Contenders? The ring grows smaller for too many

I am no Yale graduate. I did not attend Harvard or any of the other Ivy League schools that churn out many of the men and women who become our leaders and policymakers and determine the future and direction of the country.

I don’t have Ph.D trailing my name and I can assure readers that Mensa isn’t pounding at my door for me to become a member.

Maybe if I were any of those things, I would be making a lot more money or be lounging on a beach chair drinking cocktails as I perused the stock page.

But I am like most people — working hard to stay afloat and glancing apprehensively as the mail is delivered.

Yet that doesn’t mean I don’t see things clearly. It may not be a Ph.D, but I do have an educational designation that follows my name that means a whole lot more. It comes from the school of hard knocks and it is called C.S. — and that stands for common sense — and it allows me to see into the future by simply adding one plus one and arriving at two.

There is something about being raised in a poor family that no matter whether you are black, white, Hispanic or otherwise, there is one commonality: you know when the table is being set for you and you recognize when it is being cleared against you.

And you know when it is time to speak up.

I got the idea for this column one morning as I was sitting on my couch watching the news and drinking coffee as I prepared for work.

I have a large picture window in my apartment in Black Rock and I noticed a little girl — maybe 7 or 8 years old —running for the school bus. She is among a bunch of kids in my neighborhood that regularly jump on school buses at various times of the morning.

She was obviously late as she raced down the street, her braids of colorful beads flapping behind her, her book bag banging against her back.

I thought about her eagerness and enthusiasm to get on that yellow bus that will take her to a place where she has been told her imagination can will her future.

Right now, with her zeal, she is in the game, a contender in the ring of possibilities.

But with judges’ rulings on lawsuits regarding educa-

tion in Detroit and California, along with ongoing cuts to education, lack of necessary tools for success, and a public education system that is increasingly demanding that parents show them the money for their children to play sports, the opportunities and possibilities for contending kids are shrinking.

And that is worrisome. The judge in Michigan ruled that “access to literacy” is not a right after advocates sued stating it was “underfunding, mismanagement and discrimination,” in overcrowded schools with a lack of teachers that were the causes of poor test scores.

The California courts issued a similar ruling — “students have no right to quality education”— in a lawsuit brought by school boards and administrators, the California Teachers Association and State PTA, and nine school districts.

And we already know that schools across the country are moving to pay to play and that includes schools in Connecticut, which are grappling with funding cuts, aging structures and teacher shortages.

I don’t think you need to be a genius to know where this could be headed. You only need to be able to add one plus one and come up with two. The law says parents must send their kids to schools to be educated — but

there is no law that says that that education must be of quality.

In other words, keep low-income kids on a brain freeze.

So, if parents and education advocates are under some idealistic view that the judges’ rulings coupled with pay to play don’t portend the beginning of a future of pay to learn, then you must think one plus one equals three.

Education costs money and folks, if it isn’t clear to you yet by your paycheck that this country is moving toward just the elite, here is a grim reminder that a new report drives home: 78 percent of full-time workers say they are living paycheck to paycheck. To me, that doesn’t sound like there is much left over after the basics are paid.

Judges may make a legal ruling that quality of education is not a right — but what they are really ruling is that if you are poor, your life simply isn’t worth the price.

There is a powerful bulldozer clearing a path right through every poor, low and middle income kid’s opportunity to start out on equal footing. And that power is

growing, not waning.

I don’t know the little girl who was late for the school bus, or her parents. I have no idea what their situation is. But I do know there are no silver spoons living in the homes around me. This is a Bridgeport neighborhood on the clock and every morning there is an exodus of people jumping into cars and boarding buses and trains to punch in.

It has been like that for decades in neighborhoods across America and yet, too many kids sputter on the lane to success and remain broken down on the overlook of life through no fault of their own watching as others succeed.

And I can’t help but wonder what role we have all played as their guiding forces. Kids look to us to make it right, not make it wrong. And too often, before they can reach for the sky, we move the earth from underneath them.

Lawmakers in Connecticut have just started the 2019 session. They took tens of million from money allocated to education to fix the state’s woes. But by doing so time and again, they put the future of the state’s most

vulnerable kids in jeopardy. They have a chance to correct that this year. After all, adult irresponsibility shouldn’t be kids’ responsibility to shoulder.

But it does remind me of a famous quote from a movie when a brother who depended on his older brother — whose ethics were questionable — to help him have a better life confronts him about the barriers he placed in his path that eventually prevented him from being who he thought he could have become:

“I coulda been a contender,” he famously told his brother. “I coulda been somebody ...”

Iwonder how many lowincome kids have thought that — and I wonder how many more will be standing on that overlook because when it counted, their opportunities shrank with the dollar.

Contenders? The ring of opportunity grows smaller for far too many.