IF YOU WERE A PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE, WHAT DOMESTIC ISSUE WOULD YOU CONSIDER  MOST IMPORTANT AND
WHAT WOULD YOU DO ABOUT IT?

Each weekday morning, nine-year-old Misha Smith swings her front door ajar and saunters south on Detroit’s rugged Harper Avenue for twenty minutes. When she reaches Elmdale Conservatory, a Detroit Public School with a derelict water supply and faulty toilets, she grabs her daily breakfast of apple Jell-O and heads to a second-grade classroom.  Because she is tardy, Misha must sit on the floor today; the seventeen desks cannot accommodate the thirty students present.  Each one of the students at Elmdale comes from a black, urban household.  Most of them receive subsidized meals in school, and—if stats here are comparable to district standards—only twenty-one percent will graduate from high school.  The plight of urban education is a crucial problem in the United States; if I were a presidential hopeful, I would place inner-city institutions at the forefront of financial and social restructuring that would potentially transform the American experience.

Good education runs on money.  In districts like Detroit, reminiscent of hundreds of urban systems nationwide, a dearth of funding is available for curriculum development, efficient faculty and, often, fundamental upkeep.  The bulk of federal educational spending is instead utilized at schools in wealthier, largely white communities.  $4,690 is spent annually on a Detroit Public Schools student; in the same period, $10,700 is subsidized in a nearby district in which eighty-eight percent of students are Caucasian.  Presidential hopefuls should scrutinize these demographics closely.

Passing bills to redirect the flow of dollars to the nation’s most oppressed schools could ultimately reform America’s searing achievement gap and establish a degree of unprecedented equality.  If I considered filling the Oval Office hotseat, I would forge loyalties within the Appropriations Committee and the Department of Education (alongside its myriad subcommittees) to facilitate this financing.  I would employ an aggressive devotion to veto privilege when faced with bills that would jeopardize prospective progress in urban America. I would also campaign aggressively for programs, aimed at efficiently utilizing tax money, that pass funding to urban districts, and would persistently foment bipartisan support for such measures through reasonable dialogue.  In my executive campaign, I would pledge to close the congressional gap between liberals and conservatives that has stagnated a wealth of opportunity for America’s children.

While stimulating financial developments in Washington would help me propel improvement in urban education, it would take a gradual shift in national culture to initiate long-term progress. As a presidential candidate, I would anchor a presence in urban schools and dutifully shine a spotlight on my presence there.  From my work as a teacher’s aide at Elmdale, I have glimpsed the educational liability of learning in an underprivileged environment.  On the campaign trail footage of this tragedy could potentially transform voters’ understanding of the inner-city and its complexity.

Campaigning would also allow me to express the reasoning behind universally decent education:  good schools, and consequently high graduation rates, would contribute to an educated workforce and help today’s youth restore tomorrow’s economy. These progressive attributes could also neutralize the educational barrier that stands between racial communities in this segregated nation.

The promise of superior education is a limited aspect of the American experience.  In hundreds of inner-city communities, access to satisfactory schools falls piteously short of an acceptable level.  My aforementioned proposals for bettering the status of domestic education would aim to fortify our nation’s workforce, shut the achievement gap and mend the quilt of justice that our forefathers conceived.