The Attack on Public Education

The Chicago Reporter. "Emmett Elementary" Image by Max Herman, The Chicago Reporter.

Education is becoming less and less available, particularly within populations which are less advantaged and often black or another minority group in the American populace. Education is what is used to build societies. Education is everything, how we learn, how we interact, it is how we express ourselves through our interests, and it is how most people make their living. Education in our society fuels children to create, sing, learn, and most importantly, live. Without it, our society would not be where it is today, and the education system of our public sphere is the building block that revolutionized urban and rural landscapes alike. It is well known that education takes many forms, on the job training, trade school, college, but the one type that has the highest impact in the metropolitan landscape is public education, or as many people call it the K-12 system in the United States. As such, it has the power to broadly change the urban population it is part of through many different avenues of change.

The image, which depicts a closed down Emmett elementary, is just one of many examples of schools which have been closed throughout the scourge of American innovation and the rise of Private schooling. When we encounter legislation passed in recent history, which we will talk about next, we also begin to see how policy which is meant to help public education students, we find that it can cause effects which hurt public education as a whole.

A Photo taken by Loveland Technologies of Joy Middle School depicting the left behind supplies in a run down classroom. Sourced from Huffpost

Throughout the last decade, we have seen over 11,000 schools closed for various reasons, most of which are 'poor performance' (NCES, 2021). Under these metrics, there is a common beliefs that kids from the urban population are just less intelligent, and there is much deep seated racism from those ideas, seeing as a majority of kids from inner city school are black and latino (NCES, 2022). From this we can begin to see how we initiate the beliefs of our system, which discounts children due to their skin color, and how it can lead to a futherance of racism in their adult lives.

A Photo taken by Lester Graham depicting a closed Hutchins Intermediate School in Detroit Michigan. Sourced from Michigan Radio's article regarding Detroits closing of Neighborhood Schools.

The entirety of this belief roots itself in the closing of these schools. There is a fundamental belief in a large portion of the american populace which relegates urban children as being less worthy of education, whether its because they don't believe in equity, believe these children just aren't as smart, or are outright racist (Garret, 2020).

This is the very principle of our teachings this semester, not neccessarily the outright saying of being racist, but the implicit reachings of different actions and beliefs which all happen as a result of deep seated racism. Throughout this exhibit we will go on to follow the current status of our nation, as well as the differences we can make to end this problem.