Target: Public Schools

It’s back to school time. Stores have sales on school supplies, comic strips show kids in backpacks groaning their way to class, and politicians slam the schools as failures. Welcome to open season on public education.
Despite whatever flaws the likes of Newt Gingrich and Al Sharpton can point out, the fact is that public school failure is an urban myth. Statistics show that in 2008 84.2% of African-Americans age 25 and older had high school diplomas; 9l.8% of whites had them, as did 85.7% of Asians and 63.7% of Hispanics. No other country can match these figures, the result of free, public - that means government-run - schools.
Okay, fine, but look at the discrepancies between the ethic groups’ graduation rates. How does that happen, since we know from plentiful research that there are no inherent differences in ability among such groups. The reason is not one we like to face. It is poverty, whether in the black or brown inner-cities or the rural poor of the picking fields of California or the hollows of Appalachia.
Millions of children, mostly minorities, live in families surviving, just barely, below the poverty line. (Poverty is defined by the federal government as a family of four living on $18,000 a year or less.) Poverty means living in the violence of drug - and gang-infested neighborhoods. It means having no health insurance and no medical facilities nearby and no money to buy medicine. It means broken homes and poor school attendance. Above all, it means kids coming to school half sick, hungry, sleepy, scared, and without encouragement to learn from parents who themselves lack education and have passed on to their children a lack of commitment to learning.
Child poverty is a reality that politicians do not want to recognize or work to eradicate. Instead, they blame the only institution that really tries consistently to cope with and help these children the rest of us would rather forget about. No political leader is willing to launch another war on poverty as Lyndon Johnson did in the l960’s. It is easier to target public schools, where the problems are most visible. Teachers and teacher unions become the villains - pretty much like blaming doctors and hospitals for the poor health of poor America.
For solutions, politicians, turning to the moneyed groups that offer themselves as the solution, push for various kinds of private or charter education. They want us to believe that inserting the profit motive into education will produce better results and bring up the statistics about minority kids. Some of the right wing extremists are willing to ignore the facts about poverty and dismantle the best public school system is the world. But their for-profit schools cannot match the public schools for educating all the children - the mentally challenged, the physically challenged, the newly arrived immigrant with no English skills, the emotionally disturbed, everyone. It’s a snap to educate just the brightest, to pick and choose which kids to enroll. That’s not what public education does: our schools work to educate all comers, no matter what.
And that is what makes public schools the cornerstone of American democracy; that is what Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he planted the idea of a school in every township in America in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787. That’s the basic concept of American democracy, and it must not be sacrificed.