Archives for category: Inequality
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A Billionaire Declares: Better Public Schools Won’t Fix America

By dianeravitch
June 11, 2019 //
160

 

Nick Hanauer was a big supporter of charter schools. As he explains in this fascinating article, he swallowed the Corporate Reform Dogma whole. He believed that America’s “failing public schools” were the cause of poverty and inequality. Fix the schools and—poof—poverty and inequality will disappear.

He writes:

Taken with this story line, I embraced education as both a philanthropic cause and a civic mission. I co-founded the League of Education Voters, a nonprofit dedicated to improving public education. I joined Bill Gates, Alice Walton, and Paul Allen in giving more than $1 million each to an effort to pass a ballot measure that established Washington State’s first charter schools. All told, I have devoted countless hours and millions of dollars to the simple idea that if we improved our schools—if we modernized our curricula and our teaching methods, substantially increased school funding, rooted out bad teachers, and opened enough charter schools—American children, especially those in low-income and working-class communities, would start learning again. Graduation rates and wages would increase, poverty and inequality would decrease, and public commitment to democracy would be restored.

But after decades of organizing and giving, I have come to the uncomfortable conclusion that I was wrong. And I hate being wrong.

What I’ve realized, decades late, is that educationism is tragically misguided. American workers are struggling in large part because they are underpaid—and they are underpaid because 40 years of trickle-down policies have rigged the economy in favor of wealthy people like me. Americans are more highly educated than ever before, but despite that, and despite nearly record-low unemployment, most American workers—at all levels of educational attainment—have seen little if any wage growth since 2000.

To be clear: We should do everything we can to improve our public schools. But our education system can’t compensate for the ways our economic system is failing Americans. Even the most thoughtful and well-intentioned school-reform program can’t improve educational outcomes if it ignores the single greatest driver of student achievement: household income.

For all the genuine flaws of the American education system, the nation still has many high-achieving public-school districts. Nearly all of them are united by a thriving community of economically secure middle-class families with sufficient political power to demand great schools, the time and resources to participate in those schools, and the tax money to amply fund them. In short, great public schools are the product of a thriving middle class, not the other way around. Pay people enough to afford dignified middle-class lives, and high-quality public schools will follow. But allow economic inequality to grow, and educational inequality will inevitably grow with it.

By distracting us from these truths, educationism is part of the problem.

Oh, my God! Did he read Reign of Error?

I wrote exactly that! I demonstrated that the graduation rates of every group were the highest ever, the dropout rates were the lowest ever, we were never number one on international tests but consistently mediocre or less because of high child poverty rates, etc etc etc. I said that test scores were a reflection of family income and education, not a cause of poverty.

Could I be dreaming?

Then he wrote:

Whenever i talk with my wealthy friends about the dangers of rising economic inequality, those who don’t stare down at their shoes invariably push back with something about the woeful state of our public schools. This belief is so entrenched among the philanthropic elite that of America’s 50 largest family foundations—a clique that manages $144 billion in tax-exempt charitable assets—40 declare education as a key issue.

Well, of course. These are the billionaires who want to privatize public schools without the permission of the families and children who like their public schools.

Here is the kicker: Educationism appeals to the wealthy and powerful because it tells us what we want to hear: that we can help restore shared prosperity without sharing our wealth or power.

Well, this is an article you must read.

I wonder if Nick Hanauer would join the Network for Public Education and help us push back against the powerful elites that he now understands so well. Then he could join with those who understand what he has happily recognized.

Categories Billionaires, Education Reform, Inequality, Poverty, Segregation

Senator Sanders: This Is Where I Came From

By dianeravitch
June 4, 2019 //
65

 

This article by Senator Bernie Sanders appeared in the New York Times.

 

My father came to this country from Poland at the age of 17 with barely a nickel in his pocket. I spent my first 18 years, before I left home for college, in a three-and-a-half-room, rent-controlled apartment in Brooklyn. My mother’s dream was to own her own home, but we never came close. My father’s salary as a paint salesman paid for basic necessities, but never much more.

As a young man I learned the impact that lack of money had on family life. Every major household purchase was accompanied by arguments between my parents.

I remember being yelled at for going to the wrong store for groceries and paying more than I should have. I’ve never forgotten the incredible stress of not having much money, a reality that millions of American families experience today.

We are the wealthiest nation in the history of the world and, according to President Trump, the economy is “booming.” Yet most Americans have little or no savings and live paycheck to paycheck.

Today our rate of childhood poverty is among the highest of any developed country in the world, millions of workers are forced to work two or three jobs just to survive, hundreds of thousands of bright young people cannot afford to go to college, millions more owe outrageous levels of student debt, and half a million people are homeless on any given night. Over 80 million Americans have inadequate health insurance or spent part or all of last year without any insurance, and one out of five cannot afford the prescription drugs they need.

While wages in the United States have been stagnant for over 40 years, we have more income and wealth inequality than at any time since the 1920s.

Today, the wealthiest three families in the country own more wealth than the bottom half of the American people and the top 1 percent owns more wealth than the bottom 90 percent. Millions of workers earn starvation wages even as nearly half of all new income is going to the top 1 percent.

Gentrification is ravaging working-class neighborhoods, forcing many struggling Americans to spend half or more of their incomes to put a roof over their heads. The rent-controlled apartment I grew up in was small, but at least we could afford it.

I am running for president because we must defeat Donald Trump, the most dangerous president in the modern history of our country. But, if we are to defeat Mr. Trump, we must do more than focus on his personality and reactionary policies.

We must understand that unfettered capitalism and the greed of corporate America are destroying the moral and economic fabric of this country, deepening the very anxieties that Mr. Trump appealed to in 2016. The simple truth is that big money interests are out of control, and we need a president who will stand up to them.

Wall Street, after driving the United States into the worst economic downturn since the 1930s, now makes tens of billions in profits while forcing working-class Americans to pay usurious interest rates on their credit card debt. The top 10 American drug companies, repeatedly investigated for price fixing and other potentially illegal actions, made nearly $70 billion in profits last year, even as Americans paid the most per capita among developed nations for their prescription medicine.

Top executives in the fossil fuel industry spend hundreds of millions on campaign contributions to elect candidates who represent the rich and the powerful, while denying the reality of climate change.

Major corporations like Amazon, Netflix, General Motors and dozens of others make huge profits, but don’t pay federal income taxes because of a rigged tax system they lobbied to create.

Back in 1944, in his State of the Union speech, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt reminded the nation that economic security is a human right, and that people cannot be truly free if they have to struggle every day for their basic needs. I agree.

We must change the current culture of unfettered capitalism in which billionaires have control over our economic and political life. We need to revitalize American democracy and create a government and economy that works for all.

Categories Economy, Education Reform, Inequality, Injustice

Jacobin: Foundations and Philanthropy Will Not Cure the Crisis of Capitalism

By dianeravitch
April 28, 2019 //
64

 

The billionaires understand the growing rage caused by inequality on an unprecedented scale. They worry that the rage might be directed at them. This far, it has been captured by rightwing populists like Trump, whose tax policies deepen the crisis of inequality by transferring more wealth to the one tenth of the one percent.

Jacobin explains that multibillionaires like Bill Gates are trying to buy time through their philanthropy and “the giving pledge,” which commits them to give away a big chunk of their billions when they die. Unfortunately, or fortunately for them, their capital is so vast that they make more money than they give away, without working. At a certain point, capital multiplies just by sitting in stocks and bonds.

Anand Girihadaras hit a nerve in his book Winners Take All, where he described the elite Charade of pretending to save the world through philanthropy, while building mechanisms to control the lives of others.

Charter schools are a perfect example of elite philanthropy that offers a way to “save poor children” while destroying democratically controlled institutions and transferring control to private boards directed by financiers. The parents of the children being “saved” will never have a voice in the education of their children, will never meet face to face with a board member, will never gain admission to a board meeting, and-if they complain too much-will be told to take their child and go elsewhere.

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Charter Schools, Education Industry, Gates Foundation, Bill Gates, Inequality, Philanthropy, Privatization

Katie Porter: A Freshman Hero in Congress

By dianeravitch
April 13, 2019 //
21

Katie Porter is a freshman in Congress. She ran for Congress in the 45th District in California, which has not elected a Democrat since the District was created in 1953. Porter was born in Iowa and had an elite education, studying at Phillips Academy, Yale University, and Harvard Law School (where Elizabeth Warren was one of her professors). She is a consumer advocate and a master of complex financial transactions. She co-authored a book with Warren titled The Law of Debtors and Creditors. 

She has fought the abuse of mortgage holders by banks. She has planted herself firmly on the side of the little guy, the public interest, and the victims of the powerful.

In her role on the House Financial Services Committee, she has challenged some of the most powerful people in the nation. She does it with facts, logic, and subtlety. She quietly sets a trap, and then it snaps.

Watch her take apart Jamie Dimon, CEO of J.P. Morgan Chase, who received a salary of $31 million this year. She explains the difficulty of a teller in his bank in her district who is paid $16.50 an hour. Better than the minimum wage, but watch her quietly pin him to the wall. 

The video went viral.

Paul Waldman of the Washington Post says that Porter has framed the most important issue for the 2020 election: Inequality. 

He writes:

“Congratulations are in order to JPMorgan Chase, the largest bank in the United States. It just reported that in the first quarter of 2019 it made a record profit of $9.18 billion on $29.9 billion in revenue. Truly, we are living in an age of boundless prosperity.

“Well, some of us are. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, made $31 million last year. Which led to an interesting exchange between him and first-term Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) this week in a Capitol Hill hearing, when Porter asked Dimon to consider the financial situation of a teller working at Dimon’s bank in Irvine, Calif., the location of her district.

”A video of Porter questioning Dimon is spreading, and it’s an excellent reminder of something with profound implications for next year’s presidential campaign:

“Rep. Katie Porter (D-Calif.) grills JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who made $31 million last year, on how a low-paid bank teller is supposed to pay the bills. (Danielle Kunitz, Joshua Carroll/The Washington Post)

“Porter is uniquely situated to do this kind of questioning. A law professor with deep expertise in topics such as bankruptcy, she is quickly becoming one of the financial services industry’s most formidable critics on Capitol Hill. And she was doing more than making Dimon uncomfortable. She was obviously trying to make a larger point not just about JPMorgan Chase or even just about the banking industry, but about the American economy in general.

“That point is this: If you have a bank that’s making $9 billion in profit in a single quarter, with a CEO who makes $31 million a year, and yet people who work for that bank can’t possibly make ends meet, something is very, very wrong. And that should be at the center of the campaign of every Democrat running for president…

”Speaking of which, we just learned that as a result of that tax cut, twice as many of the largest corporations in the United States paid no taxes in 2018 as had the year before, despite making billions of dollars in profit. In many cases they even got large refunds, which means your taxes went right into their bank accounts. To take just one example, Chevron made a $4.5 billion profit and got a refund of $181 million. The banks did particularly well; the tax law increased bank profits by $28.8 billion. You’re welcome, Mr. Dimon…

”JPMorgan Chase could give every one of its 250,000 employees a $25,000 raise, and it would cost the bank only about two-thirds of the profit it made just in the first quarter of this year. But of course, it is not going to do that. We can’t rely on the generosity of corporations to tackle inequality. That’s the government’s job. Democrats just need to decide to do it, and to make clear to voters that it will be their top priority as president.”

Watch Katie Porter take on the CEO of Wells Fargo. (Ignore the misspelling on the placard she holds up. (Somebody goofed but not her.)

Watch her eviscerate the clueless head of Trump’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, explaining basic rules of consumer finance.

I love AOC.

I love Katie Porter.

These are two amazing and powerful people. They give me hope for the future.

 

 

Categories Accountability, Economics, Economy, Inequality

The Failure of Market Reforms in Sweden

By dianeravitch
February 14, 2019 //
6

German Bender writes here about the failure of market-based school reform in Sweden.

Privatized schools that get public money, for-profit schools that get public money, the gamut of school privatization has degraded the education system of Sweden.

The main results of privatization: education inequality, falling test scores, and segregation.

Please take note, Center for American Progress, Ann O’Leary (the new chief of staff to California Governor Gavin Newsom, former chief of staff for the Hillary Clinton campaign), and other devotees of school choice (Betsy DeVos, the Koch brothers, the Walton Family Foundation, Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, the Dell Foundation, John Arnold, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, etc.).

Categories Inequality, International, School Choice, Segregation

Henry Levin: Want Lower Test Scores and More Segregation? Try School Choice!

By dianeravitch
February 10, 2019 //
6

In this article, published in 2017, Economist Henry Levin explains the international failure of school choice.

The main effect of school choice is to privilege the advantaged and harm the have-nots.

Categories Inequality, Injustice, International, School Choice, Segregation

Sherrilyn Ifill: Racism is a National Security Concern

By dianeravitch
December 23, 2018 //
7

Racism and segregation are our nation’s greatest sin, written into our founding and our history. We live with their consequences every day in the misery and blighted lives that stand in sharp contrast to the ideals of our founding documents. We think of ourselves as a just people, but we tolerate injustice. We think of our nation as one that is dedicated to equality, yet we live with inequality and ignore it. Now, as Sherrilyn Ifill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, writes in the Washington Post.


Two newly released reports from the Senate Intelligence Committee about Russian interference in the 2016 election have been nothing short of revelatory. Both studies — one produced by researchers at Oxford University, the other by the cybersecurity firm New Knowledge — describe in granular detail how the Russian government tried to sow discord and confusion among American voters. And both conclude that Russia’s campaign included a massive effort to deceive and co-opt African Americans. We now have unassailable confirmation that a foreign power sought to exploit racial tensions in the United States for its own gain.

Ever since U.S. intelligence agencies reported that the Russian government worked to sway the 2016 election, foreign election meddling has been one of our nation’s top national security concerns. But our discussions about Russian interference rarely touch on the other major threat to our elections: the resurgence of state-sponsored voter suppression in the United States. In light of these disturbing new reports, it is clear we can no longer think of foreign election meddling as a phenomenon separate from attempts to disenfranchise Americans of color. Racial injustice remains a real vulnerability in our democracy, one that foreign powers are only too willing to attack.

How should we respond? First, we have to make it easier, not harder, for Americans to vote. In the wake of the Supreme Court’s 2013 Shelby County decision, which severely weakened the Voting Rights Act, we’ve seen a resurgence of voter-suppression efforts across the nation. Congress has the power to fix the Voting Rights Act, but so far it has declined to do so. The revelations of Russia’s racial targeting should serve as a wake-up call that domestic voter suppression, in addition to being unconstitutional, effectively aids foreign attacks on our democracy. Indeed, we should take seriously the danger that domestic and foreign groups may coordinate to suppress turnout in future elections, a possibility we can begin to forestall, first and foremost, by protecting the franchise here at home. Rep. Terri A. Sewell (D-Ala.) has already introduced a comprehensive new voting rights bill, and Congress should swiftly act upon it in the new year.

Second, these revelations only deepen the urgency of demanding more accountability from technology companies. The New Knowledge report criticizes social media companies such as Facebook for misleading Congress about the nature of Russian interference, noting that one even denied that specific groups were targeted. This is just more evidence that Silicon Valley has yet to come to grips with the enormous influence it wields in our democracy, and the ways that foreign powers can use that influence to manipulate Americans. Congress should require greater transparency and responsibility from these corporations before the 2020 elections.

Finally, we have to accept that foreign powers seize upon these divisions because they are real — because racism remains the United States’ Achilles’ heel. Indeed, it is, and always has been, a national security vulnerability — a fundamental and easily exploitable reality of American life that belies the image and narrative of equality and justice we project and export around the world. It may be especially difficult in our era of “fake news” and “alternative facts,” but we must recognize that our failure to acknowledge hard truths, especially when it comes to race, makes it easier for foreign powers to turn us against one another. Russia did not conjure out of thin air the black community’s legitimate grievances about racist policing. Nor did it invent racist and hateful conspiracy theories. Rather, Russian trolls seized upon these real problems as ready-made sources of discord. Moving forward, we need to recognize that our failure to honestly address issues of civil rights and racial justice makes all of us more susceptible to foreign interference.

This is hardly the first time our adversaries have identified race and racism as America’s great vulnerability. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union frequently pointed to segregation and civil unrest as proof of American hypocrisy. This propaganda was sufficiently widespread, and contained enough truth, that leaders of both parties began arguing that segregation undermined the United States’ position in the Cold War, helping to ease the passage of civil rights legislation in the 1950s and 1960s.

Today, we need a similar understanding that our failure to ensure equal justice for all has grave implications for U.S. national security. The upcoming House oversight committee hearings on Russian interference and voter suppression will be critical opportunities to educate the public on the threats to our democracy, and they deserve our close attention.

But we must be careful not to reduce the struggle for racial equality into a bloodless question of national interest. Civil rights are essential to our national security, but national security cannot be the chief rationale for pursuing civil rights. After all, racial injustice is not just another chink in our armor. It is the great flaw in our character. Our adversaries know that race makes us our own worst enemy. It is past time we learn this hard truth ourselves.

Categories Inequality, Injustice, Racism

“American Capitalism Isn’t Working”

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2018 //
80

David Leonhardt, columnist for the New York Times, explains his conviction that American capitalism isn’t working. It’s puzzling that someone who is so clear-sighted about the economy and the damage done by rapacious corporate greed is so bamboozled by charter school mythology.

He wrote:

The October 1944 edition of Fortune magazine carried an article by a corporate executive that makes for amazing reading today. It was written by William B. Benton — a co-founder of the Benton & Bowles ad agency — and an editor’s note explained that Benton was speaking not just for himself but on behalf of a major corporate lobbying group. The article then laid out a vision for American prosperity after World War II.

At the time, almost nobody took postwar prosperity for granted. The world had just endured 15 years of depression and war. Many Americans were worried that the end of wartime production, combined with the return of job-seeking soldiers, would plunge the economy into a new slump.

“Today victory is our purpose,” Benton wrote. “Tomorrow our goal will be jobs, peacetime production, high living standards and opportunity.” That goal, he wrote, depended on American businesses accepting “necessary and appropriate government regulation,” as well as labor unions. It depended on companies not earning their profits “at the expense of the welfare of the community.” It depended on rising wages.

These leftist-sounding ideas weren’t based on altruism. The Great Depression and the rise of European fascism had scared American executives. Many had come to believe that unrestrained capitalism was dangerous — to everyone. The headline on Benton’s article was, “The Economics of a Free Society.”

In the years that followed, corporate America largely followed this prescription. Not every executive did, of course, and management and labor still had bitter disputes. But most executives behaved as if they cared about their workers and communities. C.E.O.s accepted pay packages that today look like a pittance. Middle-class incomes rose faster in the 1950s and 1960s than incomes at the top. Imagine that: declining income inequality.

And the economy — and American business — boomed during this period, just as Benton and his fellow chieftains had predicted.

Things began to change in the 1970s. Facing more global competition and higher energy prices, and with Great Depression memories fading, executives became more aggressive. They decided that their sole mission was maximizing shareholder value. They fought for deregulation, reduced taxes, union-free workplaces, lower wages and much, much higher pay for themselves. They justified it all with promises of a wonderful new economic boom. That boom never arrived.

Even when economic growth has been decent, as it is now, most of the bounty has flowed to the top. Median weekly earnings have grown a miserly 0.1 percent a year since 1979. The typical American family today has a lower net worth than the typical family did 20 years ago. Life expectancy, shockingly, has fallen this decade.

The great stagnation of living standards is a defining problem of our time. Most families do not enjoy the “rapidly rising level of living” that Benton called for. Understandably, many Americans are anxious and angry.

The solution will need to involve a return to higher taxes on the rich. But it’s also worth thinking about pre-tax incomes — and specifically what goes on inside corporations. It’s worth asking the question that Benton asked: What kind of corporate America does the rest of America need?

Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator, is now rolling out a platform for her almost-certain presidential campaign, and it includes an answer to this question. It is a fascinating one, because it differs from the usual Democratic agenda of progressive taxes and bigger social programs (which Warren also supports). Her idea is the most intriguing policy idea to come out of the early 2020 campaign.

Warren wants an economy in which companies again invest in their workers and communities. Yet she doesn’t believe it can happen organically, as it did in the 1940s, because financial markets will punish well-meaning executives who stop trying to maximize short-term profits. “They can’t go back,” she told me recently. “You have to do it with a rule.”

She has proposed a bill in the Senate — and Ben Ray Luján, a top House Democrat, will soon offer it there — that would require corporate boards to take into account the interests of customers, employees and communities. To make sure that happens, 40 percent of a company’s board seats would be elected by employees. Germany uses a version of this “shared-governance” model, mostly successfully. Even in today’s hypercompetitive economy, German corporations earn nice profits with a philosophy that looks more like William Benton’s than Gordon Gekko’s.

Is Warren’s plan the best way to rein in corporate greed? I’m not yet sure. I want to see politicians and experts hash out her idea and others — much as they hashed out health care policy in the 2008 campaign.

But I do know this: American capitalism isn’t working right now. If Benton and his fellow postwar executives returned with the same ideas today, they would be branded as socialists. In truth, they were the capitalists who cared enough about the system to save it. The same goes for the new reformers.

Categories Accountability, Economy, Inequality

Sweden: Market-based Education Produces Poor Results, Segregation

By dianeravitch
December 7, 2018 //
5

Swedish scholar German Bender reports on the negative results of market-driven reforms in his country.

Choice has produced worse outcomes and encouraged segregation.

He demonstrates how choice has increased inequality and concludes:

It is clear that the Swedish school system, once known for its egalitarian ambition and high degree of equality in outcomes, now effectively sorts children by ethnic and socio-economic background. And, although the escalating violence in many Swedish suburbs cannot directly be connected to school segregation, it is very likely that segregation is a contributing factor. Our report summarizes a large body of research on the negative effects that segregation has on a wide range of social factors, such as educational and occupational choices, income and unemployment, health and criminality, and social attitudes towards other groups. Most of these outcomes have a considerable impact both on an individual and a societal level.

The results make it painfully clear that the Swedish school system effectively works against the very idea that schools should level the playing field for students from all backgrounds and give every child equal opportunity. Even after the rise of right-wing populism in Sweden, our established political parties have proven themselves unable, or unwilling, to rein in the highly unregulated Swedish school market.

Governments seeking inspiration for school reforms should look elsewhere – unless they are looking for a cautionary tale.

Categories Failure, For-Profit, Inequality, International, School Choice, Segregation

Peter Greene: Society Is Failing Our Children and Their Schools

By dianeravitch
November 7, 2018 //
12

Recently, a commenter on this blog wrote that he finally understood why some schools are succeeding and others are failing. He said he realized that children in affluent communities have well-resourced and successful schools, while children in impoverished communities have terrible schools. I tried for the umpteenth time to explain to him that he was reaching the wrong conclusion. The only measure he was using was test scores, which reflect family income. I suggested he consider that the schools in poor communities did not get the same resources as those in affluent communities. The schools he called “failing” very likely have dedicated teachers who are working hard despite large classes and inadequate support. The problem is not the schools, but society’s refusal to pay the cost of making every school a good school.

Peter Greene explains the point in more detail in this post about the Journey for Justice Alliance.

He begins:

“If you’re not regularly exposed to the problem, you might think that finding the ways in which non-white non-wealthy students are shortchanged would require deep and nuanced research. As it turns out, finding the ways in which education fails to serve those students requires no more careful research than finding the nose on the front of your face.

“The Journey For Justice Alliance is based in Chicago, but it’s an alliance of grassroots community, youth, and parent-led organizations in 24 cities across the country. They are working and organizing for community-driven alternatives to the privatization of and dismantling of public school systems. They’re the folks behind the #WeChoose movement (as in “we choose education equity, not the illusion of school choice.” Look at their member groups and you’ll find honest-to-goodness community grass roots organizations, not just one more astroturf group funded by Gates, Walton, et al. Their director, Jitu Brown, is one of the most powerful speakers for education and equity it has ever been my pleasure to hear.

“Last spring they issued a report– “Failing Brown v. Board”– that looks at the gap between the schools that serve primarily wealthy white families and those that serve non-wealthy families of color. Their findings are not encouraging.

“The report says: The fact is, public schools in Black and Latino communities are not “failing.” They have been failed. More accurately, these schools have been sabotaged for years by policy-makers who fail to fully fund them, by ideologues who choose to experiment with them, by “entrepreneurs” who choose to extract public taxpayer dollars from education systems for their own pockets.

“The report also rejects the notion that money doesn’t matter, or that somehow the children and their families are responsible. And they know what successful, fully-resourced schools look like

They offer a culturally relevant, engaging and challenging curriculum, smaller class sizes, more experienced teachers, wrap-around emotional and academic supports, a student-centered school climate and meaningful parent and community engagement. These are the hallmarks of what Journey for Justice calls sustainable community schools.

“J4J performed a fairly simple piece of research– looking at course offerings in various schools across twelve cities. They acknowledge that such a comparison isn’t perfect, that schools may offer courses that are never actually taught, that the course offering list doesn’t tell you about the quality of those courses. But the findings are still pretty stark.”

In every pairing of black and white schools, “majority white schools offered both more academic subjects and more “enrichment” subjects in the arts than majority Black and/or Brown schools. Majority white schools offered more foreign languages, more high-level math options, more AP courses. The range of offerings in arts, music, dance and theater was far greater in majority white schools…

“Charter fans are going to say, “See? That’s why we need to build more charters, so we can get some of those children of color out of there,” but why should those children have to sacrifice the other big benefit that majority white schools enjoy– a school in their own community that they can attend with their neighbors? And why do we need a complicated web of privatized schools to fix the problem. We know how to fix the problem, as witnessed by the fact that politicians and leaders have fixed the problem for each of the affluent majority white schools.

“It’s like you have twenty kids in a cafeteria, and ten sit down with a steak dinner and the other ten get bowls of cold oatmeal, and when someone complains about it, a bunch of folks pop up to propose some complex system by which one of the oatmeal kids will be sent out to a restaurant across town. No! Just get back out in the kitchen and use the same tools and supplies that you demonstrably already have to make steak dinners for the rest of the kids.”

Categories Charter Schools, Education Reform, Equity, Funding, Inequality, Injustice, Racism
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