PHOTO /SARAH JANE RHEE
Nationalize Funding
CHICAGO—At the far north end of Chicago sits the Rogers Park neighborhood, where the Chicago Public Schools (CPS) celebrates Black History Month – by slashing school funding. What distinguishes Gale Math and Science Academy — one school that serves Rogers Park — is that 60 per cent of the students at this school are African American. The remainder consists of children of parents from many other nations — people from South and Central America and Mexico; children from China, Myanmar, Cambodia and India; children whose parents are immigrants from Haiti, Jamaica, Nigeria, Ethiopia. This school is a United Nations of students.
Yet this school is not given the classroom resources to deal with all this variation, especially the question of students for whom English is not their first language. Combine this with the fact that this school sits in the midst of the most impoverished section of Rogers Park, where 98% of the students come from families living in poverty.
This diversity gives CPS a tremendous opportunity: Provide students with an opening into the many rich cultures that are present in the school. That would be one legacy of African American history. Instead, CPS cut $500,000 from their budget at the opening of the school year and had nothing else to offer except further cuts. This forces the school to scramble to provide sports programs and uniforms and to keep one part-time art teacher and one music teacher, by cutting corners on things like building maintenance and on supplies as basic as toilet paper.
This month elements of African American history will be incorporated into the classroom. One lesson that should be learned is that African American history is central to all American history, and respect for African American history is central to developing respect for all. One example of this is that education was legally denied slaves in the pre-Civil War South. After the Civil War, during Reconstruction, the demands of freedmen created a system that also included many poor whites who had been excluded before.
Education is a basic survival right of all, in order to be able to contribute to society. For the students of Gale School to take advantage of this right, local school funding is inadequate. It’s not just that CPS is wicked. It’s that CPS is part of a larger state and federal system that is rigged against poor communities and the public schools in them. Property tax funding favors wealthier school districts (e.g. the suburbs that are on the northern rim of Chicago), not Chicago (and the suburbs on Chicago’s southern rim). In Chicago, as in most big cities, that means funding discriminates against African Americans and Latinos, who are the majority of public school students. A national funding system could allocate resources equitably to address classroom as well as other community needs.
This Black History Month let’s raise again the historic demand, rooted in the fight against slavery, that education must be for all, guaranteed by nationalized funding for all!
