A Level Playing Field: School Finance in the Northeast

Preface

Preface In 1968, I read Jonathan Kozol’s book, Death at an Early Age. The descriptions of the harm done to children in school appalled me. They also rang a bell. In South Jersey in the late 1940s, I had seen my black friend, Frances, humiliated at school so much that one day she was driven to drink a bottle of ink in reply to our teacher’s asking her, in annoyance, why she was so black. Frances was extremely talented. At ten she could split wood, wash clothes in a bucket, take care of her younger siblings, make Shirley Temple curls on her older sister, and slaughter, pluck, eviscerate, cut up, and cook a chicken on a woodstove. She worked picking crops in the fields in the summer to earn money for her family. It seemed to me that Frances (or Franny, as everyone except her teacher called her) could deal with everything, from her two-year-old brother Jimmy’s tears over the refusal of the grocer to cut him a slice of baloney for a nickel, to the death of her father from exposure to agricultural chemicals. Frances knew how to survive. A grade behind me at Blue Anchor Grammar School, Franny disappeared from my sight after her freshman year in high school. After fifty years I still wonder, with admiration, love, and regret, what happened to her. Despite her incredible strength, Franny did not have much of a chance, but she was tough. I hope she survived, but I wish she had a chance to thrive. I also hope that no child will have to struggle to survive in the coming century. Unfortunately, this is not yet the case. Kozol’s book made me realize that I wanted to do something. In 1949 I could not help Franny, except by being her friend, but in the 1970s, mother of three young children, I could do something for children like her. I volunteered to tutor students at the local junior high my children would attend. My first student was a young black boy, Alex, who was about Franny’s age when I had played with her in South Jersey, boiling over with hostility, struggling with learning disabilities and attention problems, but with a fine poetic and artistic streak. His teacher, Hilda Enoch, cared so deeply about each child that she wanted Alex to have the special attention he needed. After working with Hilda, I decided to become certified as a xi teacher so that I could do what she was doing. Years later, after teaching for more than a decade, I am a teacher of teachers. The ideals of democracy—liberty and justice for all—require that there be a level playing field. To realize such an ideal, all children must receive a quality education. The dice cannot be loaded against some of them from the start. They must be equipped to participate fully, both as children and as adults, in the political, social, intellectual, artistic, and economic life of the community. For this reason, the United States had long proclaimed dedication to the ideal of free, tax-supported public education, offering equality of educational opportunity to all children regardless of their status . In 1647, the Massachusetts Bay Colony required towns of more than fifty households to establish public schools. In the 1830s, Horace Mann proclaimed a common education “the great equalizer,” which would allow working-class children to escape the poverty of their parents. When the California Supreme Court ruled that the public school finance system of the state violated the equal protection clauses of both the constitution of California and the United States in Serrano v. Priest (1971), the justices quoted Horace Mann on education as a natural right. I believe in the existence of a great, immortal immutable principle of natural law, or natural ethics,—a principle antecedent to all human institutions, and incapable of being abrogated by any ordinance of man . . . , which proves the absolute right to an education of every human being that comes into the world, and which, of course, proves the correlative duty of every government to see that the means of that education are provided for all . . . (italics in original, reference omitted)1 Mann included girls and women, opening the door to higher education for women teachers in normal schools. In the heyday of the melting-pot metaphor, education was thought to serve as the vehicle of assimilation. In the 1920s and 1930s, George Counts and others thought that...