Welcome to the blog
U.S. Education and the New Jim Crow.
The blog will examine the causes of the rapidly growing, disenfranchised underclass in the U.S., the social function of the New Jim Crow, and the role that the rapidly deepening educational divide plays in growing this underclass.
The great disparity between the education of the wealthy and the rest contributes early on in life to the burgeoning underclass. School taxes based on property values naturally provide better educational opportunities to wealthy home owners’ kids than the property taxes paid in poorer neighborhoods provide poorer kids. On a recent standardized math test, students’ performance from a high-performing school in one of the New York City’s wealthiest neighborhoods, where 85 percent of students are white or Asian, and just 8 percent are poor, was compared with the test performance of students in a school with a high-needs population in the South Bronx, where 97 percent of students are African American or Hispanic, and 96 percent are poor. The odds of students passing a standardized math test, in the wealthy school were 1,560 percent better than the chances of the students in the South Bronx school (NY1). It’s hard to compete against those odds. Beyond the inferior schools that poor children of color are given, they tend to be treated as criminals within these schools in disproportionate numbers, encounters with the in-school police a common occurence early on.
Since the escalation of the “war on drugs” in the mid-1980s, the prison population has increased 700%, the great majority of whom are African American, Hispanic, and poor. Thirteen percent of all African American men are denied the right to vote because of past felony convictions, the majority for non-violent drug offenses. They most often are not eligible for public housing or food stamps as well.
While the major focus of the blog will be on the workings of the education and criminal justice systems in building The New Jim Crow, the blog will also consider the broader implications of racism, its history in this country, and place in the divide and rule strategy essential to the maintenance of the miniscule minority that creates the laws, controls politics, and seizes the major part of society’s wealth.
The blog will present a wide range of posts, including an initial interview, conducted by the editor of Rethinking Schools, with Michelle Alexander, a civil rights activist and author of the ground-breaking book, The New Jim Crow. Already in the pipeline are several essays on the experiences of a few of the 5 million stopped and frisked youth over the past ten years in New York, a statistical analysis of the impact of school closings on poor and minority students, and articles and comments by researchers, activists, educators, and parents. We intend to provide at least one post a week.
My own experience with U.S. education includes 45 years teaching English in the City University of New York and growing up in the Cleveland Public Schools as the first Jim Crow was coming to an end.
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Henry Lesnick
Blog administrator
