Recently Chicago Teachers Union president Karen Lewis spoke about education reform at a City Club of Chicago luncheon.
This speech was given a day before the first set of school closings, twenty-eight, was set to begin. Her comments are representative of the problems in the black community.
She asked: “When will there be an honest conversation about poverty and racism and inequality that hinders the delivery of an education product in our school system? When will we address the fact that rich white people think they know what’s in the best interest of children of African-Americans and Latinos, no matter what the parents’ income or education level?” She went on to say that Chicago is the most segregated city in America.
She did not stop there. Lewis said that there are more foreclosures and school closures in minority neighborhoods. She also blamed banks for driving people out of their homes through illegal foreclosures, resulting in underutilized schools and a smaller tax base. “If the banks had not crashed our economy, the district would now have nearly $180 million more to invest in our classrooms,” she said. She forgot that banks were coerced to give loans to people who could not afford them which inevitability and predictably resulting in foreclosures and massive losses in the banking industry.
She said inequality has prevented people from embracing more revenue for schools through higher property taxes. “If you look at the majority of the tax base for property taxes in Chicago, they’re mostly white, who don’t have a real interest in paying for the education of poor black and brown children,” she said.
Of course her solution called for more school funding rather than more cuts and layoffs – pointing instead to TIF funds, taxes on commuters and financial trades, and what she called a more equitable tax system to bring in billions of dollars for schools. For the left there is never enough funding for any program.
Let’s dissect this. First, schools were closed because they were failing. Also there was an oversupply of schools and lastly a need to cut costs. The reality is that until true reform is implemented including free choice, schools will continue to fail but that is a discussion for another day. Lewis of course blames racism for the cuts despite the fact that the mayor is black and Chicago has been owned by the Democrats for decades. It is because “rich white folks” don’t understand or care about the needs of black children. I ask, when it comes to education shouldn’t the needs of black children be the same as white children, Asian children and Latino children? Should not we concern ourselves with really educating our youths rather than filling them with propaganda? Well the teacher’s unions do not care about that at all. And the Democrat politicians see the educational system as a training camp for indoctrinating future voters and rewarding their allies in the unions.
She asks when will there be an honest conversation about poverty and racism. Well her idea of an honest conversation is quite different from a truly honest discussion. Her discussion would be about blacks as victims and whites as haters. Fairness would be discussed as a need for the rich (white) folks to pay more in taxes to help out the minorities. She would not want to discuss decay of the black family unit, proliferation of single mother households, lack of responsibility of black fathers, abortion rates of young black women, unemployment rate of black youths and generational welfare in the black community, all by design and made possible by the black leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton and Democrat Party policy. These so called leaders thrive on the misery of blacks. Their livelihood depends on it. Democrats also have a vested interest in perpetuating victimhood and dependency in the minority communities.
Yes Ms. Lewis we do need a really honest discussion about this.
