whither the American Dream?

I just finished Jonathan Kozol's Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. Reading this book is grueling. Each chapter told the story of a different urban environment and, despite the marked geographic differences between cities such as New York, Detroit, East Saint Louis, San Antonio and Washington D.C., each chapter exposed the same endless litany of discrimination and inequality characterizing these urban schools. It is a relentless story of racism, discrimination, corruption and poverty. But most disturbing is the revelation of the benign indifference of the privileged who not only permit the existence of these inequalities, but who also fight tooth and nail to ensure that these inequalities remain. For they, the privileged, are motivated not only to protect the benefits guaranteed by the higher revenues of their property tax, but also, and more tenaciously, to protect the privilege itself: the gap between those who have and those who don't which permits certain individuals to surpass others. At root in the local policies and state legislation is the desire to protect their "right" to have more than others.
Jonathan Kozol describes how typical press coverage focuses on the attitudes and behaviors of ghetto residents; research consistently returns to the question of the values of these residents. However, he points out, researchers never focus on "values of the people who have segregated these communities. There is no academic study of the pathological detachment of the very rich" (193 Kozol 1991).

I grew up in a suburb with this precise attitude. The city of my childhood established its boundaries in the era of desegregation; with careful attention to the demographic make-up of surrounding communities, the city elders delineated their territory with an eye to keep the white neighborhoods in and the non-white neighborhoods out. The result was that in my small city, the schools were 98% white, 2% Asian, Hispanic and black, whereas in the surrounding cities, with school populations three times as large, whites comprised the minority of the school populations. My school system was wealthy; it provided excellent teaching, demanding courses, a variety of higher level math, science, language and literature courses. A point of pride was the International Baccalaureate program, an alternative to AP courses which prioritized critical thinking and research on original documents. Although we were poor, I and my siblings were extremely lucky to have such educational wealth.

Today I am aware of these existing discrepancies, both in my childhood home and in my current home. The state took over control of the schools in Oakland in 2002, when the schools went bankrupt. Schools were closed, programs cut and teachers fired in an attempt to get out of debt. But none of these financial efforts resolve the real issues: that urban schools need more state and federal money than suburban schools for the very obvious reason that urban property taxes provides less than one-third than taxes generated in the suburbs. In urban environments where the need is greater (older buildings, more social and environmental problems, larger school populations, fewer resources), there is simply less money to address it.

In the words of Mayor Jerry Brown, the state of Oakland's school system "is a crisis that has been going on for decades." With a 52% drop-out rate, Oakland high schools are failing an enormous student population. But how surprising is it? In schools with 2000 students, classes of 35-40, no lunch programs (despite the 68% of Oakland's students qualify for the federal lunch program), and minimal resources, who can blame the kids for ditching?