The life of a college intern might just be one of the best experiences a person can have. My sole focus this summer, as a Daniels Scholar Junior Fellow Intern at the Common Sense Institute (CSI), has been looking at the current public school education system and the effects it has on various student demographics.
Over the course of my 20 years, I have experienced different education systems both in the United States and overseas in New Zealand. I saw many different forms of how punishment was pursued in schools across the world, and how substantial amounts of students are not served in their school systems.
I was blessed with the opportunity to work with CSI Fellow Janelle Wood over the last two months to provide the facts about disproportionate punishment in the education system and how to minimize the school-to-prison pipeline in minority demographics.
What Janelle and our team strove to understand is why students are not getting the help that they need in the public school system to become successful functioning and contributing members of society. What is seen a majority of the time is that students who are not served well in their school have fewer opportunities for furthering their education.
The CSI education data in Arizona can provide insight into what the Colorado education system should pursue when moving forward in the future. For instance, Arizona’s Black, brown, disabled, and male students were the demographics that the public school system struggled to serve in particular. Black, Brown and Native American students make up two thirds of all suspensions and expulsions in Arizona public schools, while Black students were suspended at three times the rate of White students.
To put that into perspective, that is 158 for every 1,000 Black students and 53 out of every 1,000 White students suspended in the 2017-2018 school year. African American and Hispanic students drop out nearly 50% more often than White students, which shows a clear problem in the lack of service towards students in the Arizona public school system.
Arizona’s data can inform the Colorado education system. A thriving education system will contribute to asuccessful economy. An important fact to understand that contributes to the future of the Colorado workforce is outlined by CSI in its report, “Supply and Demand: Diagnosing Colorado’s Skills and Attainment Gap,” released in February 2024. What it found was that by 2031, roughly 73% of Colorado jobs will require some form of post-secondary education. The troubling factor in this statistic is that currently, only 66.5% of Colorado adults born in the state meet this demand, showing a potential need for students furthering their education.
How can we give students the resources that they need? What both states can benefit from moving forward is better opportunities for students, whether it involves homeschooling, micro-schools, private schools or other options to shape the lives of these students and place them on a better path.
The importance of opportunity for students with different learning styles, disabilities or education backgrounds stands as a foundation for creating a diverse culture of individuals in the workforce.
Pursuing change in this world can simply begin by learning the facts. Collect the raw data, seek to understand it, improve it, and promote it. It is important to ask yourself the following questions when looking to inspire change:
• What is the cause that I am truly fighting for?
• How will this information impact bills or voting initiatives that I can do my part in?
• How can I inform others of these facts and figures without pushing my agenda, but simply educating the community?
These questions serve as a method of understanding, educating and supporting an issue that matters to you the most. What our society needs is not another forceful agenda, but a mode for people to understand one another’s beliefs and cares, and what will forever hold true are the facts.
Avery Martinez is a rising senior at Grand Canyon University in Phoenix and worked this summer in Colorado as a Common Sense Institute Daniels Scholar Jr. Fellow.