AP English Language — Claims and Evidence — Drill 1

The following text is adapted from a speech delivered by education reformer and writer James Cortland to a state legislature's education committee in 1963, during debates over school funding equity. I want to speak to you today about a word that appears frequently in education legislation and almost never in schools: opportunity. Your committee has debated, at considerable length, the question of whether this state's funding formula is equitable. I am not here to dispute the formula. I am here to tell you that the formula measures the wrong thing. What the formula measures is input — dollars per pupil, classroom square footage, textbooks per student. What it does not measure, and what no funding formula I have seen attempts to measure, is whether those inputs translate into genuine opportunity for the children who receive them. A school can be funded at the state average and still systematically deny its students access to the courses, teachers, and expectations that would allow them to compete on equal terms with students in wealthier districts. The money arrives. The opportunity does not. I have visited forty-three schools in this state over the past two years. I have sat in classrooms where the textbooks were current and the ceilings were intact and the teacher had given up. I have sat in classrooms where the books were ten years old and the heat was unreliable and the teacher made every child feel that their future was both possible and their own responsibility. Funding matters. It is not the only thing that matters, and pretending otherwise insults the teachers and students who make the best of inadequate conditions every single day. What I am asking this committee to consider is a different question: not whether districts receive equal funding, but whether students receive equal preparation. That requires measuring outcomes — graduation rates, college enrollment, performance on assessments that actually test higher-order thinking, not merely compliance with curriculum. It requires holding districts accountable not for spending money correctly but for producing results that justify public trust. And it requires being honest with ourselves about which students, in which zip codes, are being prepared for full citizenship and which are being prepared for something less. The children sitting in the schools I visited did not choose their zip codes. They did not choose their tax base. They did not choose the teachers their districts could afford to hire or retain. What they deserve — what this committee has the power to give them — is a reckoning with what opportunity actually means, and a commitment to measure whether they are receiving it.