A Broken Windows Approach To Education Reform
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NEW YORK, NY - AUGUST 28: Freddy Walters watches a giant screen in Times Square as U.S. President Barack Obama speaks on the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' speech on August 28, 2013 in New York City. With the official ceremony in Washington D.C., a crowd gathered in Manhattan's Times Square to watch the President's speech broadcast live and commemorate the anniversary of what is seen as one of the most important days in the history of American civil rights. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)
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.