Life in America

Hello again!

When I last left you, we had discussed working in America. We had covered different alternatives for finding a job, how important health insurance was, and the difference in the American and Russian work ethic.

Today, we are going to go into a bit more detail about life in the US. I am going to focus on school.

As I mentioned last month, ‘Public schools in the US are terrible. Depending upon your child’s age, and what grade he/she is in, the problems will range from incompetence to life threatening danger. The bad news is, most of us don’t have an alternative. Private school in America is very expensive, and for that reason, the vast majority of American children attend public school.

88 percent of the children in America go to public schools, but among teachers, only 50 percent attend public schools. The people who work in the schools, the teachers, choose not to send their kids there. That should tell you something.

The possibility for a child to get a wonderful education exists. Teachers in the US are frequently hard working, capable people. Most classes are equipped better than anything you have seen here in Russia, but the will to educate just isn’t there. Too much time is spent on ‘sensitivity training’, and state mandated minimum standards to really move kids forward at a reasonable rate. ‘

Today, we will begin going into details.

Far too often, schools in the US have become warehouses for children. Their parents, too busy at work to take a serious interest in them, shift the responsibility for educating them to the state. Schools are all too frequently seen as a babysitting service as opposed to a tool to be used to further the education of a child.

In the US, schools are graded on two things. The first is attendance. Nothing matters as much as attendance. The importance placed on this can be explained by several reasons; it is important for a kid to be in class, discipline, etc. It is also important to understand that the government penalizes a school, financially, for the number of kids who don’t show up. It is important to the budget of a school that all enrolled children appear in class, whether they learn or not. It is more profitable for a school to have a student in a classroom that is not learning than to have him absent.

The other important factor to the school administration is how many kids reach the minimum standards. The more kids that at least clear the minimums, the better it is for the school. If a school has a lot of kids doing poorly, the state will investigate, and maybe make changes. It is a lot more comfortable to have everyone reach the minimums.

The bad thing about that system is after a certain age a lot of kids don’t want to learn. They become bored, and can be disruptive in class, sometimes to the point of being dangerous. While school violence like what happened in Columbine (The school in Colorado where a few students brought guns and bombs to the school to assault the facility, in a para-military fashion.) are rare, less spectacular acts of violence in schools are common. Most high schools have taken to having metal detectors and armed guards at the door, and police are frequently used to patrol the hallways. For the most part, that prevents guns and knives from making inside the building, but it doesn’t stop routine intimidation and coercion in the hallways, restrooms, and outside from occurring. American high schools have never been a place for the weak and timid, and that is truer today than ever. There is no easy secret to navigating these rough waters, but one should take heart in the fact that millions of kids do it successfully each year, and there is no reason that your child shouldn’t be able to do so. What is important is for you, the parent, to pay attention. Take physical threats and danger seriously, and make sure to stay involved with the curriculum.

The high schools in the USA offer a wonderful opportunity for the child who wants to get an education. There are chemistry labs in every school, computers in virtually every class, ‘honors classes’ for kids who want to do more than the average. A well-motivated student can even take college credit courses while still in high school.

In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens writes, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The same can be said of the American school system. It may seem strange that these two, seemingly different worlds, could exist in the same system, but they do. Even more amazing is that they exist in the same building. In every school in the US there are kids learning, working hard for their future, and progressing at rapid rates. There are also dangerous, lazy, students cruising the hallways like sharks looking for ‘weak fish.’

Lately, a lot of students from China, Korea, Vietnam, and other far eastern countries have been coming to the US, and they have done very well in the schools. It is fairly obvious that the success this demographic group enjoys is due to the emphasis the family puts on education. It is not uncommon for a child from a Vietnamese family to spend 3 or 4 hours at night studying, while the average American student may spend 4 hours a week studying. The successes these groups have achieved highlight the possibility for excellence. It is there; it just needs to be taken advantage of.

In the lower grades, the physical danger a child faces is a lot less, but the danger of falling into bad habits is still there. If you, the parent, doesn’t stay involved, your child may be left behind academically, all the while being promoted grade through grade. I cannot stress the importance of going to the school, meeting the teacher, checking the homework every night, and staying as involved as you can.

If your child doesn’t speak English, the school will make allowances for that, and extra help is available in most districts. While it may be difficult to find a Russian speaking instructor, that may be a blessing. Generally, the sooner a new arrival in the US learns English, and gets totally involved in the society, the better they are. In talking about the far eastern families that come to America, almost none of them speak English when they arrive, but after a couple of years, typically the children speak English well, and are excelling in schools. At the same time, a lot of Hispanic families that immigrate to the US don’t place the same emphasis on integration to the American system, and the test scores of the children reflect that. The English these children speak is typically of a lower quality, and their test scores, in comparison, are abysmal. What your child may lose, academically, in the first year will be more than made up in rapid progress once English is mastered.

At the university level, the system is very generous. In America, we have a system of colleges in virtually every area called ‘community colleges.’ These are set up to offer programs to people who want to earn a degree, but may not have the time or credentials to go to a full time university. At these colleges, you can go in the evenings, take as many or as few classes as you want, and work toward a degree in many different fields. For most working people, this is a convenient system to further their education.

The community college system can also be used for remedial work. Frequently, people graduating high school in the US don’t have the basic knowledge it takes to pass a college entrance exam. Rather than exclude these people, the system makes allowances for them. They can enroll in classes at the community college in subjects such as basic math, basic English, science, and so on. It offers a second chance to a lot of people who wasted their time in high school, but have now gotten more serious about life.

It also is a good place for an immigrant to go, because they will almost always offer ESL (English as a second language.) classes at free or reduced rates. The schedule is very flexible, the rate of study is individual, and the convenience for the individual is at a maximum.

On the university level, the US is a wonderful place. If you are serious about education, America offers some of the best institutions in the world, and although they can be expensive, there is always assistance out there for a good student. There are government guaranteed loans, grants, and scholarships offered, to citizens and non-citizens alike, and all universities have counselors whose specialty is helping students with financial needs gain the assistance they require to attend and excel at school. If you work hard and get good grades, it is very possible that the university will underwrite the entire cost of your education, at the same time helping you with a stipend toward your living expenses.

In a nutshell, it may be best put this way. America has long held itself out as ‘The Land of Opportunity’ and that is as true today as it ever was. The opportunity is there to excel, to thrive. The opportunity is also there to languish, to fall into an abyss of state sponsored apathy and wasted livelihood. The American education system, just like the American system in general, isn’t perfect. Nothing is. What it is though is a place where if you work hard, follow the rules, and do the right thing, more often than not you can build a good life for yourself.

Next time, let’s talk a bit more about the day-to-day living in the US, and how things have changed for the immigrant community since Sept. 11th.