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As a proud Chicano who was the first in my family to attend college and the only member of my family to have a graduate degree, I am a strong proponent of education. As an educator of color, I counsel my students to strive to overcome economic hardships and expand their horizons.
I push back against biased tests that have for decades been found to enforce cultural barriers for POC to be accepted into higher education. The system is structured to limit OUR access and ability to self-actualize. These calls for justice have caused many to brand me a radical.
It concerns me that a generation of vulnerable students might be falling behind, widening the gap between them and their dom-culture peers. That said, I question why now there is a concern to address these issues when those of us inside the system have been fighting in obscurity.
When organizations like the NFL, NBA, and MLB can't control COVID outbreaks leveraging billion-dollar budgets and safety measures that far exceed anything afforded to public educational facilities that have been in disrepair for decades all in service of "what's best for kids"
I have to wonder why now the federal and state structures are all the sudden pulling a Blind Side and looking out for disadvantaged students of color. Because for decades it hasn't been about uplifting students who look like me. It's been about EQUAL per-pupil funding between –
Suburban schools serving students of higher means with IB GT, and AP courses and urban schools looking to leverage limited funding from declining enrollment brought on by modern-day white flight and no-excuses charters to serve higher numbers of ELL and IEPs plans.
Districts routinely shuffle their "at-risk" students off their rosters following October counts leaving them educationally exiled from their neighborhood schools and drastically impacting their ability to access post-secondary education and career paths.
No one was worried about BiPOC then. But now... we need to get front line essential employees back to work in mass. The pandemic has been hardest hit among women, many of whom are home working with children to meet the demands of remote learning.
Without this labor force returning to work the economic recovery will stall. So like Helen Lovejoy delivering her signature line, "Ohhh, won't somebody please think of the children!" the government becomes concerned about the gap between students of color and their white peers.
WP excerpts tell us WHY there are concerns... "And troubling data is emerging about college application rates. Applications for federal student aid were down 16 percent this fall, as were submissions to the Common Application, a portal used by hundreds of colleges–
The drop there was larger from Hispanic and low-income students and those whose parents did not attend college." So without a return to school, you don't get economic recovery whereby POC and women return to work and you don't get debt slaves paying off college loans.
What we NEVER got was equity in education. That won't change without changes the system isn't willing to make to arrive at EQUITABLE funding for schools serving vulnerable populations in communities of color. Technocrats and neoliberals just want to "lower the temperature."
