There are reams of reading materials and stacks of studies purporting to assess various problems of the United States educational system. Each problem turns out to be rooted in our individual failure to place an extremely high value on a solid education. Our failure contrasts sharply with societal values of China, India, or Japan where admission to universities is a high calling and competition for scarce slots is fierce.

This failure to assign a high value to education is all too easily laid at the feet of society rather than each of us. Unfortunately, that approach allows individuals to escape responsibility for doing something to reverse the “rising tide of mediocrity” so well documented a whole generation ago by the National Commission on Excellence in Education.(1) If we truly cared, we would be working, really hard, to reverse that tide.

The numerous findings of the Commission as to content, expectations, time, and teaching(2) are more compelling today than they were then. Little has been done to extend the school year or extend daily hours in school. Those remain the same. (note 10 infra) A full core of language, math, and science for all students is not required and only a third of students study the solid subjects.(3) Teacher pay remains low in comparison to other professional opportunities for college graduates.(4) Dropout rates are 30% or higher.(5) The disproportionate influence of the education lobby continues.(6)

The consequences of a failed system are severe. Our kids won’t have good jobs. Their quality of life will decline, sharply. Our culture will lose international influence. Commerce does not wait. CEOs can hire better-educated workers offshore to sustain value. Why should the rest of us wait at home?

In 2005, the prestigious ACT noted that “the number of post-secondary school graduates will not be sufficient to fill the more than 14 million new jobs that will be added to the labor market by 2008. And, leaving high school without being prepared…will cost our nation over $16 billion each year in remediation, lost productivity, and increased demands on criminal justice and welfare systems.”(7)

In 1984, thirty-seven states had minimum competency tests for high school graduation. By 1995, the number was seventeen. The minimums have tended to become maximums, thus lowering standards for all.(8) Today, rank and file teachers say with some irony that “No Child Left Behind” is coming to mean “All Children Left Behind.”(9)

The organized time that children spend learning in school has remained static at 180 days per year and about 6 hours per day for a generation. By contrast, China, with one fortieth the per capita GDP of the United States, has eight-hour school days in its poorest, worst educated province.(10) Talk about valuing education!

The Commission also noted that a “1981 survey of forty-five states revealed shortages of mathematics teachers in forty-three states, critical shortages of earth sciences teachers in thirty-three states, and of physics teachers everywhere. This shortage persists. The percent of college graduates going into the teaching profession has continued to decline.”(11)

One specific thing we can do is vote! Votes can emphasize values. Votes get the attention of those who make policy. Even though federal and state education policies tend to dominate, a critical link in our system of education is the independent nature of local school boards. Where voters in local districts can lead, those politics can also help to elect state and federal officials with values that can help.

 In short, we need to build a better value system for education. Ask prospective school board members; ask state and federal candidates what they will do, specifically, to raise the priority of, and fund, high-quality education for our children. Elect and retain those with pro-education answers, and actions. Don’t vote for those whose talk – and actions – fail to show that education is a topmost priority.

As parents, we must tell our children we value education highly – and back those words with deeds. Teachers alone cannot be expected to change the value system of our society. The preeminent value we place on education must be clear in all our social interactions, and in our families. Even through poverty, divorce, and single parenthood, education must be sustained as a most important activity of family life. No electronic toys, or iPods, or playtime, until all of the homework is done. No cell phone privileges unless grades are up to snuff. And we all can think of additional ways to drive home the point that hardly anything is more important to our children and their posterity than acquiring a quality education. Learning well is simply essential to their future.

1 A Nation At Risk: National Commission on Excellence in Education; April 1983

2 ibid: Findings; also following Note 10 re teacher shortages

3 Courses Count: ACT 2005 (American College Testing, formerly)

4  USCA: New Teachers and Old Pay Structures; 2002

5 Manhattan Institute: High School Graduation Rates in the U.S.; 2001

6 American Behavioral Scientist: The Political Context of Higher Education; 2000

7 ACT: Courses Count; Preparing Students for Post Secondary Success; 2005

8 Synthesis Report 20; NCEO 1995

9 Desert Sands Unified School District: Author interviews; 2006-2007

10 The Education Sector; Washington D.C. and IUCN Asia Directorate; 2001 (Ghizou; Lowest urban GDP/worst education)

11 Opportunity in Education

The caller’s question is to the point. “Would someone from the park haul water for a group of Boy Scouts?” The park ranger’s answer is not so simple. He wants to know why the Scouts can’t carry their own water. The woman on the phone explains that the troop leaders would like to have water waiting for the Scouts at the backcountry camp sites, so it’s there when they all finish hiking. “We would have to hike it in just as you would,” explains the ranger.

“Can’t you use an ATV or something?” the woman asks.

“No. Your Scouts will have to carry in their own water.” The ranger places the phone down; he’s not surprised by the question, but it’s troubling none the less. Neither he nor I, also a ranger, understand why it is that humans and nature remain so far separated. Why was it reasonable to the scout leader to ask us to haul water?

It occurs to me that the Scout leader’s initial question is really about expectations. It asks who is responsible for taking care of people in the wilderness, and how do park rangers and environmental educators teach about wilderness, nature, and being prepared in the outdoors.

If the ranger hauls water to the campsite, four miles round trip, the Scouts will have no better sense of where water comes from, how little there is, and how precious the resource is than if they were sitting at home getting a glass from the tap. The Scouts’ learning experience will be quite different if they have to carry their own water. They will learn that in the high plains desert of Colorado, sources for water are few and far between and, if they are lucky to find them, may contain little more than a swallow, all of which will be non-potable without filtration. Carrying their own water, forced to conserve as they drink and cook over their camp stove, would teach them about the value and necessity of water, and that once drunk or spilled it’s gone, there is no more.

The 2400 acres the Scouts want to hike and camp in transitioned from working cattle and hay ranch to State Park in the 1960s. The house, barns, and stables were leveled by the park to make room for picnic tables and BBQ grillers. Today the only indications that there was a ranch are three full-grown cedar trees and the remnants of a stone walkway. Standing in front of the walk, looking west towards where the front porch stood, one might think the ranch family lived rather primitive. It’s a notion based on the modern idea of comfortable living, and from a culture accustomed to ease. In reality, the ranch family did quite well. They were able to extend their ranch from 160 acres to over 2600 and put all four of their children through college.

Here, where the prairie meets up with forest, the ranch family had to have a relationship with the land; their life and livelihood as ranchers depended on it. They strung pipes from a spring in a north-western gulch to their shallow well dug between their house and barn. They must have wondered how to use less water, and how to conserve what they were already using. The spring in Well Gulch depends on the winter snow pack and the late summer monsoons for regeneration; there would have been times when everything went dry, including the family’s well.

How might today’s conversation to encourage water conservation change if it were framed in terms everyone can relate to – houses, raising families, and modern conveniences? I don’t want to revert back to the time of western settlement, when people had less than an outhouse. But what I would like to see is people making an effort to work with the conditions of nature, not against.

I have a unique job as a park ranger; it gives me the gift of having to work with nature, of having to pay attention to cycles and changes. What I know is that nature is not stagnant, it does not run on a predetermined course; instead it is ever changing and re-formulating, adapting, and altering. Nature not only makes change look easy and possible, but necessary and exciting. Sadly though, our concept of nature, of environment, has moved indoors. There is a cultural acceptance that nature is a view, one that can be witnessed through a window or traveling car.

The Boy Scouts are practicing only what they’ve been taught and what they know from experience: that natural resources are readily available and plentiful. I hope these Scouts and their parents do decide to come to the park. I would like to hike with them. I’d like to show them the springs and drainages. We could talk about the plum trees which only produce decent fruit in wet years. We could cook together, making great meals which require only one cooking pot and little water. We could even roast marshmallows over our camp stoves. There would be stories and lots of time for exploration and questions.

In theory, on a wilderness backpacking trip, Boy Scouts could learn quite a bit about nature and the environment – it depends, however, on how willing the leaders are to get outside the familiar, to let go of the easy, and to put themselves in a position where they too have to recognize the importance and the inevitable shortage of water, and the natural conditions of a desert landscape.

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]]> http://sylvanecho.net/editorials/2007/11/25/rachels-post-here/feed/ http://sylvanecho.net/editorials/2007/09/03/retonos-del-desierto-%e2%80%93-ciudad-juarez-mexico/ http://sylvanecho.net/editorials/2007/09/03/retonos-del-desierto-%e2%80%93-ciudad-juarez-mexico/#comments Mon, 03 Sep 2007 00:29:06 +0000 Administrator Volume 1 Issue 1 http://sylvanecho.net/editorials/2007/09/03/retonos-del-desierto-%e2%80%93-ciudad-juarez-mexico/

By Consuelo Flores

In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, the girls keep dying. Since 1993, 500 victims – all girls and women - and the killings continue.

“Is it her?”

“We don’t know mama,” the boys responded.

“How can you not know if it’s your sister?” their mother pleaded.

“We can’t tell.”

“Didn’t you see her? Didn’t you see her face?”

“Mama, we didn’t see her face.”

“Why not?”

“Because…she didn’t have a face. She didn’t have anything above her neck but her head.”

Irma Monreal screamed and collapsed into her children’s arms. Esmeralda, her daughter, her oldest child, was only fifteen years old. Irma had sent her two next oldest children to identify their sister at the morgue because she was afraid of how she would see her beloved Esmeralda.

Esmeralda wanted to help pay for her quincenera because her mother, Irma, was the sole provider for their family of seven. She begged and pleaded for Irma’s permission to work not too far from where they lived. After a few weeks of Esmeralda’s coaxing, Irma gave her approval and her daughter went to work. Two weeks later, Esmeralda disappeared. Instead of a quincenera, Irma used the little money she had to pay for her daughter’s funeral.

Esmeralda’s body was found with the bodies of seven other young girls in a desert dumping ground. Eight girls had been abducted, tortured, raped, murdered, and their bodies dumped like discarded remnants after use. Esmeralda’s long, black hair had been cut off. Her nose, lips, and ears had also been cut off. She had no face, no recognizable features.

All of this had been done to her while she was still alive.

***

Irma lives with the pain of not only losing her daughter, but also with knowing that her daughter was brutally tortured, raped and then murdered. She is one of over 500 mothers who want justice for their beloved daughters.

In Juarez, where shantytowns call to young girls, beckoning them like Roman Catholic candles in the midnight sky, the girls assemble parts for planes, VCRs, TVs, and CD players over and over and over in factories that pop out from the desert sands like barbed wire in a garden of Baby’s Breath. Their feeling of responsibility to their families overcomes the desert trap and never-ending maze of sand and buildings and assembly lines. They feel responsible especially to their mothers, who stand over stoves stirring pots of beans into futures, as Jude, the Patron Saint of the worker, watches from the lit veladora.

In Juarez they stand in assembly lines, their fine motor skills like alchemists transforming arid despair into existence. “Pero son pobres (but they’re the poor ones),” say the rich residents of the Ciudad Juarez — where the caste system adds to the apathy, and creates fatal distances between the “haves” and “have nots” — to justify the lack of government action in the girls’ disappearances. A young girl, a dear and precious thing, a child of desire to her parents, something to be fond of, something to protect. If only a parent’s love resonated today in the hollowed government offices of the United States and Mexico.

The girls assemble parts for planes, VCRs, TVs, and CD players so that we can go on trips to other cities, watch movies and television shows, and listen to music over and over and over to escape our monotony. In the meantime, their bodies are found strewn about the desert between Juarez and El Paso, sliced open, burnt, and violated, like precious seeds which Saint Jude left unattended.

Having met Irma Monreal and other mothers from Cuidad Juarez and, along with them, fought for justice for their mijas, the victims, I cannot and will not go on with life as usual and turn away from these horrors. I hope, pray, fight and write about the spirit of those lost to us so that they can find peace and resolution. I am driven to help shed light in whatever manner I can until these crimes are resolved. I am part of a larger group of women and men who are creating change in the world by demanding human rights for those young women who have been pulled from their families.

Artists have created entire exhibits dedicated to the murdered women so that the public can “see” what has happened in Ciudad Juarez. Some of the art work — silkscreen prints, paintings, and mixed media work, scarves, pins, and tee-shirts — has been sold to raise funds for the families. There have been performances and conferences in cultural centers, galleries, and academic institutions to involve all areas of society, to educate as well as activate these communities. Books have been written (Desert Blood: The Juarez Murders [fiction], Harvest Of Women [nonfiction)], films (Bordertown) and documentaries (Missing Young Woman, Harvest of Women) produced, and music has been created (“De Mariposa a Cruz—Stages of Fear”).

There have been marches, protests, and vigils — many times from Mexican Consulates in different cities — creating a public presence to call attention to the murders. The mothers have protested in Ciudad Juarez, initially by painting pink blocks with black crosses on walls or telephone posts near the sites where their daughters were found. They’ve marched, carrying large photos of their daughters or black, life-sized cutouts in the form of women’s bodies. They’ve marked the actual places where bodies were found with pink crosses identifying the young woman by first name, date of birth, and date of discovery — no one really knows when these girls died. They’ve organized to raise funds for each other — for DNA testing, to bury their daughters, to create flyers, and to fly mothers across the world to raise awareness of the femicides occurring in Ciudad Juarez and, more importantly, the lack of action in their murders.

And it is not enough. In Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, the girls keep dying. I want those who read this for the first time to remember that together, we have the power to stop these injustices in the world.

In the desert sands of Juarez lie the truths of innocence lost, yet through our support and demand for justice, hope will bloom again.

For more information on how to help these mothers and their murdered daughters, please visit:

amnestyusa.org/women/juarez/salma.html

borderechoes.com

peaceattheborderfilms.com

harvestofwomen.com

JUSTICIA PARA LAS MUJERES DE JUAREZ

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