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From the Desk of Bill Cirone...
April 7, 2000
Strong Schools Enrich Communities
Strong schools enrich the quality of life in our communities.
For many young families seeking homes, quality schools rank high on the list of reasons for moving into a particular community. What’s more, poverty and crime levels are generally lower among educated populations. Culture and the arts also flourish when they are supported by an educated population. It is not a stretch to say that strong schools enhance the quality of our lives.
For one thing, education increases a community’s standard of living. Poverty and a lack of education are often closely linked. More than any other factor, a good education will reduce a person’s chances of living in poverty, according to Harold Hodgkinson of the Center for Demographic Policy.
Many children who live in poverty do so because of their parents’ lack of education. These statistics from a report of the National Center for Children in Poverty, illustrate the dramatic connection between education and poverty: 62 percent of children under age six whose parents had not completed high school lived in poverty, and 19 percent of children where one parent had a high school diploma lived in poverty. In contrast, only 4 percent of children who had at least one parent with some education beyond high school lived in poverty.
Education is also important in that it creates and nurtures cultural experiences and opportunities. "Imagine a world with no artists, educators, musicians, dancers, actors, or writers," wrote the authors of "How Our investment in Education Pays Off," a publication of the American Association of School Administrators. "Suppose our communities had no theaters, orchestras, art galleries, zoos, or museums. In a world without education, many of the cultural institutions we take for granted would not exist."It is often the case that the experiences and knowledge gained through education become the stimulus for creative and artistic works and important discoveries. School is the place where children explore the world through literature, history, social studies, and fine arts instruction. It is where they learn to communicate by studying other languages and cultures. For many of our children, school is the only place where they are exposed to worlds outside their own.
Education also reduces crime by providing skills, direction, and hope. Tragically, a lack of education correlates with criminal activity.
"A dollar invested in Head Start is about eight dollars in jails you don’t need to build and drug detox centers you don’t have to staff," wrote demographer Hodgkinson. He also pointed out that the relationship between high school dropout rates and the number of people in prison is a greater correlation than the relationship between smoking and lung cancer.
Hodgkinson’s research documented that states with high graduation rates tended to have the lowest number of prisoners per 100,00 people. And the opposite held as well: states with high dropout rates tended to have more prisoners.
There are many ways that education pays off. Increasing a community’s standard of living, nurturing cultural experiences, and reducing crime are but three of them.
© Santa Barbara County Education Office
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