Building, Not Rebuilding, Public Education

[TBF]

Building, Not Rebuilding, Public Education
7.23.14 ~ by Lois Weiner

Fighting corporate education reform is less about restoring the old system to its former glory than building a just one for the first time.

In 1954, I was in the first grade at David W. Harlan Elementary School in Wilmington, Delaware. I could buy a hot lunch prepared by cafeteria workers who were employed by the Wilmington Public Schools. I took music lessons for free, using a violin the city schools lent me. We had a school library, chorus, and band. We had art classes three times a week.

Yet schools on Wilmington’s east side got the leftover musical instruments and much less money for books, supplies, and maintaining school facilities like the playground. Harlan was all white, intentionally segregated. Real estate developers and brokers in its attendance zone had homeowners sign racial covenants that prohibited the sale of homes to blacks.

When decrying today’s corporate reform, too many gloss over the second experience and universalize my own, appealing to a past that was always deeply unequal.

Across the United States, there is a great struggle over the nation’s education system. But many working class parents of color see the current battle differently than do those from the white middle class. To be credible to the poor and working-class parents and community members who should be natural allies, labor must acknowledge its complicity in allowing the gross inequality in American education to persist ...

More here: https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/07/building-not-rebuilding-public-education/