A Broken Windows Approach To Education Reform
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In America’s inner cities, the hope engendered by Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech – whose 50th anniversary we celebrated this week – quickly devolved over the ensuing decades into an epidemic of fatherless children and concomitant crime. In most urban locales, this pattern continues, even as many of the civil rights gains courageously sought by Dr. King have been met.
For decades since King’s beautiful speech, sociologists of urban decay sought remedies for the nation’s crime epidemic in increased government beneficence. This fateful commingling of civil rights with top-down social engineering was a Great Society conflation that engendered a permanent American underclass, beholden to self-serving demagogues for handouts and crippled by the sacrosanct victim status bestowed upon them by the guilt-ridden custodians of the then flush American entitlement state. This was hardly the “dream” of disciplined, faith-based, family-friendly, self-motivated, nonviolent empowerment that was Dr.