The educational justice furlough

MAGA's war on educational equity will cost us all. Only good government can rescue the American mind.

I got a detailed response from Gerry Von Korff regarding my post about the threat today’s anti-diversity politics pose to decades-long efforts to address racial inequality in education. Specifically, the attempts of education reform to erase achievement gaps between the offspring of enslaved people and their enslavers.

Gerry is a long-time education advocate and former member of my town's school board. He has focused specifically on how our funding of programs and systems harms children of color, the poor, and students with disabilities. He has fought a yeoman’s battle against our State of Wobegon to close the special education cross-subsidy gap in school finance, even leading a lawsuit to correct that and other issues.

He sent a task force report outlining how Minnesota approached an educational equity problem. There were no grand pronouncements or ideological warfare, just the basic mechanics of good governance: identify a problem, study it, develop solutions, and implement them.

This shouldn't be remarkable. Yet, as America re-enacts The Birth of a Nation, it is.

I've spent years arguing public education has systematically failed Black children. I’ve tried every way possible to say we all pay a cost when 83% of Black fourth graders aren't reading proficiently. It isn’t an other-people’s-children problem. Inequity in education is a drag on national progress.

Many notable voices through decades of research have told us the solutions aren't mysterious—we have pretty good ideas about what works. What's missing isn't knowledge—it's permission to solve the problem and sweat equity to see it through.

The MAGA movement's war on equity has poisoned our ability to engage in basic problem-solving. We can't even name challenges anymore, let alone address them. Any acknowledgment of racial disparities is branded as "wokeism” or “victimhood.” Reparative attempts to direct resources to historically marginalized people are attacked as anti-white discrimination.

This manufactured hostility to equity hasn't just changed rhetoric – it's broken governance.

Gerry and I probably agree that Minnesota isn’t perfect by any means, but if we’re proud of anything, it’s our pro-civic, pro-education ethos and our measured, good-faith approaches to addressing important issues. When confronted with evidence that their schools were systematically underfunding low-income students, multilingual learners, and students of color, the state assembled a task force, brought in experts in school finance, studied successful reforms from other states, and developed targeted solutions based on evidence, not ideology.

It took a lot of advocacy and prodding, and there was resistance. However, the mediating instrument to negotiate conflict was a task force, information collection, study, and resolution.

The resulting recommendations aren't radical. They're almost mundanely pragmatic: Modernize funding formulas to reflect student needs, strengthen accountability measures, invest in proven interventions, and expand support services.

That is the rational problem-solving that today’s toxic political theater has made nearly impossible in much of America. The cost of this enforced blindness falls heaviest on Black children, immigrant children, those in poverty, and those with special education needs. We can't develop targeted solutions when we can't acknowledge that different students face different challenges. When we pretend that systemic inequities don't exist, we perpetuate them.

The tragedy is that this retreat comes just as we've built the strongest evidence base yet for what works to support Black student achievement. We know that funding formulas matter, teacher diversity matters, curriculum representation matters, and early intervention matters.

Meanwhile, Republican-controlled states are ironically implementing some evidence-based changes to how they teach reading while also actively dismantling their capacity to address educational inequities. They're banning equity initiatives. They're prohibiting informed discussions of systemic racism. They're making it illegal to direct additional resources to repair social and educational issues caused by our nation’s inability to see people as equal.

This isn't just bad policy – it's a rejection of good governance. It's choosing political performance over problem-solving. It's sacrificing children's futures on the altar of white grievance politics.

The underlying message is clear: We'd rather preserve comfortable myths about American education than help Black children succeed.

Although all of this feels momentarily disorienting for those of us who experienced years where reputable allies worked beside us, the moderates who have gone asleep now that their anti-equity brethren have taken over, we can take comfort that these things are always temporary.

Difficult and distressing, yes, but always time-bound.

Two steps forward, one step back, three steps forward the next time.

Believe me, it’s foolish to expect anyone to see the other side while in the middle of a fight. But we have to take a long view and understand the patterns of history so we don’t demoralize ourselves.

I look to people like abolitionist Theodore Parker who had this to say in 1853:

Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.

Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble.

For a less poetic approach, I consider Gerry’s pragmatism in responding to my post.

Until we reclaim our ability to engage in basic governance—to identify problems, study solutions, and implement reforms without getting lost in ideological warfare—we will fail the students who need us most.

And we will pay a price for that over time.