Thomas Friedman has a powerful article on the lottery for the SEED school in Baltimore Maryland. See Hope in the Unseen. The article recited much of the hope and anxiety previously reported about school lotteries – how futures rely on fate and how damn unfair it all can be. While compelling, the article was not new (at least to me). What was new, I thought, was how Friedman addressed the critical topic of hope for those urban residents with little to no education or hope for tomorrow. They are not blind to their predicament.
If you think that parents from the worst inner-city neighborhoods don’t aspire for something better for their kids, a lottery like this will dispel that illusion real fast.
This point is critical to education reform and this point should be explored in greater depth by the public and private sectors. But let’s not sit on our hands. This work needs to have begun yesterday and it is ridiculous that we are only beginning to recognize the urgency.
There are so many good reasons to finish our nation-building in Iraq and resume our nation-building in America, but none more than this: There’s something wrong when so much of an American child’s future is riding on the bounce of a ping-pong ball.
