Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man

by Emmanuel Acho

Our public school system is just as flawed, and for related reasons. In most states, school funding breaks down like this: state taxes (45 percent), local taxes (45 percent), and federal taxes (10 percent). While states sometimes subsidize funding shortfalls, it’s not usually enough to level the playing field. If the homes in a school’s neighborhood are worth less than the homes of schools in other neighborhoods, then those owners pay less taxes. If there are fewer businesses in the particular neighborhood, there will also be much less tax revenue. So schools in poor neighborhoods are forced to do more with less. Not only that, the American educational system is de facto almost as segregated as it was during Jim Crow, because of those redlined neighborhoods, the defeat of busing programs, and lobbyists for local school districting—often simply (white) parents who want to make sure their good schools stay good. It all adds up to a system described by Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones as “separate and unequal.”