And also during the time the majority of immigrants had skin dark enough that they couldn’t be retconned into whiteness like the Irish. Such a co-incidence!
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I think this is the entire premise and message of Dream Hoarders: middle class+ Americans focus so exclusively and effectively on the prosperity of their own children that they end up barring relatively disadvantaged children from educational and other opportunities.
I mean, the key example of course is how some southern states shut down the entire public school system and opened segregation academics rather than integrate. And then in the coming decades, you had white flight to the suburbs - Kevin Kruse covers that in White Flight, which is about integration in ATL:
And then there was the revolt against busing, which was especially fraught in places like Boston. Meanwhile, the 80s saw the rise of the home school movement, which tended to be religiously oriented, and then came the cries of people whining about their tax dollars funding public education…
So yeah, it’s about racism. Anyone saying other wise is either very blinkered, ignorant, or is lying to your or themselves.
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Some of us are more concerned about actually finding viable solutions to the problem, not just someone to blame or punish.
Don’t be an asshole, yo; our quota for this site is already full.
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We had much better support for education during periods of our history with a much poorer record for equality. Remember, we’re comparing support for education system as it stands today to the greater support it enjoyed in the past, when the forces of racism your referencing were even stronger than they are today. For that reason I don’t think we get a ton of mileage by attacking the education problem primarily from the racism angle. We need to focus more on the practical benefits to society from an educated populace. Plenty of people will handwave about those benefits and pay them lip service, but no one quantifies them and makes them concrete in the way a tax bill is quantified and concrete.
The level of self-destruction over such a stupid issue is staggering. To get an idea of the kinds of opportunities that were missed because young African-Americans and dark-skinned immigrants were denied a decent public education, just imagine what a boring, crappy economy we’d have if the children of (reasonably white) immigrants had been denied it in earlier decades.
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Because African Americans did not benefit equally from that public education system. The best black schools were private, always. The clawing back of public money into the private sphere from public education (across the board) came when people of color demanded to have equal access to public institutions. You might think it’s a coincidence, but it’s really not.
It’s not an “angle”, it’s historical reality. White people really need to come to terms with this fact. We’re not going to fix shit until we do.
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Nope. It’s trickle-up economics. The US federal gov’t has consistently decreased funding for public education since the early 80s, which puts more of the burden on states. Many of the states have also decreased funding of public education, either directly through Kansas-esque austerity to fund tax breaks for corporations and the wealthy, or indirectly by starting programs like vouchers or private-public charter schools. That, in turn, shifts the burden onto local governments and school districts, whose primary mechanism for funding schools is property tax. As the 2008 housing bubble and crash showed, property tax is a terrible way to provide consistent, reliable funding.
How else, in the middle of one of the biggest economic expansions in US history, can schools be struggling for funding? Schools should be getting unprecedented infrastructure and teaching payroll funding right now. Instead, they are doing bonds just to pay teachers in order to avoid further cutting back on school days.
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It’s weird how some folks never seem to want to even acknowledge the detrimental impact slavery/JimCrow/institutionalized racism has had and still has on pretty much every aspect of current ‘civilized’ society in the US.
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That was because those deemed deserving of public education during those periods were at least passably white. What happened after the 1980s as late-stage capitalism truly kicked in is that what were (and still are) policies and outcomes grounded in racism began to be imposed on poor and working-class white people as well as native-born and immigrant PoC.
That’s why looking at it through the lens of racism and the poisonous legacy of slavery/Jim Crow/exclusion acts, etc. can still be useful: underfunding of public schools is not a new problem to be addressed if you’re an African-American, any more than a horrible drug abuse epidemic is; the only difference in terms of urgency and outcomes regarding those crises is that they’re now affecting white people.
So while you may wring your hands and say “it’s a post-racial problem in post-racial America”, perhaps listen to those who have been there for a while and are saying:
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So you believe that Walt Disney Elementary in Burbank, the school discussed in the article, has suffered loss of funding primarily due to racism and that tackling the broad issue of racism is the best way to restore funding there? I mean I agree it’s a component and that’s why I included the immigrant stats in my first post of the thread, but I just don’t see it as the prime mover. If it were, then the lack of funding would not be spiking in the last decade as it has. A trend cannot be driven primarily by racism when racism is broadly declining while the trend is getting worse.
Just want to throw it out there: to test the hypothesis that lower birth dates lead to less support for public education we should look at demographics. We know the major political divide in America is Urban vs rural and state vs state. Do people in cities have more babies? Do people in blue states have more babies? No and no.
If this is the major driver for collapsing support for public schools, why are the states with the highest birth rates paying their teachers poverty-level wages?
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Your opinions seems to boil down to the idea that the voters have no voice in education funding – that the federal and state governments have cut education funding contrary to the will of the people through economic policy. Otherwise you would acknowledge that voters can in fact force the government properly fund education if they so wish. And if you acknowledge that, then you have to ask why a majority of voters has not forced the government to properly fund education. The answer is that there is not today a majority of voters who want to see it funded. That’s the root cause. If you want to change that, it requires marketing to those voters to get them to care more about education – especially those who do not have kids, as those who do have kids already have substantial motivation.
I see you are struggling the difference between immigrants, and US citizens whose parents are immigrants. This link you have provided says 21.5% of students’ parents came to the US from another country (but the students are US citizens), and 3.8% are immigrants themselves. Of that 25.3% of students, 6.9% have parents who are illegal immigrants (from 2012 data) - with no data for how many are illegal immigrants themselves.
Next time you want to use data as a part of your analysis, please be sure to read the charts and figures completely instead of just glossing over them.
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She asked for a less biased source, not the pseudo-mainstream clearinghouse for exactly those neoconservative think tanks. US News is just a less-overtly racist version of Fox News.
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Verifiable citation fucking needed, STAT.
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The citizenship of the kids is irrelevant. What’s relevant is that the immigrant parents whos children make up a quarter of public school attendees cannot vote for more educational funding because they can’t vote at all. Moreover, the right does not make this fine distinction between child citizens with immigrant parents and brown people they don’t want to help with their tax dollars.
Umm… immigrants can vote, dude.
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So it could be hit with no-true-scotsman? No thanks, I learned that lesson already for this thread. If you really believe that today’s America is not better w.r.t. racism than the 70’s and 80’s then I don’t know what to tell you.
The FBI’s hate crime statistics would like to disagree with you.
Prior to 2016 (2004 - 2015) the rate of hate crimes fluctuated, peaking in 2009. According to the DOJ, the difference between 2004 and 2015 rates was not statistically significant.
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