Washington, DC–(ENEWSPF)–February 9, 2017
Black people in the United States have long believed that education is the great equalizer. Despite persistent stereotypes and media portrayals to the contrary, black parents routinely encourage their children to aspire for degrees (whether they be high school, college or beyond) in order to improve their chances in life. This is a common value which reaches across political ideology.
Given that, it’s interesting (to say the least) to read Omarosa Manigault’s Black History Month take on blacks and education—specifically how, because of the president’s commitment to education, blacks will do better than they ever have.
I am proud to serve under a president who has made it clear that the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no more, including — and I would argue especially — African Americans.
…His desire is for every disadvantaged child in the United States to have an opportunity to attend the public, private, charter, magnet, religious or home school of the parents’ choice. He believes this is the great civil rights issue of our time, and African Americans all over the country agree, as does our new Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos.
Access to quality education is most certainly a critical civil rights issue and school choice is worthy of debate. But it simply makes no sense to support the idea of sending kids to private, magnet or charter schools without addressing how we fix public schools. The Senate just confirmed an education secretary that has worked most of her adult life to funnel money away from public education. So any suggestion that this administration will prioritize improving public schools ignores facts and history.
The president has also pledged to ensure funding for historically black colleges and universities and to increase support for trade and vocational education, which will provide African-American students with the skills that lead to better jobs, higher wages and increased prosperity.
Trump has “pledged†lots of things, most of which will have a deleterious impact on many groups, but most certainly for black people. We have no reason to believe that the same man who doesn’t seem to know who Frederick Douglass was and often sees us as a monolithic group known as “the blacks†will suddenly see the importance in investing in the sacred institutions of higher learning that educated blacks when no other universities in the country would.
Finally, Trump has only shown that he sees black students as stereotypes—violent criminals living in urban jungles who are likely bound for prison instead of college.
For instance, a team of researchers from the Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education conducted a study on young men of color attending 40 public high schools across New York City. We went to each of these schools, which were on average 94 percent black and Latino. None of us were shot or assaulted…
Trump’s mischaracterizations of majority-minority schools would lead most Americans to erroneously conclude that nothing good happens in them, little learning occurs, violence erupts every day and no one goes to college. That’s not what we observed. Instead, we found hundreds of young men at these inner-city school sites who spoke extensively about goodness in their schools: teacher practices, peer support and other factors that helped them succeed. They’re presently in college; one is at the University of Pennsylvania, the same university that Trump and his children attended.
In order to have a strong future, we need to improve the educational opportunities for blacks in this country. In fact, it’s long overdue. But Omarosa is not correct that those opportunities are likely to improve under Trump. And she, along with his egregious cabinet and administration picks, most certainly should not be leading the charge.
Source: http://dailykos.com
