Name: 【TED】Kandice Sumner: How America's public schools keep kids in poverty (How America's public schools keep kids in poverty | Kandice Sumner)
Uploaded: 2017-04-24T01:47:55.000Z
Duration: 13 min 51 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Now, I know everyone thinks that their kid is the most fantastic,

and they are the most intelligent, inventive, innovative,

brilliant and powerful kids that you'll ever meet.

Any student I've had the honor of teaching in my classroom is my kid.

However, because their "real" parents aren't rich

and, I argue, because they are mostly of color,

they will seldom get to see in themselves

college-educated, African-American parents

my father, a minister; my mother, an educator.

Wealth was never the primary ambition in our house.

we lived in a neighborhood that lacked wealth,

and henceforth a school system that lacked wealth.

Luckily, however, we struck the educational jackpot

that buses inner-city kids -- black and brown --

out to suburban schools -- rich and white.

At five years old, I had to take an hour-long bus ride

At five years old, I thought everyone had a life just like mine.

and were the only ones using the brown crayons

while everyone else was using the peach-colored ones.

At five years old, I thought everyone was just like me.

But as I got older, I started noticing things, like:

How come my neighborhood friend don't have to wake up

while my neighborhood friends don't even have a music class?

Why were my neighborhood friends learning and reading material

that I had done two to three years prior?

I started to have this unlawful feeling in my belly,

like I was doing something that I wasn't supposed to be doing;

All these amazing things that I was being exposed to

I wasn't supposed to have a library, fully equipped athletic facilities,

I wasn't supposed to have theatre departments

I wasn't supposed to have fully resourced biology or chemistry labs,

school buses that brought me door-to-door,

while I was grateful for this amazing opportunity

There are thousands of other kids just like me,

Why is a high-quality education only exclusive to the rich?

It was like I had some sort of survivor's remorse.

All of my neighborhood friends were experiencing

that I was saved from through a bus ride.

I was like an educational Moses screaming,

I'd seen firsthand how the other half was being treated and educated.

and I could not for the life of me justify the disparity.

I now teach in the very same school system from which I sought refuge.

I know firsthand the tools that were given to me as a student,

and now as a teacher, I don't have access to those same tools

There have been countless nights when I've cried in frustration,

because I can't teach my kids the way that I was taught,

because I don't have access to the same resources or tools

We sit and we keep banging our heads against this term:

why these kids perform well and these kids don't?