Education in Rocket City

Huntsville, Alabama: Wherever you go in Huntsville, you are never more than a couple hundred yards away from a replica of a rocket. They’re on the golf courses, they’re in the barbeque joints and they’re along the highways. Nicknamed “Rocket City,” Huntsville has been integral in U.S. space exploration from the time Wernher von Braun came over to develop rocketry for the U.S. Army in the 1950s. Since then the city has been responsible for designing the Redstone ballistic missile (the type of rocket power that carried the first U.S. satellite and astronauts into space), and the Saturn V, which is still the most powerful launch vehicle ever operated in the world.

Inside the offices of the Huntsville Times, the city paper with a circulation of 70,000, a wall pays tribute to the most important front pages through the decades. With Huntsville having been at the forefront of space exploration, it is not surprising that many of the banner headlines have to do with aerospace. “Man Enters Space,” says one from April 12^th, 1961. “Jupiter-C Puts Up Moon,” and “Eisenhower Dedicates Marshall Space Flight Center” say two more.

Steve Campbell, a reporter for the Huntsville Times with a disarming southern accent says to us, “Well, I guess these are all the things Huntsville finds important.”

Campbell, who is 24, has been working for the paper for more than two years, and has essentially been put on an education beat (in fact, he had just come from covering a school board meeting). For him, “what’s important” seems to be slightly different from what’s on the wall. Slender and dressed in his words, “like [he] is trying to sell us real estate in the suburbs” in a blue button-down and khakis, Campbell talks earnestly about how important fixing the country’s educational system is. Having spent years reporting on the local schools, Campbell has become an expert on what works and what doesn’t in Huntsville.

“First of all, I am not a fan of no child left behind,” he says. “There is no federal guideline for the tests, so each state determines on its own what qualifies as adequate yearly progress. Their funding is based on these interpretations. The state is going to determine how well they do by setting their own guidelines. Plus, a lot of schools completely miss out on funding due to not meeting these requirements. This seems like penalizing the schools that need the most help.

Since this is a growing area, they are really scraping for dollars. There’s a huge influx of kids, looking for money any way they can get it. So to have a superficial policy that could take away a lot of money from you, that can be a huge factor in determining whether the Huntsville Schools are adequate or not.”

Campbell says he is not exactly sure how policy in Washington can fix the problems of individual schools, but he has seen what works on the ground level. He talks about a school named Lincoln Elementary, an all black school where almost all of the 150 students have free or reduced price lunch. Yet, despite the poverty, it is one of the top performing schools in the area.

“What makes this school perform so much better than Martin Luther King Elementary, a school with the same levels of poverty only 2 miles away?” he asks. “The reason it works is because dedicated group of volunteers nearby church. This group comes in and not only tutors the kids, but acts as the parental figures they don’t have at home. High levels of poverty inherently have high levels of dysfunctionality at home, and these volunteers help level the playing field.

I don’t know how you have the government do that, but that’s the way to do it. I had parents that pushed me hard in school, but plenty of people don’t. And not just poor people. Plenty of wealthy kids ignored by their parents too. There needs to be some kind of incentive, monetary, tax, to be a volunteer at a school, and there needs to be these same incentive to keep good teachers around.”

Oh to be back in the land of Coca Cola

Above: The soda tasting room at the New World of Coke.

Marietta, Georgia: The first part of the tour in the New World of Coca-Cola in Atlanta is a room filled with so many trinkets, so many bibelots and gewgaws and gimcracks and knickknacks that it would be easy to miss the original Normal Rockwell that sits behind a pane of glass. The Rockwell, a painting of a Tom Sawyer-like boy—barefoot and complete with a straw hat, suspenders, blue eyes, red hair, a puppy, and of course the iconic glass bottle of Coke—speaks of a simpler time for the company, a time when there was only one flavor, and it only cost five cents. Now, the bucolic scene is trapped in a world of thousands of other company items from German posters to Japanese street signs, and a room upstairs allows you to taste the 70 flavors of Coke worldwide.

This room—which felt like something out of a 1970’s dystopia movie (think Logan’s Run)—gave me the opportunity to practice becoming a beverage connoisseur. I would pour the mystery liquid into my plastic cup (with names like Bibo, Aquarius and Cocoteen) examine the head and the body, and then be surprised to find that something like Italy’s “Beverley” tasted of bitter grapefruit rind (I had to ask what exactly the flavor was. Turns out it’s generally used as a pallet cleanser in wine tasting). A six-year old boy said to me, “It has no taste but leaves a bad taste in your mouth.”

Downstairs, beneath a 28-foot glass bottle, a room was dedicated to Coke’s philanthropist movements worldwide. The underlying message of the place seemed to be: Forget that we make billions of dollars producing a product terrible for your health, look at how benevolent we are. Telephones line the walls blaring out recorded messages of the company’s great deeds, from its efforts to combat AIDS in Africa to the $32 million it has donated to educational scholarships in North America.

Two miles away, however, at the Georgia Institute of Technology, about 500 recent college graduates are working to improve the country’s educational system, and are doing so without causing a single case of diabetes. Teach for America has its critics. There are plenty of people who say that there is a reason for teachers to require a master’s degree before taking over a classroom (it was pointed out to me that many members earn their master’s while working for TFA). Who is to say that a student just out of college is ready or at all qualified to be a teacher, and why are inner cities being stuck with so many untested educators?

Well, the TFA corps members I talked with seemed to agree with these critiques, but find the blame for the problems belongs to the government, not with the organization. For them, they realize that they are probably not the best teachers these kids can have, but at least they are something. Quality may be better than quantity, unless that quantity is zero. 

Most of the people I talked to on the Georgia Tech campus repeated the similar stories about why they joined TFA.

“I grew up in Florida,” Sarah Linzy said, “and I grew up really lucky. I lived in a neighborhood without any poverty at all. I went to a private high school and a good college at the University of Miami. I got all the education I could ask for, and why? Why did I deserve it and others not. I was just born there, so I felt like I had to help give people something of the opportunity I had.”

It was a theme echoed time and time again. Not everyone came from privilege (one guy I talked with, a man of Colombian heritage named Helbert, said it was growing up in a poor neighborhood in Queens and seeing how terrible the school system was that led him to TFA), but it was clear that much of the corps was made up of people who felt lucky. It was also clear that the group was in the midst of orientation because everyone discussed the same facts.

“Did you know that one in 10 African-Americans will never graduate high school?” a couple of people told me.

“Did you know that 8^th grade reading level is a good prediction of whether someone will go to prison,” was another one I heard a few times.

What everyone was talking about the equity and achievement gaps, and how institutionalized inequality needed to be changed.

“The most important thing to me politically and personally and in terms of making this country a better place is creating equality,” Kacie Versaci from Marrietta, Georgia. “This country needs to be a place that regardless of race, gender, socio-economic background, or geographic location, you are given the same rights and opportunities. I’m here because I think that education is a good place to start.”

Disillusioned by a lack of federal funding and respect for teachers, many of these recent college graduates feel that by being part of TFA they can help provide relief for what they consider an education crisis in the country.

“Being part of Teach for America helps combat educational problems in this country a number of ways,” said a boy named Drew from South Carolina. “First, of course, we get to help the younger generation get educated, and the better this country is educated, the better it is for the country. Then, equally important, we [teachers] all get to see first hand how policy affects students. I mean our policy is not good right now. We have the most money but rank 25^th worldwide in reading levels. Well, being in the classrooms ourselves, we get to see why. Many of these [teachers] are going to be the lawyers and politicians that get to affect educational change.”

Education with a side of Italian Ice

Above: Me talking to Britney Bryan, who is studying to be an elementary school teacher.

Charleston, South Carolina: Stopping for mango Italian ice down the road from the oldest Unitarian church in the South (1772), we learned that the vendor, Britney Bryan an 18 year old African-American, was aspiring to be an elementary school teacher at Winthrop College. Having attended schools in the area, improving the education system of the area is one of her top priorities.

“I feel that, coming from a disadvantaged background going to school in the inner city, we need better education in our cities,” she said. “I grew up in Virginia beach where the public schools are better than here, but for people here who can’t afford to go to private schools, the education sucks, especially for minorities. I think education should be a value that people want to do for themselves. It shouldn’t just be that people go to college because mom and dad went to college, it should be because they want to and they recognize the value of school. The only way that can happen is if the government values school. We need more money and yeah, better benefits for teachers so they stick around.”

But, as the case has been for a number of people I have talked to, Bryan will not be voting this November. Having applied for her voter card, Bryan said she never received it, and therefore is not a registered voter.