8. Schoolwork

Two essays written for school assignments that I came across...nothing profound but they echo some of my recent sentiments.

1. Assignment: to choose a position on the legality of DDT and write a paper from that point of view.

When my village discontinued the use of DDT for disease control, my son contracted malaria and died. There is nothing, absolutely nothing to bring a man closer to social justice than to have it affect him personally. Dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, commonly known as DDT was first synthesized in 1874 but wasn't discovered as a highly effective insecticide until 1935.Capable of killing hundreds of kinds of insects in one application, DDT was widely used during World War II for crop protection and the eradication of malaria. After environmental concerns began to be introduced, it was banned in the United States in 1972. More and more countries are taking on this view. How can we support a worldwide ban of DDT when it provides the only current solution to our children dying at the hands of malaria? We must make better use of current knowledge and technology at hand to overcome the hurdle malaria presents to future progress worldwide.

Malaria thrives in social crisis, weak health systems, and impoverished villages. It is the leading problem here in sub-Saharan Africa, where about 550 million people are at risk of malaria. Five percent of children are likely to die of malaria-related illness before the age of five. Out of one million deaths worldwide, ninety percent of these deaths occur in sub-Saharan Africa. Much effort has been taken to eradicate the disease in other nations. By contrast, little has been put into controlling the malaria situation here. One of the main reasons is that malaria eradication requires a comprehensive approach. While chloroquine was once the main drug used, the discovery of new antimalarials is not keeping pace.

The most effective treatment discovered to date is the spraying of DDT on house walls to prevent malaria transmission. This method attacks the mosquito vectors of malaria where they contact the human host. One survey showing data analysis from 1993to 1995 showed that countries that have recently discontinued their spray problems have reported large increases in malaria infection. Ecuador, after increasing their use of DDT, saw a 61% reduction in malaria rates. This treatment is also cost-effective. Affected families spend $2 to $25 on malaria treatment along with between $0.20 and $15 on prevention. Is this to be the price when we earn less than $1 a day? Treatment costs for rural families are often as high as 13%. Many of us are simply too poor to pay for ample protection if we abandon DDT for malaria control.
Additionally, high costs and a decrease in foreign aid make it impossible for many countries to switch to DDT alternatives. One common treatment, malathion, is proven to be five times more expensive than DDT. Mefloquine is newly available and highly effective against multi-resistant strains, but is expensive and may cost five to ten times more than malathion. This means, twenty-five to fifty times more than DDT spraying. Investment in vaccine development has a high chance of success and is likely to be hugely cost-effective, but it may take fifteen years to develop this vaccine. We need an answer now, and that answer remains to DDT. Someone once said, don't throw away your paper just because you dreamed a computer. Namely, don't get rid of the old stand-by that has proven effective time and time again when the idea for something better is still in your head.

Bans and environmental concerns continue to be the number one argument against DDT spraying. When used on fields, exposure to the environment can cause thinning of bird eggshells, sterility in animals, and reduced fetal weights. Bats are particularly sensitive to its use as a pesticide. Yet it must be made clear that this proposal is not to continue its use as a pesticide. The only practical use of DDT is in malaria prevention. North, Central, and South American countries used 1, 172, 077 kilograms of DDT to spray house walls in 1993. While sounding like a large amount of insecticide, this represents less than 6% of the DDT levels used in the United States in 1968 alone. The level of treatment to spray the entire country of Guyana, covering approximately 215, 000 km², is roughly equal to the amount of DDT once used to spray only 4km² of cotton. When used in houses, it has no effect on animals outside the house and it has an extremely slow accumulation in humans so as to be virtually harmless. In fact, it is less harmful than caffeine, and as a carcinogen, there is only a 0.0008 chance of cancer. It must remain firm that DDT should be produced and distributed only for governmental use in malaria control.
When faced with a solution, we must act. Malaria in school-children reduces the effectiveness of their education as a major cause of absenteeism. In cities, it drives away potential opportunity by making some zones unsuitable for habitation. Malaria affects tourism in countries where the risk is high of contracting the disease. Therefore, malaria may thus be a cause, and not simply a consequence, of underdevelopment and poverty.

This problem affects us worldwide. Malaria is not just "over there" in Africa. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention released that although malaria was eradicated in the United States in the early 1950s, there were 1,337 cases of malaria (including eight deaths) reported for the United States in 2002. This problem continues into a new millennium even fifty years after a discovered solution.
Malaria was directly responsible for five childhood deaths in Africa this past year. Thousands of other children died from illnesses brought on by malaria—respiratory infections, diarrhea, and malnutrition. When these children are my children, are my neighbor's children, this number is too high. Wrote one authority in 1955, "This is the DDT era of malariology. For the first time it is economically feasible for nations, however undeveloped and whatever the climate, to banish malaria completely from their borders." It has been fifty years and still we struggle.

To reference two old African proverbs, "If you don't stand for something, you will fall for something. Let us not look to where we have fallen, but to where we have slipped." We have come partway, eradicating the disease in many countries and treating it in our villages, but let us run full force to the problem and defeat it. Support initiatives are already in place. We need a multi-faceted approach to malaria eradication in Africa, and worldwide. It has been too long to ignore the suffering of 300 million clinical cases. Every movement must begin with a first step forward and so, let us move ahead with a common goal, working together to oppose the worldwide ban of DDT.

Assignment two: A five to seven-minute oratory on topic of students' choosing

In 1986, the Supreme Court’s ruling in the case Plessy v. Ferguson created the infamous standard “separate but equal.” Over 100 years later, we’ve dissociated this phrase from racial inequality in schools and public places, but still it persists with greater magnitude for the standards we set for low-income students in our schools. The present inequalities in our American education system are unacceptable, particularly in light of legislation such as No Child Left Behind that masks the problem rather than seeking a sustainable solution.

So what is the problem? For over forty years, Jonathan Kozol has studied unequal education standards. In his book Savage Inequalities, he states, “On an average morning in Chicago, 5700 children in 190 classrooms come to school to find they have no teacher.” (Kozol, p. 52) Many teachers, feeling that they are making no progress in their classrooms, come in only three days a week, arriving late on the mornings they do come in. The number of substitute teachers is not great enough to fill the void left by the missing teachers. “On the top floor of a New York elementary school [formerly a roller rink] a sixth-grade [class] of thirty children shares a room with 29 bilingual second graders. Because of the high class size there is an assistant with each teacher. This means that 59 children and four grown-ups—63 in all—must share a room that, in a suburban school, would hold no more than twenty children and one teacher.” (Kozol, p. 87)

Children in low-income schools have inadequate materials for learning. Unless their teachers are willing to purchase supplies out of their own pockets, students go without updated textbooks and resource materials. Students’ science labs are particularly inadequate. Many are without lab tables or sinks, and they are forced to perform experiments that have inaccurate results due to poor materials. For instance, Kozol watches as students drop water into glasses to observe wave patterns. The experiment calls for a saucer with a wide circumference, but as a cost-saving measure the school system has bought them cheap plastic cocktail glasses. The waves can’t form, and the students are right in their observation of a “small splash.” Still, the teacher persists in the original lesson plan. (Kozol, p. 139)

A student in Washington D.C., when asked what one improvement she would give to the school, replies that she would purchase blue curtains because everything else in the cinderblock school would look less gray and dismal with a little blue. (Kozol, p. 181) A mother in the neighborhood describes the effect on the children. “My children know very well the system is unfair.... They see it on TV, and in advertisements, and in the movies. They see the president in his place in Maine, riding around the harbor in his motorboat and playing golf with other wealthy men. They know that men like these did not come out of schools in Roxbury or Harlem.... When you tell them that the government can’t find the money to provide them with a decent place to go to school, they don’t believe it and they know that it’s a choice that has been made—a choice about how much they matter to society. They see it as a message: ‘This is to tell you that you don’t much matter. You are ugly to us so we crowd you into ugly places. You are dirty so it will not hurt to pack you into dirty places.’” (Kozol, p. 179)

As a society, we naturally form into groups—by location, socioeconomic status, background, religion, ethnicity. We group to belong and lift those up we feel the strongest connection with. When it comes to our schools we are no different. We want the best for our children and the children closest to us. We want the best schools, teachers and resources for them, and we should, but we also start to feel that these things we have are a type of inheritance, something we’ve earned to keep for ourselves. It’s not that we don’t care about children stuck in inadequate schools, it’s that we don’t want overcrowding and lower standards for our own children. Right?

Our government has developed its own solution. No Child Left Behind (NCLB) legislation was created in 2002 with one objective: “to have all children at or above grade level by 2014.” (United States Department of Education) More recently, President Bush and the Department of Education have worked to reauthorize the legislation. However, three glaring deficits still remain. First, our children are not numbers. The NCLB emphasis is placed on standardized test scores for all grade levels, particularly those in grades 3-8. In released publicity for NCLB’s reauthorization, Secretary Margaret Spellings consistently repeats the idea of improving individual growth models. This is good, however, what is better is finding a way to present children who don’t test well. For children already too far behind, teachers are forced to simply teach them the test in order to receive adequate school funding for the following school year. Children are no longer learning how to think, only how to accept spoon-fed information.

Second, we need the personal stories in our government’s publicity of success. In twelve videos posted on the Department’s site as success stories, not a single one showed a child addressed. Children were shown working, but it was teachers and experts who were asked to report on their success. Only the children will know the true effect improved education in the classroom has had them.
Third, Spellings repeats the statistic again and again that half of African and American and Hispanic students don’t graduate from high school. The problem of unequal education is not just black and white. It’s not just a race problem anymore, and by making it so, we’re pigeonholing those affected. We’re adding to the problem’s cycle. We are looking at diversity and equality for those of all economic levels, not simply those of minority races. The use of the term minority to refer to race is overused in a country that prides itself in diversity. We are a country of minorities, both racial and otherwise. Thus, we need to address resourcing for the education of people of all income levels.

A Century Foundation initiative, Equality and Education, pushes for the integration of schools to form more middle-income schools. This is not entirely unreasonable as statistics show that middle-income students are the majority. Education is most effective in the presence of dedicated teachers, parent involvement, and students who care and know they have the ability to succeed. Does it make more sense that the government who pour more money into a few schools or integrate schools so that the widest pool of resources can be given to the vast majority of students? We learn from a young age that the hardest thing is often the best thing to do. Somehow that idea doesn’t carry over to our government. It is both possible and desirable that the human resources given to middle- and high-income students be shared with low-income students.

It is best that integration begin at the earliest age possible. “If [the government] had first given Head Start to our children and pre-kindergarten, and materials and classes of 15 or 18 children in the elementary grades, and computers and attractive buildings and enough books and supplies and teachers salaries sufficient to compete with the suburban schools, and then come in a few years later with their tests and test-demands, it might have been fair play. Instead, they leave us as we are, separate and unequal, underfunded, with large classes, and with virtually no Head Start and they think tat they can test our children into a mechanical proficiency.” (Kozol, p. 143)

Equal education advocates frequently use the metaphor of an uneven playing field. “Unlike a tainted sports event, however, a childhood cannot be played again. We are children only once; and, after those few years are gone, there is no second chance to make amends. In this respect, the consequences of unequal education have a terrible finality. Those who are denied cannot be “made whole” by a later act of government.” (Kozol, 1980)

Grace & Peace!