|
Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...
|
From the headline, guess what the haves and have-not’s will be doing this summer.
Right after testing is complete and yearbook signing begins comes the final school ritual – the announcements of summertime plans.
For many it’s a time to share, a time to brag and a time to hide. This benign sharing of activities yet again exposes the malignancy of an unequal “classroom society.”
SECOND AND THIRD HAND
During the school year, students are forced to show their place in the socioeconomic seating chart. Whether it’s the need for recycled school uniforms, used school supplies, subsidized lunches or the inability to purchase yearbooks the haves and the have-nots are always front and center.
This COVID school year brought tears of frustration from teachers, parents and, every once in awhile, students. But, the tears I saw a few weeks back from an eighth grade girl unable to purchase a yearbook were beyond description. There are lines that subs simply can’t step over, but let’s just say, by the end of the day her smile was beaming from the school bus as she was being bused home.
ARE WE THERE YET?
Summer break finds well-off kids are spending their days (and often their nights) at camp, or traveling the country with their families, picking up knowledge, skills, and social connections that will help them to thrive at school and beyond. Naturally, these are not experiences accessible to their less affluent peers.
As the upper-middle and middle-class grows larger and richer, it is spending extraordinary sums to enhance its kids’ experience and education, while other children must make do with far less.
As is evident, not every first grader plays soccer, even if that feels like the norm. These are enormous differences. As Annette Lareau pointed out in Unequal Childhoods, many kids are scheduled to the limit, awash in activities, while poor and working class kids’ spare time is largely self-organized.
Though the kind of “free range” experience brings some benefits, it also means less intellectual stimulation, social development and basic safety for the have-nots. It’s a fascinating read.
THE RIGHT WAY TO PAY TO PLAY
If we could muster the public will to invest serious financial resources, an obvious option is simply to give their parents money. An expanded child tax credit, or more generously Earned Income Tax Credit, would put more cash in moms’ and dads’ pockets, which must be used for after-school activities, soccer leagues, and summer camps.
I’ve seen how so-called “enrichment savings accounts” work. They take their inspiration from health and education savings accounts. The notion is to give parents the equivalent of a debit card to be used for only enrichment activities for their children— for sports, dance, summer camps, Boy and Girl Scouts, art, and all the rest.
Education savings accounts already allow expenditures on these sorts of things, but they are limited to a few states, and can also be used for private school tuition. The “savings” part is critical, for it encourages parents to be careful, prudential, discerning shoppers, getting the most bang for their buck, while keeping costs down.
WHEN EVERYONE HAS A “HAVE” SUMMER
For now, imagine a world in which the summer, weekend, and after-school experiences of the poor aren’t as radically different as they are today for the rich, and where every American child gets to enjoy the ups and downs of youth soccer, summer camp, and everything else.
How cool would it be when the only summer crying would be from a nine-year old kid who went to a nature camp in Ocala and because of being homesick, balled his eyes out for the entire week from being homesick. I could tell you that would be quite the sight. I know because it was I.
This column is by Ritchie Lucas, Founder of The Student Success Project and Think Factory Consulting. He can be reached at 305-788-4105 or email at ritchie@thinkfactory.com and on Facebook and You Tube as The Student Success Project.
