Shuttlesworth’s courage even though Martin Luther King, Jr. himself once called him the most courageous civil rights fighter in the South. After reading this article I discovered that there is a man who Fred Shuttlesworth passed the civil rights torch to who few know anything about. His name is Willie T Clay. I bought his book and am half way through it. I like the fact that he was very concerned about the Black problem in America so way back in 1960 he started walking across America to survey people state to state in search of the basic problem afflicting Black Americans. I love the book so far - his discoveries about Black Americans was amazing! I’m with you - I want the shame of child hunger, homelessness, poverty and illiteracy to end too. And I do believe change is possible!
Suggestion 1: Teachers and Public Social Workers both need to unionize in order to increase their legislative power. Both serve the same demographics.
The problem is not the education system it is the parent. Or lack thereof. Our black women are having babies with out being married. The fast track to poverty is the single household.
Over 65 percent of black babies are born to single mothers. If we could just get back to the principle of marriage before children we as blacks would not have such difficulties.
We don't need a union of teachers and social workers .....we need our women to keep their legs crossed until marriage. That principle should be taught in the home by the mothers and fathers of our children. Education starts at home.
I suggest you stop telling women, black or otherwise, what to do with their body parts, and start looking for reasonable solutions that will support our families and communities.
Our children need protection, our professionals need to know how to identify the children that need their help, but most importantly we need to exercise compassion and not judgement. It may go along way in a child's life. We need to reach them before they develop the hardness (shell around them) that in their mind ensures no one will hurt them again. Often that means, they become the person that is doing the hurting. I believe that as professionals we can help change our youth's outcomes.
Woman choose the fathers of their children. That was one of the many principles my mother and father taught me.
A father ( daddy) major role is to protect his family ... which would include his daughters from strangers and thugs .
Compassion and Judgment are two different things. We need to judge ... because we need to tell our children who they should stay away from and who they should be like.
I am a firm believer that education starts in the home.
What is so sad is that no one is preaching that the road to poverty and poor education starts with the single parent.
Libs hate that idea becasue they want you to remain ignorant with your hand out taking welfare and voting for them
Stop saying that! There are any number of single family households, by choice or default that are doing just fine. You folks simply have to get used the fact that the family unit is changing or restructuring, not only in the black community but other communities as well. Much of this is fuel by advancements women are making in their own education, which leads to independence and ultimately success on their own terms. This is proof positive to what Marion Wright Edelman is saying, namely the fast track to poverty is a lack of education, not single family households.
Marriage is an artificial construct. People were having babies long before the institution of marriage was ever invented (with its attendant "civil rights.")! Your pretense toward morality is charming, however the fact of the matter is, society is changing!
Where were the jcommunity social workers? Where were the police? How did these children live on their own and no one knew?
Edelman and others would prefer to blame the education system for this, but this young woman is homeless because of a selfish mother. I don't care how many people repeat the lie, but an "excellent teacher" is not going to overcome the results of a parent choosing drugs over her children or many other social ills. Stop blaming teachers and schools in general for what parents refuse to do for their own children.
They do their work despite being bashed, disrespected, and having no help.
And teachers are primarily teachers. We are not counselors. Our job and our focus is academics, not social work.
"We must reroute all children into a pipeline to college and productive work with investments in early childhood, education, out of school programs, and youth and parental jobs."
So far Ms.Edelman rerouting the children into pipeline to college means only ONE thing for the reformers like Rhee, Duncan and Obama. The only thing they believe in is the bashing the teachers and their unions, and blaming them for everything what is wrong with our urban , public schools.
Sure, Ms.Edelman every child. However children are not the passive recipients of chances raining on them from the above. Children develop unique personalities and, honestly, if you have ever worked with children you know that some of them are dandelions and some are orchids. Some will thrive despite poverty and some will fail despite all the help from teachers.
Some children will take their chances gladly but some will not. They will failed. Why do we blame the teachers for the child personality?
In most cases the effective teacher is the lucky one having a student who will take the chance.
Yet most people blame the teachers, unions and administrators?
Failing to recognize that same ideological and political dogma that despises and defunded the public sector is materially undermining educational opportunities. Therefore, creating a nation where the likelihood that tens of millions will never be able to fully participate in a productive and fulfilling life.
It's not any better at the next level either.
Our American Dream should be to make our Pledge of Allegiance more than empty words adding to global warming but rather "One Nation under God with Liberty and Justice for all people without exception" and not just the rich, powerful, and the influential.
Our American Dream should be a government of all the people without exception, for all the people without exception, and by in the public life that are without exception committed to these propositions.
Our American Dream should be for each child without exception to reach its fullest “God-given potential.”
Our American Dream should be an American that is truly a source of pride for the rest of the community of nations, an America with a foreign policy based of justice and fairness and not what is mine is mine and what is yours is mine as well.
Our American Dream should be to use our incredible God given resources in the most efficient way possile for the sake of present as well as all the generations to come.
This America will by the way herald the end of the so called "terrorism" against us and make us a nation once a nation truly proud and without fear.