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February 2, 2012

Make It Fair for All Kids

By Julianne Moore

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I grew up traveling all over the United States, Central America, and Europe. My father was in the U.S. Army, so we never stayed any place for very long. For the most part, I didn’t mind it -- changing environments and schools was simply a fact of life for us.

I learned not to depend on environment for consistency. Instead, I found it in my family, in my interests, and most of all in literature, my most constant of companions.

The one place I absolutely did not rely on consistency was in my public school education. It was evident to me very early on that my educational experience in the U.S. was directly related to the tax bracket of the county in which we were living. I was growing up in a culture and an educational system that preached fairness and equal opportunity and yet my personal experience within it was wildly erratic.

And so what if I was in a bad school for a year or two – I’d move. But what about the kids that were stuck there? They’d never even know that the education they were receiving was not equal to the one that more affluent children were receiving. And the thought that I was left with was that it was NOT FAIR.

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