A F E D E R A L R I G H T T O E D U C A T I O N
Do we need it?
Do we need a federal right to education?
Do we need a federal right to education?
So the United States does not have a federal right to education. However, we are among the most prosperous and well-educated nations in the world. Do we even need it?
Inadequacy
The United States fails to provide adequate education for its students and support for teachers in order to do so.
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“If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war.”
"A Nation at Risk" a 1983 report
United States National Commission on Excellence in Education
Students
• The United States ranks
13th in reading (behind Poland)
19th in science (behind Slovenia)
38th in the world in math (behind Slovakia)
• 1 in 5 American adults cannot read at a basic level.
• 54% of U.S. adults lack proficiency in literacy, reading below the equivalent of a sixth-grade level.
• 72% of U.S. adults are scientifically illiterate.
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Teachers
• 44% of teachers quit in the first 5 years.
• Teacher salaries are 58% of similarly educated professionals.
• 84% of teachers spend their own money on basic classroom supplies.
• 45% of teachers say they do not feel respected by the public.
• 42% of teachers said their teaching suffered because of the state of their mental health.
• Only 10% of educators would strongly recommend the profession to a young adult.
• 86% of school districts reported difficulty hiring new teachers.
• Between 2010 and 2018, enrollment in teacher preparation programs dropped by roughly a third.
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Arizona
Teacher pay is so low that school districts are recruiting teachers overseas in the Philippines.
Rhode Island
Utah
Lawmakers proposed a bill that would allow teachers to be hired without a bachelor's degree.
Teachers in the United States earn 58% as much as similarly educated professionals, the lowest of OECD countries.
58%
The lack of incentive for our nation's best and brightest to pursue a career in education creates a dooming feedback loop.
Inequality
The United States is the most unequally educated nation in the developed world. American schools are more racially segregated today than in 1968.
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"While some young Americans—most of them white and affluent—are getting a truly world-class education, those who attended schools in high poverty neighborhoods are getting an education that more closely approximates school in developing nations. . . . With the highest poverty rate in the developed world, and amplified by the inadequate education received by many children in low-income schools, the United States is threatening its own future.”
National Equity and Excellence Commission, 2013
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De jure vs. de facto segregation
How can we still be segregated? I thought Brown v. Board of Education put an end to that?
De jure. Brown v. Board of Education ended de jure segregation in American public schools. De jure segregation is enforced by law or government policy. It is a deliberate and legally mandated separation of different groups of people. De jure segregation is outlawed in the United States.
De facto. The United States is still plagued by de facto segregation. De facto segregation is the result of social, economic, or other factors. It is segregation that arises through societal norms, housing patterns, economic disparities, and individual choices rather than explicit discriminatory laws. It results in people of different races living in separate neighborhoods without any rules forcing them to do so.*
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Although Brown v. Board of Education rid the nation of de jure segregation, San Antonio v. Rodriguez essentially constitutionalized de facto segregation—the conditions of the rich and poor, and most often white and non-white, remain both separate and unequal.
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The Michelle Fine Report
In 2002, social psychologist Michelle Fine spoke to California students who attended low-income, de facto segregated schools. She wished to study if attending schools with structural problems, exposure to high levels of under-credentialed teachers, substantial teacher turnover, and inadequate books and materials produced adverse psychological and academic effects on students. Her findings are discouraging. Students display:
1. Anger associated with relative deprivation in their schools.
2. Shame due to the mis-education received and the structural conditions of their schools.
3. Civic alienation and doubts about democratic promises.
The excerpts from interviews are heartbreaking:
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I don’t really feel like that they’re preparing me for what I have to do after high school because I don’t even have a math class because they say all the math classes are too crowded. So, I don’t get math this year.
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I think it’s from a young age, we’re started off wrong. And at least in Oakland, I don’t know about other school districts, but so I just think that we’re cheated from like a really young age.
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Well, it makes me feel like, you know, sort of upset. I mean, am I getting the same treatment as these more wealthy schools... It’s like it makes you feel, you know, kind of mad, because we get no help at all.
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People look at the city, it’s like a shit hole... That’s the way they think of it... I screw them down there, right.
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And I feel like, I don’t know, we’re being cheated out here. I don’t know. I just do.
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We can’t even get the basics? What? They say there’s not enough money? Okay.
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I don’t know who to be mad at. I don’t know if this is the, is it the school board’s fault being, mismanaging the money? Or is it a lack of money? Or is it, I don’t know if it’s just inside my school with the administrators? Because it just makes me wonder what’s going on with some schools, kids get new books every year. But yet I open textbooks and it’s still I have dates like 1995 in there. And you just wonder why don’t we get new books. We, is it because they think in the so-called better schools the kids’ behavior brings them new textbooks or whatever? Because I know, as far as I’m concerned, I’m a pretty good kid. I don’t get in trouble and I get pretty good grades. And I don’t feel I should suffer.
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[When I see pictures of better schools] I feel like, like I said, it’s a lot of frustration and you say it, well, anger, maybe even a little envious.
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If I could have my ideal school, I guess I would have seats on the toilets and enough paper in the bathroom. to clean yourself.
*In his book, The Color of Law, Richard Rothstein explains how government policies, not mere personal choices, were responsible for creating and perpetuating "de facto" racial segregation in America's housing and education systems.
Education is where we decide whether we love our children enough not to expel them from our world and leave them to their own devices, nor to strike from their hands their chance of undertaking something new, something unforeseen by us, but to prepare them in advance for the task of renewing a common world.
HANNAH ARENDT
Two school districts. Two worlds.
At Auschwitz, Nazi physician Josef Mengele was particularly interested in identical twins and they were the subjects of his horrific and unethical research.
Two school districts. Separated by 20 miles. One, a shocking example of the inadequacy of American public schools, particularly in our inner-cities. The other, a shining example of what public schools should be. But juxtaposed, they highlight the gross inequalities of the American public school system.
Detroit Public Schools
• For Detroit, Michigan 8th-graders, "Illiteracy is the norm."
• Students attended “schools in name only, characterized by slum-like conditions” that “functionally deliver no education at all.”
• The City of Detroit admitted that “none of the school district’s buildings were in compliance with city health and safety codes.”
• In colder months, students had to wear jackets and hats in the classroom.
• In warmer months, classrooms reach 110 degrees causing teachers and students to vomit and faint.
• Mice, cockroaches, and vermin infest classrooms resulting in “the first thing some teachers do each morning is attempt to clean up rodent feces before their students arrive.”
• Hot drinking fountains.
• Decades-old textbooks, or none at all.
• Missing or unqualified teachers. In one case, “an eighth-grade student was put in charge of teaching seventh and eighth-grade math classes.”
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Novi Community Schools District
Twenty miles outside of Detroit is Novi Community Schools District, the #1 rated school district in Michigan. Novi has polished facilities, qualified teachers, ample materials and resources. At Novi, college preparedness is 74%. The graduation rate is 97%.
Back in Detroit, English proficiency at an elementary school was 4%. At a high school, it was 2%. College preparedness was 0%.
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The American "Experiment"
The United States has constructed conditions in our public schools to something similar to that of Dr. Mengele’s laboratory. Where we study a set of American twins raised in different schools. One in hellish conditions and the other with every resource and support system available. One leaves illiterate, the other adept and capable. Then we release them into society. In jest, we call them “equal.” And then sit back and watch the cruel American experiment play out.
A testimony out of California:
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​Every day, every hour, talented students are being sacrificed. . . .
They’re [the schools] destroying lives.
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Let us call this what it is: we are administering a silent genocide of American dreams and potential.
Detroit Public Schools
Novi Community Schools District
20 miles
Failing Nation
The inadequacy and inequality that plague the American public school system is causing the United States to fail as a democracy and functioning society. We imprudently cut out public education—the beating heart of our democracy—from the body of our nation, and expect it to live.
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"In a sort of ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them to be virtue and enterprise. We laughed honor and we are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful."
C. S. LEWIS, The Abolition of Man
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Voter Participation
The United States ranks 139th in voter participation out of 172 world democracies.
Freedom
Civic Participation
Less than a fifth of high school seniors can explain how citizen participation benefits democracy.
Economy
Low literacy levels cost the United States $2.2 trillion a year.
Criminal Justice
Each high school graduate saves American taxpayers $70,000 over the individual's lifetime.
Public Health
Each high school graduate saves America $50,000 in health expenses over the course of their lifetime.
National Security
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Lincoln's Warning
In 1838, more than 20 years before he stepped onto the national stage, Abraham Lincoln addressed a crowd in Springfield, Illinois. The young lawyer spoke of how, considering America's geography, it is nearly impossible that the death of the United States will come from an external force, but instead, that our undoing will come from within.
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At what point shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall we expect some transatlantic military giant, to step the Ocean, and crush us at a blow? Never!—All the armies of Europe, Asia and Africa combined, with all the treasure of the earth in their military chest; with a Bonaparte for a commander, could not by force, take a drink from the Ohio, or make a track on the Blue Ridge, in a trial of a thousand years.
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At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
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Lincoln's Lyceum Address was one of his earliest published speeches.
The Course of Empire, Thomas Cole, 1833-1836
What does it do?
Considering the wealth and capability of the United States, we are guilty of heinous neglect of our education system. Perhaps it is worth a look at a federal right to education. But what will it do?