University of Hawaii protested on November 17th about the budget decisions that the school and state had decided on for the following years to come. These involved cut backs on funding for classes and the reduction of TA help on campus. This is another example of struggling government funded schools on the islands. These specific issues can be traced back to budgeting and financial issues that have presented themselves because of the destructive cycle that is the education system in Hawaii.
Despite changes being made slow continuously each year, these issues are a reminder of how hard the system is struggling. It is also a reminder of how close the entire public school system is to collapsing, which did occur in early 2000.
This occurred after a breakdown in contract negotiations with the State of Hawaii and led to an entire shut-down of the system. Public schools across the state were closed while private institutions profited from a mass enrollment of families shocked into making a change, these families being of the fortunate few who could afford it showing once again the rift that has been an ongoing issue in Hawaii.
These struggles continue today as public school teachers, not just in Hawaii, protest all over the country for better contracts. These in turn lead to funding crises for the public school systems and turn away the solution of better funding for classes and material and opportunities for students coming from already less “successful” families.
On April 14th, 2011, a mother Tanya McDowell was arrested for using her baby sitter’s address to enroll her son in better school than he was already attending in Connecticut. She was arrested after the fraud was found out and when the school found that she herself was homeless. Her son was then removed from the school. A system where the child’s future is dependent on the parent’s success is an underlying cause for why there is an un-breaking cycle in the education system where the amount of success that the parent achieved will be the success that their child achieves.
The education system that we live in is one so skewed. If it were a scale, the opportunity and chance of a successful for future for kids looking to find more success from where they come from would be much higher being enrolled in a private school than a public that would be available to them. Only by real attempts to recognize the status of the scale and to try and balance it will there be any hope in breaking the destructive cycle of education that so many people find themselves in.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-dreier/americas-rigged-education_b_5621332.html
http://khon2.com/2014/11/17/uh-grad-students-protest-poor-oversight-amid-budget-issues-ta-cuts/
A Word To the Wise 