The starkest example of this is in one of our wealthiest and most progressive cities, San Francisco, where 70% of the White students are proficient in math but a scant 12% of Black students have reached that level. How can a city with the collective resources of a small nation, and a political system more symbolic of progressive ideology than any other, sustain such racially unjust outcomes in education?
I have struggled for answers, but found them elusive. However, what I know for sure is that the political class of cities like San Francisco can’t be allowed to ignore their official responsibility to ensure every child in their jurisdiction has an equal opportunity to learn. And none of them can honestly say that it exists today.
Sadly, some of them will resist ownership of the educational problems of their cities, preferring to blame-shift to lower offices governing local schools. They will offer platitudes and point to vague “equity” plans. They will call for patience and time. Dr. King would recognize this problem as an evolution of the same “White moderate” he struggled with years ago. While most everyone then expected injustice in Southern cities, Dr. King had a harsh assessment of Northern ones too.
He said:
In my travels in the North I was increasingly becoming disillusioned with the power structures there. I encountered the tragic and stubborn fact that in virtually no major city was there a mayor possessing statesmanship, understanding, or even strong compassion on the civil rights question. Many of them sat on platforms with all the imposing regalia of office to welcome me to their cities…Yet when the issues were joined concerning local conditions only the language was polite; the rejection was firm and unequivocal…there was blindness, obtuseness, and rigidity that would only be altered by a dynamic movement.
Today he would see we still need a “dynamic movement” to address the “blindness” and “obtuseness” allowing children to be diminished by ineffective systems. Today he would still say “freedom is not given, it is won by struggle.”
Indeed, our report suggests that politically progressive cities, despite the socially liberal views of their residents, don’t just have heartstopping gaps in learning outcomes and graduation rates between White students and their peers of color—those gaps are unexplainably larger than in cities that are more politically conservative.
I’ll pause for you to take that in.
As you can read in the report, we hoped to find something that would easily explain the difference in student outcomes. Maybe city size is the real reason these progressive cities have such disparities? Or income inequality? Poverty rates? Alas, controlling for these factors couldn’t erase the sadly ironic correlation between larger gaps and a city’s progressive values.
So, what’s the remedy? Should progressives lose faith in their values and transform their donkey into an elephant? No. The opposite is true. Progressives—particularly the leaders and decision-makers in these cities—should demonstrate their values and stop living by what Dr. King called “a mythical concept of time.” Stop asking marginalized families “to wait for a ‘more convenient season’” or a new silver bullet policy, or improbable budget changes.
[pullquote position=\”right\”]The shameful gaps we see are fixable.[/pullquote] There are districts we see in our study of conservative cities where the gaps are small or even nonexistent. We should investigate them.
We also should commend the work in progressive cities like Oakland where some community members are rising up, transcending traditional political boundaries and building coalitions of parents to create tickets to opportunity. We see that in progressive cities like Chicago years of educational reforms have yielded unprecedented gains and provided families with game-changing options.
In this heightened political year, many of us will be wearing our political stripes on our sleeves. I am only asking that you reconcile your declared values with the unjust outcomes you see in your city. How can you hold your political leaders to account for “world-class cities” where many children can’t read?
As people of good faith,
Our goal should be simple, as was his: “Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God’s children.”
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