America’s School System Is Racist to the Core. Here’s How To Build an Anti-Racist One.
Veiled by comfortably coded references to local control, curricular discretion, and choice, racial bias subsists throughout the educational status quo. The threads of racism are deeply woven into the fabric of American schooling.
To start with the most obvious targets, school district lines and property taxes largely follow patterns of racial and income segregation, with wealthier, whiter districts often getting even wealthier by disproportionate access to rigged systems of state aid. The map of America's over 10,000 school districts is the geography of institutional racism. Whatever other more neutral reasons are ascribed to this politically determined checkerboard: "neighborhood," "community," "self-determination," it is no more supportable than protecting Confederate monuments as historical, commemorative, or educational.
America's lack of social mobility, cutting against our collective myth of limitless opportunity, is a pernicious product of district-based racial segregation and should no longer be legally supported.