BY MICHAEL B. FABRICANT
Professor in the School of Social Work and executive officer of the Ph.D. program in social welfare at Hunter College, City University of New York. He is author of Organizing for Educational Justice.
The present public education policy conversation is focused on exit and blame. Very rarely do we hear about how an unequal investment in our students influences academic performance. We’re talking about an inequality in the investment in, for example, suburban schools relative to their inner city school counterparts and about the U.S. having the one of the most unequal student per-capita investment records in the world. The discrepancy between the U.S.’s investment in poor and more affluent children is dramatic by any measure. Simply throwing money at problems is not a solution. As Linda Darling-Hammond and others note, we know what works in improving academic performance. Yet, targeted investments in teacher support, parent engagement, and after-school programming are simply not being made…