I find I like to talk with her as often as I can. It feels to me as if I’m standing with her on a very solid piece of ground after a tornado’s passed. Strength, it seems, in somebody who had a lot of courage to begin with, can at last renew itself.
I emphasize teachers because they are largely left out of the debate. None of the bombastic reports that come from Washington and think tanks telling us what needs to be ‘fixed’ – I hate such a mechanistic word, as if our schools were automobile engines – ever asks the opinions of teachers.
More money is put into prisons than into schools. That, in itself, is the description of a nation bent on suicide. I mean, what is more precious to us than our own children? We are going to build a lot more prisons if we do not deal with the schools and their inequalities.
Like grain in a time of famine, the immense resources which the nation does in fact possess go not to the child in the greatest need but to the children of the highest bidder-the child of parents who, more frequently than not, have also enjoyed the same abundance when they were schoolchildren.
Separate and unequal didn’t work 100 years ago. It will not work today.