“I want to go home … but I can't … I can't handle school anymore!!! I just want to go somewhere far away from this world where there aren't any schools, homework, and mean teachers.”

When I first found this note, my gut clenched and my heart sank. A clever yet quiet sixth grader named Amber, with whom I had worked, had penned those words during a math lesson and secretly slipped the message into my pocket.

Unbeknownst to Amber, the pocket of my City Year jacket is not an ideal place to deliver such a message. Lost between confiscated notes declaring crushes or cursing out teachers, along with spare pencils for my students, I nearly threw her message away. What would I be saying of public education had I not read those words?

I grew up in a bourgeois bubble. I used to imagine that all classrooms were like mine: warm, colorful, filled with smiling children and a teacher who looked and spoke like me. I had heard whispers
of American schools' shortcomings: teachers' unions working for job security rather than quality, standardized tests misrepresenting the multiple intelligences of students, No Child Left Behind unintentionally widening the funding disparity between schools of different racial and socioeconomic makeups. But these inadequacies did not appear in my upper-middle-class suburban hometown. I could harp about poor public schooling all I wanted, but I felt I didn't have the right to make such claims personally.

When the opportunity arose to take a gap year in between high school and college, I decided that it was time to get my hands dirty and experience the flip side of the U.S. school system. I applied and was accepted into City Year, a national nonprofit organization aimed at decreasing the high school dropout rate. I work with sixth graders at Aki Kurose Middle School Academy as a tutor, mentor, and role model. Aki Kurose is located in southern Seattle, a statistically low-income area, and feeds into one of four high schools that account for 50 percent of all dropouts across the city. Almost all the students I work with scored low on their standardized tests; many have told me no one had ever called them “bright” or “capable” before City Year came along. Amber, my sneaky note-writer, is one such student.

The harsh reality of the public education system became real to me when I started work at Aki Kurose. I have seen students crying in class after receiving F's on their progress reports. I have witnessed fistfights between 11-year-olds. I watched a science teacher yell at her students for having low standardized test scores. I have heard the phrase “slipping through the cracks” from just about every teacher I've talked to; they make failure sound like an anomaly, but I see kids struggling to stay afloat at every turn. And I have read the woeful words of a disheartened sixth grader who was fed up with unhelpful teachers.

I believe wholeheartedly that public education in the United States is academically and socially failing the next generation. As a City Year member, a citizen in service, and a member of our global community, I vow that I will take as much action as necessary to provide distinguished and comprehensive learning experiences for all students. I will arm myself with knowledge through my studies and then charge once more into the fray, ready to combat all that obstructs the way toward an excellent education. I will do this for Amber and the rest of the students I have bonded with this year, the students who are just waiting for a chance to shine.