For children in Baltimore classrooms, 2018 opened with buildings where temperatures never topped 40 degrees. An incensed teacher wondered why persevering in abominable conditions is something “we only ask of black and brown children.”
A new book by Cornell professor Noliwe Rooks, “Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation and the End of Public Education,” traces the history of separate and unequal education in America.
In 1914, South Carolina spent on average $15 per pupil for white schools but fewer than $2 per pupil for black schools. Appalled at the conditions in which African-American children were forced to learn, that state’s superintendent of education remarked: “It is not a wonder that they do not learn more, but the real wonder is that they learn as much as they do.”
Read the entire Stamford Adocate peice here.
