Obama Supports Education Equality with Nobel Prize Winnings

Amid the insult-throwing and jokes about Obama's sparse track record since inhabiting the White House, at least one good thing has come from the President's unexpected Nobel Peace Prize award -- 10 charities are receiving donations from his substantial winnings.

On Thursday, President Obama unveiled the much-anticipated roster of organizations that will benefit from his Nobel Prize money, all $1.4 million of it. There are several ways to describe the list, and "politically correct" is definitely one of them; the President obviously doesn't want to leave anyone out, hence his donations to humanitarian relief (the Clinton-Bush Haiti Fund), to families of veterans (Fisher House) and to organizations serving both Africa (AfriCare) and Asia (the Central Asia Institute).

But those four organizations are the exceptions to Obama's main rule: focus on education. His six other choices -- College Summit, the Posse Foundation, the United Negro College Fund, the Hispanic Scholarship Fund, the Appalachian Leadership and Education Foundation, and the American Indian College Fund -- all revolve around high school and college success. Given the President's recent emphasis on fixing our nation's worst-performing schools, his choice of direction isn't surprising. But it's definitely welcome.

By donating hundreds of thousands of dollars to organizations dedicated to helping disadvantaged youth achieve their educational goals, President Obama is reminding all of us that certain kids have it easier than others. Some are born into middle-class households in safe neighborhoods; others face violence and discrimination on their way to school. Some children grow up believing that racism no longer exists in America, because they're never judged by the color of their skin; others feel the tangible repercussions of slavery and colonialism on a daily basis. Try as many conservatives might to blame poverty on the poor and suggest, as Glenn Beck did recently, that "all men are created equal, and in our daily choices, that determines our outcome," not everyone in America is born with equality of opportunity.

A few statistics to prove my point:

Black families are suffering from a much tougher recession than their white counterparts. At the brink of the recession in 2008, "the typical African-American family had only a dime for every dollar of wealth possessed by the typical white family," and just 18 percent of black Americans had retirement accounts, as opposed to 43 percent of whites. Now, in accordance with the "last hired, first fired" adage of the African-American community, the overall unemployment rate for blacks -- 13.4 percent -- is twice as high as for whites, with a staggering 16.3 percent of black males unemployed.

Minority students also face lower graduation rates; only 43 percent of black college students nationally continue on to graduate from a four-year institution, as opposed to 63 percent of white students. The reasons, according to the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, range from administrators' poor efforts to integrate black students into their campus communities to the high cost of student loans (almost 70 percent of African-American students who dropped out of college cited pricey loans as their primary reason, compared with only 43 percent of white dropouts).

Similarly, less than 50 percent of Native Americans in the Pacific and Northwest regions of the U.S. graduate from high school, according to a recently released UCLA report. The authors' solution? Administrators should "review and revise school policies and avoid practices that exclude, demean, embarrass, harass or alienate Native students." Notice how they don't ask students to pick themselves up by their own bootstraps?

I firmly believe that we won't end poverty without achieving equality of opportunity in our educational system. So in my Poverty in America gradebook, President Obama's prize money distribution gets a big "A." For a more nuanced report card on how Obama handled his winnings, check out fellow blogger Nathaniel Whittemore's recent article on Change.org's Social Entrepreneurship blog.

Photo credit: SashaW