WE NEED EDUCATION EQUITY

With more than half of our children in public schools under the free or reduced lunch program, this indicates the wide gap of social inequality with Guam’s public education. Anu Partanen, a Finnish Journalist, wrote a great article on Finland’s School Success. Finland’s idea of reforming education was to ensure that every child has “the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income or geographic location.” There are no private schools in Finland because they believe that getting a better education should not be just for those that can afford it but for every child. With that being said, Finland Schools made it a priority to provide the basics in life which was to ensure that every child had a safe school environment, free lunches, and access to health care. What they realized after their initiatives was that academic scores improved drastically. Year after year Guam spends less than half the national average per student. How can we provide a good education system such as that of Finland’s if we aren’t investing as much as we should? Thanks to low wages, tax breaks and public give-aways, Guam loses out on billions and billions of dollars that can go towards improving public education. Hopefully one day we can learn from Finland’s education success.