By Janice S. Ellis, Ph.D., Kansas City, MO –

Quality education for our children must be priority, as high a priority as providing accessibility to health care, enhancing our economy or protecting the ecosystem.

How many more studies, how many more reports will it take for us as a nation, as a local community, a city or a state to become invested in doing what is required to supply an excellent education for our kids?

This is a call for unprecedented engagement on the part of parents, religious institutions, business and community leaders to get involved and help come up with a remedy to mend our floundering schools all over America.

If we continue failing to educate a large percent of our children, and preparing them to compete can we expect to continue, as a nation, to be a major player on the world stage? We’re currently lagging behind countries that are smaller and have less resources than we do. What is our problem?

It really isn’t about pointing fingers anymore. For there is enough blame to go around. It’s really about putting racism, elitism, classism, and every other ism, to bed. It is about putting greed, huge egotism, private financial interests, and political agendas to the background. It’s about conveying our wishes to the powers that be, whether our elected officials, our school boards, the business and civic community, our neighbors, family members, or ourselves, that we won’t continue to sacrifice our children’s future.

It’s time for us to unite our collective good will, our collective brainpower, and our collective business sense and make the decisions that will be in the best interest of our children, the future of our communities, the future of our nation. Not to do so is to consistently miss the mark and face impacts with costs we cannot afford to pay – socially, morally and economically.

Preparing our children to achieve academic success, in order that they will have a significant future, in order that they become productive and contributing citizens in an ever-demanding society, is our obligation. Any future society or current society, with a good primary and secondary education or the lack of it, will most assuredly establish our children’s alternatives in terms of higher education opportunities, life choices, employment, and overall quality of life.

Our society isn’t becoming a more straightforward one in which to endure and prosper. Rather the contrary, it is becoming more complex. And we are abdicating our responsibility as a nation, as parents, as community leaders, as Americans if we don’t do everything in our power to make certain our children are prepared, educationally for their future.

Why is ensuring our kids are prepared to succeed so hard to comprehend? Do we actually believe that educating the few, and perpetuating a permanent underclass is the reply?  History has proven that the poor and uneducated, too, shall climb in manners that we will not like, at times when we least expect it.

Is that where we are headed, America? Is that where we are headed in wherever we live?