Freedom School Research Paper

How many of you have been on an airplane before? How many of you have heard a safety talk before the flight takes off? As a child, one part of the safety information always stuck out to me. The flight attendant would instruct passengers to fasten their own oxygen masks before helping those around them. It was unsettling to think that parents were not supposed to help their children right away. As I grew up, I started to understand the logic behind it. How can you help others if you are not okay yourself?

Over the past four summers, I have volunteered at Stephen Wise’s Freedom School and currently serve as the chair of the Teen Board. Freedom School is a summer program, run by the Children’s Defense Fund, that focuses on improving children’s
I look forward to dedicating my summer to helping my scholars, the name given to the students at Freedom School for motivational purposes, with both their academic and interpersonal skills. Like everything in life, Freedom School must come to an end. The last day is one of my painful days of the year because you have to leave Freedom School knowing your work is not yet finished. We haven’t fully closed the learning gap between the different socioeconomic classes. It is hard to leave something when there is so much more work to be done. Pirki Avot 2:16 says ,“It is not incumbent upon you to finish the task, but neither are you free to absolve yourself from it.” It is important for us to have Freedom Schools, but it is not possible to end the problem of inequality in our education system. One of the main problems facing students from low income backgrounds is summer learning loss also known as the summer slide. Students from low income households do not have the same summer opportunities as children from more affluent backgrounds who spend the summer going to camps and traveling with their families. According to summerlearning.org, “Every summer, low-income youth lose two to three months in reading while their higher-income peers make slight gains.” The lack of summer opportunities given to low-income students creates an achievement gap between them and their peers from different socioeconomic backgrounds, and often leads to them dropping out of high school. Wise Freedom Schools is able to combat this problem for the 230 students it serves each summer, but it simply can not close the achievement gap for the 31.4 million children in America that come from low-income families. If we are not commanded to finish fixing the broken world, how do we decide what work takes priority? Rashi’s commentary on Deuteronomy 15:7 helps answer that question. He says, “the most needy person has