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Saturday, January 15, 2011

Viewpoints: Defend the dream: Education is the civil rights issue of our time - Sacramento Opinion - Sacramento Editorial | Sacramento Bee

Viewpoints: Defend the dream: Education is the civil rights issue of our time - Sacramento Opinion - Sacramento Editorial | Sacramento Bee

Viewpoints: Defend the dream: Education is the civil rights issue of our time

Published: Saturday, Jan. 15, 2011 - 12:00 am | Page 11A

We like to name schools after heroes. But how would Martin Luther King Jr. feel about his name affixed to a persistently failing school, where more than a third of kids drop out year after year – across multiple generations?

Millions of California's children are being sentenced to a life at the bottom of our nation's economic ladder. The dream has been deferred – if not outright denied. In 2009 there were roughly 2 million children attending more than 2,000 failing public schools.

Despite pouring billions of dollars in additional funding into these schools, only a few have turned around.

The racial inequalities of this failure are alarming; last year, the dropout rate of California's African



Read more: http://www.sacbee.com/2011/01/15/3325386/defend-the-dream-education-is.html#ixzz1B7X23RCx