False Hope Is Worse Than

If We Allow Public Funds To Be Used To Support Our Relatively Benign, Morally Grounded Schools, We Will Have To Allow Those Public Funds To Be Used For Any Type Of Private School.

But What Is Now Encompassed By The One Word (“school”) Are Two Very Different Kinds Of Institutions That, In Function, Finance And Intention, Serve Entirely Different Roles. Both Are Needed For Our Nation’s Governance. But Children In One Set Of Schools Are Educated To Be Governors; Children In The Other Set Of Schools Are Trained For Being Governed. The Former Are Given The Imaginative Range To Mobilize Ideas For Economic Growth; The Latter Are Provided With The Discipline To Do The Narrow Tasks The First Group Will Prescribe.

I Have Been Criticized Throughout The Course Of My Career For Placing Too Much Faith In The Reliability Of Children's Narratives; But I Have Almost Always Found That Children Are A Great Deal More Reliable In Telling Us What Actually Goes On In Public School Than Many Of The Adult Experts Who Develop Policies That Shape Their Destinies.

Many Of Us Regard Ourselves As Mildly Liberal Or Centrist Politically, Voice Fairly Pleasant Sentiments About Our Poor Children, Contribute Money To Send Poor Kids To Summer Camp, Feel Benevolent. We're Not Nazis; We're Nice People. We Read Sophisticated Books. We Go To Church. We Go To Synagogue. Meanwhile, We Put Other People's Children Into An Economic And Environmental Death Zone. We Make It Hard For Them To Get Out. We Strip The Place Bare Of Amenities. And We Sit Back And Say To Ourselves, "well, I Hope That They Don't Kill Each Other Off. But If They Do, It's Not My Fault.

The Primary Victims Of Katrina, Those Who Were Given The Least Help By The Government, Those Rescued Last Or Not At All, Were Overwhelmingly People Of Color Largely Hidden From The Mainstream Of Society.