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| Alicia Humphrey Class of 2017 |
It seems like I was on the fast track to law school from the moment I was born. I remember reciting the Preamble to my dad as I sat on his knee, learning about the Supreme Court justices, and memorizing the worn flashcards of the U.S. Presidents that he used to quiz me with. When we all sat down for dinner, my family would engage me in debates about current hot-button political questions, and I was always extremely vocal, opinionated, and articulate in my firmly-held beliefs (much to their delight). In high school, I thrived in political activities like Student Government and Mock Trial. I loved my country and was passionate about its history and law code. Driven by this patriotism, my career goals were guided by a never-ceasing desire to continue to make the United States an incredible place to live for everyone, just as the Framers desired. Naturally, many of the adults in my life hoped I would become a lawyer to achieve these goals. However, you can imagine everyone’s surprise when, upon pursuing an undergraduate degree at the University of Louisville, I expressed an interest in the seemingly abstract and entirely unrelated field of education policy. Despise the surprise with which my decision was met, the reason for it, to me, was simple in that it was only my career path but not my ultimate goal that had changed. I had simply come to the conclusion that education policy was the locus where America’s problems arise and where they can also be solved.
This realization was prompted by a conspicuous societal issue I had noticed: the large discrepancy between the ideal of the American Dream I had grown up believing was true for everyone and the harsh reality that it is not, largely at the fault of America’s education system. I saw this system’s underperformance in countless ways; at my public middle school in a poor urban part of western Kentucky, I witnessed the devastating effects of ineffective tenured teachers in classes with low-achieving students from troubled neighborhoods. Most disturbingly, I saw rich kids with helicopter parents achieving at high levels in the same building as perfectly capable lower-income students struggling to overcome nearly unsurpassable obstacles to their education—the chasm I had heard called “the achievement gap” but had never witnessed for myself. With these observations came the realization that many of the problems that bothered me about society—violence, hunger, poverty—could be traced back to people like the ones in my own high school who had been denied a quality education at the K-12 level that would have put them on the same playing field as their more wealthy and privileged counterparts. Thus, I formed my belief that an excellent education is indeed a fundamental human right necessary to protect future freedom of self determination, and that this right was being infringed upon in American schools every day, thus doing devastating damage to American society.
I wondered how this right to education could ever be guaranteed to all students with America’s education system being in such a seemingly irreparably broken state until I saw the power of good local policy at work in my own hometown. Struggling to make ends meet with a budget decreasing every year, the Paducah City School Board, under the leadership of my mother, the School Board Chair, decided to consolidate three local schools, saving money and creating an educational powerhouse that has attracted thousands of new students since its creation. I now see policy as the pathway to close the achievement gap and create truly functioning schools to give kids the chance to get a great education and to succeed in life, and have been exploring ways I can make an impact on the education system through policy ever since.
My initiation into the world of education policy began this year with an extensive research paper about the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001. Through the process of writing this paper, I became aware of the ambiguous, indecisive muddle that has been American education policy at the national level since the expiration of NCLB, as well as the partisan gridlock that has prevented progress from being made for years. However, as I began reading more extensively on the subject, I learned that changes were being made at more local levels; for example, Michelle Rhee’s story of how she transformed Washington, D.C. public schools through unflinchingly student-oriented policy changes as the Chancellor of D.C. public schools became and has remained one of my greatest inspirations. Realizing the importance of local policy changes focused on putting students first, I co-founded a chapter of the Roosevelt Institute, a student-run think tank, at the University of Louisville this year. I am currently preparing to launch a research project next semester to determine the effects of charter schools on student performance and will be writing my own policy about my findings afterwards with the ultimate goal of collaborating with local schools as well as education policy think tanks to put my research to use.
Although my future in education policy remains largely open due to my continuing exploration of options, I am intent upon continuing my work to create education policy that puts the right every student has to a quality education before other competing interests, such as through promoting quality teachers, access to charter schools and vouchers if need be, clean and functioning school buildings, more flexible common core standards, availability of technical schools in public high schools, and a devotion to individualized learning instead of a one-size-fits-all approach that does not in fact succeed in leaving no child behind. Thus, whether I work at the national level in the Department of Education, at an incredible think tank devoted to the libertarian ideal of complete freedom through equality of opportunity such as the Cato Institute, or in local Kentucky politics or school systems, keeping students first will always be my mantra as I move forward. I truly believe that there can be no progression unless the rights of every person are ensured—even those rights that are so often neglected.
Alicia Humphrey is a sophomore McConnell Scholar at the University of Louisville. She studies English, political science and Spanish.