It is important because the future of our nation hinges on our ability to educate future generations of youth for the challenges of the next century. The health of our national economy, the well-being of our democracy, and the promise of the American dream are all placed at risk with each day that millions of children are forced to attend second-rate schools. If America and her people hope to experience a free, prosperous, and opportunity-filled 21 st century, our schools will have to lead the way by providing all children with access to high-quality education.
As a nation, we will never have "high quality education" for all until we first reach a meaningful definition for what "high quality" education actually means. Yet in America today, there exists a separate definition for quality in each of the 50 states and each of the more than 15,000 school districts around the country. Thus, by pushing for a constitutional right to "high quality education," one of the goals of the Our Education movement is to spark a national conversation about what quality of education all American children should receive. An open discussion about the skills and knowledge sets that all students should possess upon graduation would go far towards ensuring that our nation is able to respond to the challenges of the 21 st century. With this in mind, Our Education is planning to hold a national youth conference at which a representative body of high school students from across the nation will gather to create a student definition of what the right to "high quality" education ought to mean. The goal is for this statement of student priorities and beliefs to kick-start a much needed dialogue among other key stakeholders about the kinds of schools and education that all American children should have access to and we as a nation believe "high quality education" ought to mean.
There are four important reasons why the United States Constitution should be amended to guarantee all American children the right to a high quality education.
First, an educated citizenry is the cornerstone of a healthy democracy. As such, in order to protect our very democracy, access to high quality education ought to be guaranteed as a fundamental right in our nation's most sacred document the US Constitution.
Second, the current system of education in America is one where 15,000 different school districts in fifty different states provide far too wide a range of different quality schools between and among their students. This system has led to vast inequalities among students along geographic, socioeconomic, and racial lines inequality that will only be resolved when the American people agree and demand that all schools should be held to the same, high quality standard. A constitutional amendment would do just that.
Third, children today do not grow up to become citizens of Ohio to compete with citizens of California; they grow up to become American citizens, needing the skills and knowledge sets to enable them to compete with workers in India and China. Because education is the lifeblood of our nation's economy, we must provide high quality schools to all children no matter what city or state they live in and a constitutional amendment addresses this critical need.
Fourth, the current conversation about education in America has strayed from the most important issue: what is actually best for America's students. Education policy and resource mobilization are increasingly politicized today, with interest groups, teachers unions, and politicians jockey for their own ideologies and causes. As debates about education grow more politicized, and positions more entrenched, our nation desperately needs to change the way we view education and ensuring a constitutional right to high quality education has the power to push us as a country to do what is right for our children, and not just what is easy and politically expedient.
Believe it or not, the word "education" does not appear a single time in the United States Constitution, and in 1973, the US Supreme Court ruled that America's children are not guaranteed the right to an education either implicitly or explicitly. Each of the fifty states is compelled through their individual state constitutions to provide their residents with a free school system, but as we have seen all too clearly, guaranteeing children access to "free schools" falls far short of providing the kind of first-rate educational opportunity every American child deserves.
Our Education is a non-profit, non-partisan, organization working to engage and empower youth around the country in a national movement for quality education. The organization was created to respond to the sad reality that the most critical stakeholders in education students do not have a voice in school policy and reform efforts.
One of the curious anomalies of indian education is that while tertiary and higher education are over-controlled and regulated by government and its agencies such as UGC, AICTE, Medical Council of India etc, the pre-school sector is completely unregulated. Consequently thousands of nurseries and pre-schools for children as young as three years have been started in garages, garden sheds and urban apartments.Though most urban pre-schools — in effect to socialise children from an early age — claim to deliver the Montessori and other play-way pedagogies, they tend to be staffed by under-trained teachers, and the preliminary skills and love of learning which they promise to inculcate in tiny tots is a matter of luck and conjecture. Yet with educator and parent communities becoming increasingly aware of the benefits of pre-school education, and given that it’s completely free of government interference, it’s hardly surprising that education entrepreneurs in India and abroad are entering this sector in a big way. For instance, the Zee Group, a big name in sophisticated wrapping foils, television and the media, has quickly established a nationwide 600-strong chain of Kidzee pre-schools under the franchise model. Likewise, Australia-educated, Mumbai-based edupreneur Lina Asher has also promoted the 36-strong Kangaroo Kids chain of pre-schools countrywide, under the franchise model. Moreover according to the grapevine, the Mumbai-based Ryan Group of Institutions which runs India’s largest chain of privately-owned K-12 schools (240), is poised to enter pre-school education in a big way.
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