Income Inequality, Educational Inequity, Privatization… Pittsburgh to Chicago
Two blog posts arrived in my in-box today. The first is from a young woman, Jessie Ramey, whose blog is called Yinzercation and whose recent post is titled Diane Ravitch Launched, Yinzer-Style. This sent me, of course to Google and ultimately Wikipedia for a definition: “Yinzer is a 20th century term playing on the Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania second-person plural vernacular “yinz.” This post is about Diane Ravitch’s book launch for Reign of Error on last Monday night at a synagogue in Pittsburgh.
The event drew a thousand people and involved presentations by several school music groups. Writes Ms. Ramey, ” Several student leaders from the Westinghouse Bulldogs high-stepping marching band joined Dr. Ravitch on stage to explain what has happened to arts education, music, and band at their high school. Despite the proud Westinghouse legacy that includes many of this country’s jazz greats (think Billy Strayhorn, Al Aaron, Mary Lou Williams and a host of others), the ragtag band has almost no instruments, hasn’t had new uniforms in more than a dozen years, and can’t even afford drumsticks. Yet the students are passionate about holding their band together.”
The second blog post, The Myth of the Level Playing Field, is from the Rev. John Thomas at Chicago Theological Seminary. He too writes about public education, describing the scene as he rides his bike to work each morning down Stony Island Parkway, “past two schools within a quarter of a mile of each other. On one stretch… sits the new Earl Shapiro Hall, a slick,