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I don't believe in the "lift all boats" theory of achieving justice. It's why the current "progressive" agenda leaves me cold.
Last month I did a thread looking at how we could bring an anti-racist agenda to health care reform. https://twitter.com/Cajsa/status/1332783187194470402
In a great tangent off that thread @TheButterNutty made suggestions for an anti-racist agenda in education reform, most particularly in regards to IDEA and other special education issues. https://twitter.com/TheButterNutty/status/1332828602782674947
In thinking about policies to improve Education with an anti-racist agenda one of the first things that come to mind for me is addressing the funding inequities in public education. Schools are funded by property taxes which makes for great inequities that the Supreme Court OKs.
Here's the Supreme Court's terrible decision in 1973 where they decided there is no fundamental right to an education, so equal protection does not apply to schooling.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_Independent_School_District_v._Rodriguez
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Antonio_Independent_School_District_v._Rodriguez
Those assholes.
So what happens? There is a $23 Billion shortfall in funding to schools that serve predominantly nonwhite students. https://edbuild.org/content/23-billion
Which is why I think equalizing funding for K-12 is essential to achieving any sort of progress toward liberation and far more vital than any other education reform, including student loan forgiveness.
But there's more. I think we need universal Pre-K as it is shown to help children do better in school. But...let's make sure pre-K is unstructured and fun and not regimented and focused on rote learning. We need to let children be children
And while we're at it. We need to make child care affordable, but with subsidies, not credits and refunds that people cannot afford to front. If you don't have the money to pay for it, a tax credit next year is not helpful.
We need to disclose graduation rates and other performance metrics by race so that problematic school districts that fail BIPOC students can be reformed.
We need an anti-racism curriculum that is integrated into schools with TRAINED and COMPETENT teachers. We need literature, history, and science courses to include the advances from BIPOC and women leaders and end the erasure of all but white men
This means rather than a Black history month, there is Black history/Asian History/Native American history integrated into our curriculum all year round.
We need to kick the cops out of schools and end the school to prison pipeline. Kids should be able to make mistakes without getting arrested.
We need to invest more in underperforming schools, not take their funding away. We need diagnostic evaluations of the problem and investment in the fixes, not just punishing the students for the failures of the adminstration
We should have breakfast and lunch service at schools. They should be financed by the school district, not by parents so no students are stigmatized. Kids who are hungry do not learn well. Feed them.
We need after school programs that include options for students who are not in sports and for young kids, programs that can keep children safely supervised until most parents are home from work.
All schools in a district should be open to all students in a district - so no parents are sent to prison for sending kids to a school out of their neighborhood.
Equalizing funding would reduce this problem.
We can address the digital divide by providing all students with chrome books or other inexpensive laptops. The school district could finance hot spots throughout the district for student wi-fi
Public college should be debt-free and tuition costs should be constrained. Non profit private universities could be required to spend a portion of their endowments on scholarships to maintain nonprofit status.
We need more BIPOC teachers in schools. Black, Latino, Indigenous, and Asian students need to see their possibilities in their teachers. We need more men in elementary schools and more women teaching math and science.
We need teachers to be trained in how to teach in multiple ways to serve students who learn differently. How can you teach a concept using visual, auditory, and manual learning to reach all learners?
We need to focus less on discipline and more on learning. More on thinking and less on memorizing. A noisy classroom is not necessarily a bad classroom, it could be an engaged and vibrant classroom
So those are a few of my ideas... but I am sure there are more. If you have suggestions for how to make schools better AND address systemic inequality, racism, and other oppressions, add them, please.
