Enacting Economic Equity
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| It’s the avowed 800 pound gorilla in the room, No, Not that ONE! |
It’s the avowed 800 pound gorilla in the room: poverty just mucks up everyone’s numbers. Kids don’t “achieve learning”, schools fail to make “adequate yearly progress”, businesses can’t locate sufficient or acceptable workers.
The “education gap” between rich and poor is the perfect common bogeyman: everyone agrees it is intolerable. And it’s a start to have a common enemy. Consensus on tackling it is trickier. But its imperative is clear; poverty has life-long, even cross-generational effects. Mustering the will and way to “throw money at the condition” of poverty may seem enduringly complicated, but next week LAUSD’s school board can take a small, simple step in the right direction. You can too by signing the petition explained below and turning out in front of the board in person to fully support all our entitled students – details follow below.
In 1965 Lyndon Johnson started this process by signing the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA), familiarly known as “Title I”. Designed to “improve academic achievement of the disadvantaged”, the act has sporadically been amended, reworked and even renamed in 2001, redubbed (as it were) the “No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act” during the republican administration of George W Bush. Democrat Barak Obama’s “Race To The Top”