Understandably, some parents react by giving up on public institutions: to home school or set up parent-run schools and tutorial programs outside the district structure. That’s fine for children who have access to these alternatives. But what happens to the rest of them?
The problem is that the institutions of the state — the school districts and state departments of education — essentially are at war with these children. School finance systems tend to concentrate funds among school districts serving better-off families — overwhelmingly white — and give short shrift to those with poorer, black families. Within districts, resources are diverted from schools serving poor black families and directed toward schools with wealthier families.
Until this is changed, minority children will continue to flow — ill-educated and unprepared for careers or college — into poverty and frequently, if they are male, into the prison system.