In a powerful and emotional address, Joycelyn Elders, the former U.S. Surgeon General, repeatedly challenged attendees at ASCD's57th Annual Conference to answer one question: Why does America spend more to help its prisoners than to help its children?
Joycelyn Elders
"Since 1980, we've paid the average prison guard with less than a high school education$57,000 a year," she said angrily. "It costs taxpayers $35,000 per prisoner to keep someone in jail, and we're paying both more than we pay a teacher with a master's degree. That is wrong!"
The effects of these misdirected priorities, Elders argued, are visible in the sufferings of America's children. "Many of our young people graduate with shoes that glow when they walk but with a brain that goes dead when they talk," she said. "It's up to us to make sure that they[graduate] with four things: an ability to hear those less fortunate, a vision that allows them to see things farther than their eyes can reach, a scroll that shows a good education, and a song to inspire [them]when things get rough."
Teachers, she continued, can make a powerful difference in society's efforts to combat poverty and hopelessness. "A good health education teacher is worth two doctors. If that teacher can prevent one boy from doing drugs or one girl from suffering an unplanned pregnancy, she has saved her community more than she gets back."
That saving, Elders stressed, often faces opposition. "People say, ‘Oh, we can't afford this!’ But have you ever gone to a community that needed a new prison that didn't find the money? Don't we pay for these things when we see people on welfare who did not get a good education? We know what we've got to do; it's a matter of getting it done."
Getting it done, however, can be perilous, as Elders acknowledged humorously. "When you talk about change, people say the time is not right, the money is not right—and if you keep it up long enough, they say, ‘Dr. Elders, you are not right!’"
Nonetheless, she argued, education and health care must be improved because the price of failure is too high. "Our young people—our most valuable resource—have their lives at stake," Elders said. "We must care for them, because as the old saying goes, not to know is bad, not wanting to know is worse, not to hope is unthinkable—but not to care is simply unforgivable."
