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. 

the "magic bullet" myth

It is both a blessing and a curse that education reform has become part of the mainstream conversation. The blessing part is that, with so many people talking about how to fix public schools, something positive is bound to come out of it. The curse part is that the discourse has been so hijacked by simplistic movies like Waiting for Superman, that many in the public think that the fix is easy. "More accountability." "Better teachers." "Learn from Finland." Yes, all of these are real suggestions. No, I don't think any of them will solve the problem entire problem.

No one thing will solve the entire problem.

If one thing could fix public schools, they would be fixed by now. If the "magic bullet" (or even a magic brand of bullets) existed that closed achievement gaps, raised test scores, and prepared students for the future, there wouldn't be an issue with public schools. Every child would be on pace to succeed and I would channel my 'save the world' energies to something else... probably something related to food.

But of course this isn't the case. There isn't ever a problem (outside of math or stretch pants) where one size really fits all. When people are the variable, the answers are endless. So why are policy makers looking for a quick fix? Why do they treat public schools as a monolithic entity with little regard to the people who constitute them? I remember sitting in many a counselor meeting and being absolutely thrown but the presenters who spoke of students merely as data points and categories. "The Black males aren't doing this." "The Latina girls need that." Having my kids haphazardly lumped together infuriated me. Whatever statistical regression that the school district used to tell me how to work with kids I actually knew didn't take into account the real life issues that they faced.

That is the problem with this whole "magic bullet" mindset - it doesn't address the actual, tangible needs of the people it is supposed to help. Even within one city, every school is different. They have different kids, different cultures, different problems. The only way to help all kids succeed is to address their needs within their specific environments. To me, this is common sense, yet all schools are held to the same mandates... and the public wonders why there is so much stagnation.

Targeted, individualized intervention is necessary to actually make progress instead of just mandating it. Schools need to be trusted to know what their problems are, and then given the autonomy (and adequate resources) to fix them. Yes this is more difficult than just setting one policy that everyone must follow, but clearly that does not work. I really believe that if educators had more decision-making power about what goes on in their own schools, then real progress can be made. Top down management doesn't work when the top doesn't listen to or understand what is going on at the bottom.

It is time to stop looking for a quick-and-easy fix to a problem that has been around since the American education system began. Achievement gaps, low test scores, and unprepared youth are symptoms of larger social problems that come with the unequal opportunities that children have to receive a quality education. Equalizing funding (rather than relying solely property taxes, which are based on race and therefore exacerbate existing problems) would probably be the best place to start, but policy makers seem to think that demonizing educators, punishing schools, and creating more charter schools is a better plan. Unfortunately, this plan is not working. At all.

I think these "magic bullets" should be melted down into a magic pen so policy makers can write some legislation that actually works. But what do I know? I just study this stuff...

xo,
Linds