http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/national/feed/a46857-1999sep11.htm
Tale of Two High Schools: An Object Lesson
By William Claiborne
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 11, 1999; Page A03
CHICAGO, Sept. 10 ** Three busloads of students from a
down-at-the-heels, 90-year-old high school in Chicago's South Side and their
teenage counterparts from a new, $62 million state-of-the-art school in the
wealthy suburb of Naperville had a close encounter today with an adage
from legendary songstress Sophie Tucker:
"I've been poor and I've been rich, and I can tell you that rich is better."
The two groups of students, spent the day touring each other's facilities and
getting a close-up lesson in the inequities of educational funding. In other
words, seeing how the other half lives.
Orchestrated by Jesse L. Jackson and his Rainbow-PUSH Coalition, the
event was designed to throw a spotlight on the huge disparities that exist
around the country between the quality of public education delivered to poor
students vs. that showered on the rich. While most of the national education
debate has focused on taxpayer-funded vouchers for private schools, the
more immediate concern in many communities is how to address what
many argue is the unfairness of having children in one part of the city get a
far better education than those in another. The amount of funding in
suburban school districts, Jackson argues, is often three times higher than
that in inner-city neighborhoods.
For the mostly white, well-off students at Naperville's Neuqua Valley High
School, about 35 miles southwest of the city, the eye-openers from their visit
to Harper High School in the economically depressed Englewood
neighborhood were the peeling paint in a food service classroom, a science
laboratory devoid of water or gas connections and any visible sign of
chemistry equipment, a music room without soundproofing or uniforms for
the school band, a gymnasium with dilapidated bleachers and a computer
room without connections to the Internet.
"I just want to cry," said Lauren Drane, a 16-year-old junior from Neuqua
Valley, as she walked through the dimly lit corridors of Harper High with
her classmates. "This is so out of this world, I can't believe it. I'm just so
lucky to have what we have."