“What is the status quo? I am embarrassed to say that our country is ranked 22nd in the industrialized world in education and we are falling further behind every year. We see drop out rates in many poor school districts surging past 50% and 60%. Can you look into the desperate eyes of our nation’s poor children and tell them that they don’t deserve the right to choose a better school? Can you continue to herd them into the same failing school year after year without remorse? I can not, and I will not stand idly by while injustice goes unanswered. To claim that shuffling them along the same failed pathway is fair and equal is absurd and offensive. Schools separated by geography are inherently unequal.
So I repeat the words of the Supreme Court that education “is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.” Equal does not mean taking from some it means giving to all. Equal means that every parent and child has a choice and equal funding to attend the school that most meets their needs. Equal means that hopes and dreams are not a faded sheet of paper on a bulletin board soon to be thrown away. We must have equality, we must have school choice.”
My Thoughts: Classism has become in many ways a more potent division in this country than racism ever was. Part of that is because race is visible. He was treated that way because of the color of his skin. Classism is not visible to the naked eye, but disadvantages compound over time. Few say He was treated that way because he is poor and he is poor because his parents were poor and the education available to their class and neighborhood was also poor and didn’t give him the tools he needed to move out of poverty. Those things aren’t visible, but are just as real, even though laying blame on the individual becomes an easy way to dismiss the consequences of the public education system that we are responsible for funding, supporting, and changing if it is not working.
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