On Being

Education
Segregation and the concentrating of poverty have especially pernicious effects on education. Because elementary and secondary schools are primarily funded through local taxes, cities with large numbers of poor people have fewer resources per child and are therefore less able to fund decent education. Further, because the ghettos are politically marginalized even within the city, education in the ghetto can easily be neglected. As Jonathan Kozol graphically describes in Savage Inequalities, the physical state of inner-city schools, the equipment and supplies available, the level of instruction, class size, expectations of the students and so on are markedly inferior when compared to their non-ghetto counterparts.

Concentrating poor African Americans into the ghetto, of course, means that ghetto schools will be completely black and predominantly poor. The other problems these children bring to school (hunger, homelessness, exposure to violence, and so on) demand resources that have to be pulled away from the already meager educational resources allotted. Ghetto schools should be getting far more money than suburban schools because the problems they have to deal with are worse. Instead, they get less.

One current approach to improving urban education is the "magnet school," which takes students from the districts of many schools, often to emphasize a particular area of study, such as science or the arts. These schools are better funded and have better teachers, more access to supplies, and better physical plants. They are of very significant benefit … to the children who qualify. Unfortunately, by creaming the best students, the most committed parents, the more assertive parents, and (often) a higher-than-average proportion of the school district's budget, they also weaken the schools that remain.

This creaming and consequent weakening of the remaining school system is the primary danger of the proposed educational voucher system for education. Vouchers represent a determined amount of money (usually the average that the public school system spends per student) that parents can use to pay the tuition at any school (including private schools) to which the child can be accepted. Private schools (although not all parochial schools) usually cost more than the average public school cost, so poor families that can't afford another expense will not benefit, nor will the children of parents who are not actively involved nor children who for any reason can't get accepted at a private or parochial school. Since the voucher money is withdrawn from public education (with large fixed costs in buildings, maintenance, teacher contracts, and so on), the danger is that the public schools that remain (which will have to educate many of the most difficult students who require the highest level of resources) will have even less adequate funding than they do today.

In their 1886 Plessy vs Ferguson decision, the Supreme Court created the doctrine of "separate but equal." Schools could thus be segregated as long as the education provided to black students was equal to that provided white students. In their 1954 decision, Brown vs School Board of Topeka, the Supreme Court went further to demand the integration of schools. As Jonathan Kozol has pointed out, we have not only failed to meet the conditions of the 1954 decision, we have also failed to meet the conditions of the 1886 decision.

In Washington DC approximately half of the black children will drop out of school before they graduate. Those who do graduate will, on the average, be two years behind national norms. Without a decent education, a child is handicapped for life.