still here!

Hey Folks,

School is crazy, but I don't want to completely neglect this space! Here is a quote that I recently found and instantly fell in love with. It totally jives with my approach to my work, as you will see when my for-reals posting continues... next week! For now, back to the papers. Bleh...

xo,
Linds

mo' money, mo' prisons.

Lately, I've been thinking a lot about who benefits from educational inequality. Clearly it isn't people who look like me, but there has to be someone. After all, if it was 100% bad that poor kids and kids of color got a far worse education just for being poor and not White, then this inequality wouldn't have persisted for this long... right? It wouldn't be so publicly acceptable for state governments to unequally fund urban school districts with smaller tax bases while holding them to the same standards as the wealthy suburban ones with people who can pay higher taxes for better schools... right? Am I missing something here?

[Not sure how common this knowledge is, public education in most states is funded by property taxes. People of color have lower property values because we are not White (really, that's the reason), pay lower property taxes, and therefore have less money for their schools... even in the suburbs. Urban centers have more poor people so their tax base is smaller, and therefore they rely more on the state government for education funding.]  

Aaand, we're back. 

The idea of costs v. benefits of inequality reminds me of a rally I took my students to last May to protest the governor of Pennsylvania's plan to cut roughly a billion dollars from the state's education budget. He and his party (guess which one it is) claimed that the state was broke, and implied that public educational institutions (including K-12 and higher education) were mismanaging current funding and could probably operate effectively if only they knew how to budget. Meanwhile, the same budget approved the building of three (3!) new prisons, at the cost of a few million dollars. Because that's what you do when you're broke, right?

Call me old-fashioned (or just progressive and idealistic), but I think that an appropriately funded and resourced education system along with meaningful employment upon completion would eliminate the need for more prisons. Plus, given the fact that it costs more to imprison someone than it does to educate them, this push for incarceration makes even less sense. As Linda Darling-Hammond says in The Flat World and Education, "States that would not spend $10,000 a year to ensure adequate education for young children of color spend over $30,000 a year to keep them in jail" (p. 24). I feel ill every time I read that line.

What does this say about our priorities as a society? And, more importantly, what can be done about it?

Perhaps thinking of who benefits from such inequality is a useless task, since it won't fix it. I think it is time to more pragmatic about it, and focus on solutions. I think it is time for us to use our voices and our votes to say that this is not okay. Increases in criminal "justice" spending (like that of national defense) tend to be justified in the name of safety. As the argument goes, in order to maintain order and security, we must have places to put these dangerous individuals. But if more prisons were really all it took to stop crime, it would have been stopped by now.

Clearly something else is at play. I refuse to believe that the link between a predominately Black, brown, and low-income prison population and the systematic denial of quality education to people of these same group is anything less than a causal one. Social policies need to be linked with education policies in order to address the overlapping needs of people from these vulnerable populations. Only through a more holistic approach can reform occur in either area.