Vanessa Umana inside her new Chevy Sonic. Photo credit

Kids these days have it easy, we like to tell ourselves, and in some respects, we’re right. Everything that isn’t uploadable to the internet is made consumable by way of a microwave. This is the age of the Millenial, the epoch of electronic eminence and the disdain for the antique and traditional. Students have it easy, as parents, teachers, and other authority figures struggle to hold their attention, respect, and love. It has now led to this.

Los Angeles Unified School District: as a barren wasteland of errant students and perverted teachers, it serves as microcosm of what happens to public education gone wrong, and continues to underwhelm itself year after year. Today’s bit of news is no different, I’m afraid.

So here is what happened: two graduating seniors, Vanessa Umana of Francis Polytechnic High School and Euri Tanaka of San Pedro High School, were found to have attended every day of school, from preschool to the end of high school. This entered them into a raffle (out of 357 students) for a Chevy Sonic. They won, and now each of them is getting a Sonic. To her credit, Vanessa was an excellent student, apparently leaving with a 4.2 GPA and bound for UC San Diego.

Photo credit

So it pains me to say it, but this really leaves me quite stunned. To think that simply because I went to school every day of my entire life without fail, ergo I deserve the chance to win a car; failing that, I deserve to be compensated in some other way, like an iPad or free Subway sandwiches. Let me tell you what this means.

Whether or not Vanessa or Euri were excellent students is besides the point; the point is that the school lost money on the days that these kids weren’t at school, because it wasn’t spent–the idea being that any money left over by the end of the fiscal year was money that the school didn’t need.

When this happens, it gets interpreted by Sacramento as a sign of failing to deliver education to the students. This in turn put heavy pressure on districts like LAUSD to get those seats filled, dammit, so they had to get them filled.

So how does one get the kid to sit his or her butt at a desk? The school creates incentives, which essentially equates to a bribe; sit here for eight hours or so, eat lunch, go home. Vanessa and Euri could be dumber than a bag of hammers, but they filled a seat every day the bell rang, and that’s all that matters.

I understand that education is a difficult and multifarious quandary, especially in cities where overcrowding, gang culture, teachers, parents, and a myriad of other factors affect a student’s ability to learn. But I can’t help feeling that giving away cars is going too far. I charge the parents out there: give your children books to read, teach them how to take care of the car, take them to the races, just don’t let them languish and turn into lazy slobs or juvenile delinquents.

School should be about instilling interest and fascination with arts and sciences, as well as learning basic life skills like English and mathematics; the kids should want to go to school so they can better themselves. It shouldn’t be just about filling seats, whether wooden, leather, or vinyl.