Does Money Matter?

At the beginning of the year the inner city school protest at New Trier called attention to the relationship of money and schooling. This protest made me realize how the relationship between money and schooling is important, and money does play a role in school. After watching the movie Coach Carter this weekend, I saw an example of how this is the case. Coach Carter is a true story of a high school basketball team at a school in which learning was not a priority to many. While I'm not sure if these statistics are the exact number from the real school, the coach stated in the movie that only 50% of kids at this high school graduate, and of those only 6% go on to college. When I think of graduating high school, it doesn't seem like an option, "it's just what you do". Very few people do not graduate from New Trier, and almost all go to college, if not the year after graduation, soon after. Hearing these percentages seem almost unrealistic compared to what I know from my school, and I wonder is money makes that much of a difference. Money does not make a student smarter or work harder, but what it can effect the general atmosphere of a school. In the school in Coach Carter, the principal said that the basketball season could be the highlight of some of these boys' lives. That is the problem. This school is portrayed as authority figures not believing in the kids because of the statistics, and as well, hearing these statistics can make it hard to believe in yourself. There is no motivation to work if you think that it won't matter, you won't graduate. Imagine going to a school where they can't afford books, or up-to-date classroom text books- many people don't have to image this because it is a reality. This is not to say that money is everything in schooling. There are plenty of people attending schools with very limited resources, and are still great students; there are also lots of people attending great schools with all the resources in the world, and still just do not care. Money is not everything when it comes to schooling, but it does do a lot. It's easy to take for granted the resources New Trier has, because it's all many people have ever known, but that does not take away the reality that not every school is able to have these resources.


Just as a side note, I watched the movie on TV, and I had already seen it in theaters. In the movie there is a scene where one black student refers to another as the n-word. The coach immediately intervenes and says that calling each other that names makes white people think that they can say it too. It is a powerful scene, and in the TV edited version, it was deleted. There is a scene where someone gets shot, and there are others that can be seen as inappropriate, but they were not deleted. Deleting a scene like this just because it can cause controversy is just a way to ignore the problem, to sweep it under the rug instead of addressing it, and I was pretty disappointed that it was edited out.