America's New Educational Aparheid

America’s New Educational Apartheid

The institutionalization of identity politics has transformed America's system of free public education--once the great equalizer--into a brutal tracking system. It is cruel, inhumane, and a luxery the nation can no longer afford.

Before they ever walk through the school house door, black children, brown children, the poor, and those for whom English is a second language are labled "at risk" and channeled into dummied down programs. While policy makers speak of “no child left behind,” the reality on the ground is a cinderblock and linoleum gulag that profiles small children and leaves whole classes of society without the literacy, numeracy and civic virtue they need to function in a post-industrial society.

We have become a house divided against itself—two Americas, separate and unequal. Educational dysfunction deeply rooted in failed social policy has given rise to a two-track society without a common culture, a shared sense of citizenship or a vital moral center.

Ironically, since the monumental 1954 Supreme Court’s ruling, Brown vs. Board of Education, ending state sanctioned educational apartheid the situation has actually worsened. Virtually every urban system in the United States has installed pupil assignment policies that effectively re-segregated schools by preemptively labeling the poor and students of color as “at risk” and then assigning them to the short bus.

Immediately after the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling, parents and activists in Washington, D.C. labeled the policy “programmed retardation,” insisting that it was even more harmful than the practice of segregation in the Old South—but the policy persists to this day. The question is, why?

As Bill Gates recently noted, “Once we realize that we are keeping low-income and minority kids out of rigorous courses, there can be only two arguments for keeping it that way – either we think they can’t learn, or we think they’re not worth teaching. The first argument is factually wrong; the second is morally wrong.”