How the United States Can Help Educate the World

In the last few months just a few months ago, it was just over a month ago that the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that the state's K-12 budget is in violation of the Constitution and is inequitable. If lawmakers do not approve a formula for financing schools that the court will consider in the coming year, Kansas could be facing the prospect of closing schools. As the opinion page editor for The Topeka Capital-Journal, a newspaper that is a daily publication located in the Kansas capital city--I wrote a lot of letters and op-eds on the state's crisis with school finances. For instance, the writer of a letter addressed to the editor stated in the letter that Kansas children are "irreparably hurt by the inability of Governor. Sam Brownback and his legislators to adequately fund our schools. Similar to this writer there are many Kansans believe that the state is failing its children by not investing enough in their education. However, compared to the dozens of nations in the world's developing, Kansas (like every other US state) is lavishly devoted to its education system. I was reminded again as I traveled to Tanzania with an assortment of fellow American editors and writers this fall. In the case of the wellbeing of children within our world, our ethical issues are so precise that an $3.4 billion budget for education in Kansas, a state with only 3 million inhabitants--is thought to be woefully insufficient by a large portion of legislators and tax payers. Contrast this with Tanzania is a nation of more than 55 million residents with a budget of approximately $2 billion for education for the school year 2017-2018. The results of this deficiency of investment are obvious as follows: The average Tanzanian classroom is packed with over 70 pupils (compared 20 to the 20 students to 20 in Kansas) and the rate of graduation for upper secondary students is about three percent (compared the rate of nearly 85 percent for Kansas) as well as the majority of schools do not have access to the basic education resources. When the Tanzanian government made the primary education mandatory and waived tuition in 2001, the number of students increased from 57 % to 94 % within less than a decade. However, the country was not (and hasn't been) equipped to handle this influx of students. That's the reason we saw bare bookshelves, narrow pieces of wood used as the desks and classes brimming with 200 or more children. Other African children are facing even more problems. For instance that 62 percent of primary-age youngsters from Liberia aren't enrolled in schools. One out of seven Somali children dies before they reach the age of five (when the majority of American students begin kindergarten). If you're a young mother living in South Sudan, there's a greater chance that you'll be born prematurely and not graduate in the high school. When Americans encounter horrifying statistics such as such, they usually think "how awful" and go on with their lives. However, in 2018, we should no longer pretend that these problems are unsolvable or insurmountable. There is a remarkable global movement for education around the developing world in addition to it's time for the United States should increase its dedication to this cause. One of the primary motives for my trip the country of Tanzania was to study the Global Partnership for Education (GPE)--a multilateral platform for funding which connects developing countries to donors, experts in policy as well as the private sector aid agencies, and other resources that help increase the number of children attending schools and to improve the quality of In the year 2014 GPE is currently paid over $82 million in Tanzania--money which has been used to pay for books as well as community outreach programs, classroom construction, as well as the introduction of a new, skills-based curriculum that is available to all pupils between five and thirteen. Between 2014 between 2014 and 2017, the organization distributed millions of textbooks across the country. In one school we visited near the edge of Dar es Salaam, administrators guided us to a library , where the shelves would have been empty if not for the new rows of textbooks supplied by GPE.