School choice success stories are everywhere.
Earlier this month, National Public Radio aired an episode of WHYY’s Fresh Air, in which New York Times Andes Bureau Chief Nicholas Casey talked about the collapse of oil prices in Venezuela, how Donald Trump resembles Hugo Chavez, and the time he spent embedded with Colombian FARC guerrillas.
The interview with host Terry Gross eventually turned to Casey’s childhood, growing up in a mobile home in a working-class enclave of Northern California.
He said that, when he first enrolled in elementary school, his mother drove him to the best public school she could find. She later transferred him to a segregated school, where nearly all the children were black and Hispanic.
Later, he received a scholarship that may have changed the course of his life.
East Palo Alto, that year, had been – become – I think this was the early ’90s – per capita, the U.S. murder capital because of the number of drive-by shootings. It was a totally different public school that I was in suddenly with people that had come in – kids that had come in from very rough backgrounds, the parents who had – who were on drugs, who weren’t reading to them. It totally turned my life upside down for those years. I had, for a long time, asked my mom – why had she done this? I wanted to leave this school. But she said that she wanted me to see what, you know, the rest of, you know, America was like and the other part of my background.
So I stayed there for another number of years until I was recruited by a small private school called Menlo School, where I went to high school. And I got a scholarship to go there and, again, was turned from a very kind of poor, struggling school to an ultra-rich school. This was not, like, the middle-class, white school that I had gone to when I was in elementary school or the very poor black and Hispanic school, but the school where the creme de la creme of the Silicon Valley were sending their kids, where they had DNA-analyzing equipment and classical music instruments to play.
It was through those three experiences that I saw how much, like, your school, you education environment can totally impact what your outlook is and what your future might be. If I hadn’t gotten that scholarship to go to Menlo, I’m not sure that I would have been able to get where I am today. That place really lifted me out of poverty, set me on a track to, you know, where I am today. And it’s just taught me so much about how the kind of schooling that you get is going to have a complete impact on what kind of person you’re going to be.
How many potential award-winning foreign correspondents never got the chance to attend a school that might lift them out of poverty? Imagine if similar opportunities were available to all students.
