Number Eight: Public Education
The core of any economic advancement in any community is education. If you can dismantle education, you can almost certainly crush the economic viability of the community. And that is exactly what has happened in far too many of our neighborhoods.
Donald Trump has called for a $7.1 billion (12 percent) reduction in funding to the Department of Education. This is the third straight year Trump has asked to cut spending on education. However, the deeper story was his appointment of Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education, who is part of a family that has a long history of seeking to privatize education. Here is a great report that gives some good data on the movement to privative education.
Black communities need a viable public education system to remain viable. There are a few reasons that I believe charter schools are harmful to the Black community:
- Charter schools don’t have the same level of accountability as public schools in many districts across the country. As of today, 13 states don’t even have conflict-of-interest requirements between charter school board members and service providers.
- There really isn’t a mechanism, in many urban cities, which can stop a charter school from opening up their doors, siphoning money from the state, siphoning the best students from other schools, and then closing their doors in a few years due to poor performance leaving the students and parents high and dry.
- When the public school, which has much more regulation than your average charter school in many urban districts, has to close its doors you create school deserts. Many students in Black communities are finding themselves having to travel more than an hour just to get to school.
We have many scenarios where the public schools in urban cities are left with the lowest performing students, the most troubled students, the least amount of funding due to student flight (due to the per-pupil grant system in many states), stressed out teachers and a lack of funds to adequately resource the school. I believe this is by design.
