Emma Brown reports in the Washington Post about the outrageous inequity in funding American public schools. Corporate reformers have offered charters, vouchers, and high-stakes testing as “solutions” to poverty and inequity, but they are wrong. They are actually distracting attention from what matters most: Do schools have the resources to meet the needs of the children they enroll? The answer is no.
Brown writes:
Funding for public education in most states is inadequate and inequitable, creating a huge obstacle for the nation’s growing number of poor children as they try to overcome their circumstances, according to a set of reports released Monday by civil rights groups.
Students in the nation’s highest-spending state (New York) receive about $12,000 more each year than students in the lowest-spending state (Idaho), according to the reports, and in most states school districts in wealthy areas spend as much or more per pupil than districts with high concentrations of poverty.
In addition, many states were spending less on education in 2012 than they were in 2008, relative to their overall economic productivity, according to the reports.
A recent OECD report said that the U.S. was one of three nations that spends more on rich children than on poor children.
Charters, vouchers, and high-stakes testing do not reduce income inequality, nor do they reduce poverty, nor do they compensate for inequitable funding.
That is the civil rights issue of our time.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Mothers need to demand more for their children. Mothers need to run for more political offices. A coalition of women can turn this around. Fight Ladies Fight!
Roxanne:
IMHO, we should motivate a coalition of woman about “”birth control”” in order to find time to work and to live independently, then self-cultivate all legal matters, finally:
Fight Ladies Fight!
We cannot fight without food in our stomach, nor roof over our head in the cold and wet weather. Most of all, we need to have knowledge in strategy or plan how to successfully fight to achieve our PRIORITY – civility, humanity, democracy, and EQUITY. Back2basic
Reblogged this on David R. Taylor-Thoughts on Texas Education.
It seems like the OCR is asleep at the wheel. No agency or group seems to have the appetite to prosecute or address issues of blatant segregation and the resultant inequity. There is not only the issue of unfair funding to poor public schools that mostly serve minority students, but there is also the fact that charter schools are permitted to use public funds to create more segregated schools! This is disturbing! Moreover, I cannot understand how it is acceptable to swallow an entire urban system and deny families a right to a “free public education.” Charters schools are not public schools, no matter how they choose to manipulate and blur definition lines when it is convenient for them to do so.
The real CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE OF OUR TIMES is how they took out the tens of thousands of Americans who were professional teachers, and how they are still abusing the civil rights of teachers.
You see, while income inequality is an issue, the road to opportunity and the shared knowledge that enables OUR DEMOCRACY was a direct result of THE institution of public education. When no one stopped the abuse of teachers, and the MEDIA totally hid the reality, the end of our middle class was at hand.
We fight VAM and PARCC but there is no successful grassroots movement to ensure that teachers can do what they need to do as professionals in their own practice.
As long as principals can do this, then all we can do is sit back and complain, and watch our citizens become serfs to these masters of the universe who are now taking over the schools in the state legislatures.
http://www.youtube.com/all_comments?v=nfNxj-O1DiI
C’mon, people, we all know the civil rights issues of our time are Eva’s undersized bank account and her lack of political power. More charters! More co-locations! More politicians in the tank!
We’re currently seeing this play out in the Little Rock School District, as it has been for years. The Arkansas Department of Education has taken over our district after finding just six of our forty-eight schools in academic distress. We’re also the last local education union in Arkansas with collective bargaining rights. While teachers know what will best help students academically, we are still relegated by lawmakers with an agenda, corporate nepotism, and quite frankly, overt racism and classism.
Democracy is a farce, as our democratically elected school board was ousted by Waltonites and those with ties to the business community. Many business men and women took to the “stage” and begged for this takeover, yet I’ve seen none of them in my school trying to help. I’ve not heard of any of them going to schools in poor neighborhoods and helping students or offering the services of their businesses.
This is the civil rights issue of our day, and if we don’t stand up against corporate shenanigans and greed, who will?
The article says that Idaho is the lowest spending state per pupil, but I guess it’s what study you use. The U.S. Census Bureau just came out last week with the numbers, and said that Utah is the lowest per pupil expenditure at $6555. We’re number 51! http://www.sltrib.com/news/2579711-155/were-no-51-utah-last-again
I had the same information about Utah, and the powers that be are eager to get more private dollars invested in education there, especial for profits in preschool education.
Yep. The legislators never met a privatization scheme that they didn’t like. More and more money in Utah is going to testing and the bureaucracy to conduct and “use the data” from the testing, and we already have a tiny pittance to begin with. No wonder I had 275 students to teach in grades 8 and 9 history and geography.
I’m glad someone is fact-checking the Obama Administration claims of increased graduation rates.
http://apps.npr.org/grad-rates/
I don’t think it was wise for Duncan and the ed reform “movement” to start calling people liars on proficiency when the graduation rate increase they’ve been trumpeting has some questionable aspects.
Questionable graduation rates? Why, here is NYC, if you breathe, you graduate, and teachers who fail more than a nominal few students are virtually guaranteed an interrogation by the Principal.
Why didn’t anyone in the “data driven” crowd question Rahm Emmanuel’s numbers after Chicago newspapers revealed he was relying on credit recovery centers and then crediting the home school with a rise in graduation rates?
Surely that merits at least an footnote in the “data”.
“Almost nine out of 10 school districts in the U.S. provide some form of credit recovery. Increasingly that means online courses provided by outside software vendors.
That’s good for graduation rates. But, says Daria Hall of The Education Trust, “some of these credit recovery programs frankly aren’t terribly rigorous and aren’t preparing students well for what’s next.”
Funny how that never came up when Duncan was promoting the increase in grad rates as proof that his methods work.
I’m getting the feeling some of this “data” is influenced by the need for ed reformers to show gains so they can continue to sell the product.
Inequitable funding is a civil rights issue, but “funding” is also not going very well under ed reform leadership at the national and state level.
Why is it that 30 states have cut funding for public education since the Great Recession? What is the ed reform “movement” doing about their track record there? How can they say they’re these great advocates for children if they ignore the funding piece? Compounding their failure to secure at least stable funding for public schools is their penchant for experiments, where the limited funding public schools have is funneled thru orgs and middlemen and contractors, where everyone gets a cut of the public school dollar.
RttT didn’t even cover the costs of the experiments in a lot of districts. Is it fair or prudent to have kids bearing the financial burden of whatever experiment they come up with? They just keep piling on the mandates and they never come thru with the money.
States that continue to cut funding to public education have abrogated their responsibility to their young people. Starving public schools along with continuous testing are strategies to undermine public schools so they will be more vulnerable to takeovers. This is the result of the undue influence of billionaires and corporations that want to seize public funds for their own use. Most charter schools are not champions of equity; they are champions of exploitation so that the few can rob from the many.
There is no shortage of corporate welfare kings and queens and politicians and billionaires who think that all social services should be in private hands.