«AND I THINK I SEE MORE HOMELESS PEOPLE ON THE STREET EVERY MONTH.HOW CAN WE LET THIS KEEP HAPPENING»

In the face of this educational apartheid, we should have no illusions about what is at stake. As writer Mikel Holt puts it: "The old civil rights movement got us to the lunch counter. The new civil rights agenda is: can our kids read the menu?" It's time to acknowledge that over 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education we are witnessing a de facto resegregation of our schools, with blacks and Hispanics more separate from white students than at any time since the civil rights movement. In contrast, the last 30 years have been a boom time for America's jails, with new prisons popping up at a rate even McDonald's would envy, while the number of people living behind bars has quadrupled: "Over 2 million dissatisfied customers served.Particularly troubling is the fact that close to 150,000 children are in custody and that high school dropout rates are in lockstep with the rate of juvenile incarceration. As a result, many of America's schools have become preparatory facilities not for college but for jail.Time after time, when the choice has come down to books versus bars, our political leaders have chosen to build bigger prisons rather than figuring out how to have fewer kids in them.How is it that we are willing to spend so much on kids once they are found guilty of crimes but so little when they are still innocent? What kind of society spends more than 10 times as much to incarcerate a child as it does to educate him?

Huffington Post
August 3 2009