From Every Mountainside by R. Drew Smith

Author:R. Drew Smith [Smith, R. Drew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781438447247
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 18705337
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 2013-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

Mixed Messages from Civil Rights Movement Standard Bearers

Assigning Civil Rights Movement significance to either side of educational fairness activism has been complicated by the fact that activists from both sides have occasionally attempted to confer such significance to their side of the debate, but also by the fact that prominent standard bearers of the Civil Rights Movement legacy have landed on opposite sides of the issue. A lack of consensus, for example, between prominent clergy with significant civil rights and Democratic Party leadership bona fides has blunted moral legacy claims by either side, while contributing no doubt to the lack of a broad-based black clergy mobilization on educational fairness.

Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, have actively promoted fair funding of urban public schools while opposing vouchers and choice strategies that draw resources away from these schools. Jackson, as one of the stronger post-Civil Rights Movement advocates of school funding adequacy, has often argued that voucher programs cannot address the problem of inadequate educational opportunities for millions of at-risk public school children. Says Jackson, “Vouchers are no substitute for a quality program for all. It is a rope for a few rather than a net for all.”50 This succinctly summarizes the concerns many have expressed about vouchers, but it also points to broader concerns about school funding adequacy Jackson has expressed dating back to the early-1970s formation of his Operation PUSH organization (later renamed Rainbow/PUSH Coalition).

Jackson ally and Rainbow/PUSH board member, James Meeks, has also brought significant profile to the school funding adequacy issue. Meeks, a Chicago-area megachurch pastor and State Senator, called for a student boycott of Chicago public schools during the first week of class in September 2008. Approximately 1,000 student boycotters, accompanied by Meeks and numerous chaperones, boarded buses on the first day of school and headed to a suburban school north of Chicago to symbolically attempt to enroll the students in that school. The following day the students and chaperones, including Meeks, held sit-ins in the lobbies of several downtown Chicago corporations and Mayor Richard Daley's office. Meeks ended the boycott after the second day to attempt negotiations with Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich. The point being made by Meeks, the parents, and approximately fifty clergy that supported the boycott was that funding urban public schools via property taxes inevitably leads to urban-suburban disparities of the sort found in metropolitan Chicago, where the 2008 Chicago Public school allocation per-student was $9,600 compared with more than $19,000 per-student in the northern suburb of Evanston. Both Jackson and Sharpton were active supporters of the boycott.

Where Rev. Sharpton has attracted far more attention on educational fairness matters, however, has been in his recently emerging leadership of an organization called Education Equality Project (EEP). The EEP, founded in 2008 by Sharpton and New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein, states its mission to be “… leading a civil rights movement to eliminate the racial and ethnic achievement gap in public education by working to create an effective school for every child.” It pursues

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.