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Bernie Sanders: 65 years after Brown vs Board of Ed, segregation remains in our classrooms
By Bernie Sanders, GUEST COLUMNIST Published 6:00 a.m. ET May 17, 2019
Excerpt:
In North Carolina, over the last decade, there has been a 61 percent increase in the number of schools that are segregated by race and income. And Republicans in the legislature just passed a bill that empowers wealthy white school districts to create their own publicly-funded, privately-administered charter schools. That’s a recipe for resegregation.
I will soon announce a comprehensive plan to reform and reinvest in America’s public education system to combat racial and economic segregation. I will stand with groups like the NAACP in calling for a ban on for-profit charter schools and a moratorium on federal funding of new charters until we can ensure they’re operating with transparency and accountability.
When we are in the White House, my administration will support local school integration initiatives and I will appoint judges who uphold desegregation orders. We will pay teachers the fair wages they deserve, and make sure that school funding is equitable. The quality of a child’s education should not be determined by her zip code or by the family she was born into.
Thurgood Marshall once said that it is a right of all children to get “an equal start in life and to an equal opportunity to reach their full potential as citizens.” He declared that “children who have been denied that right in the past deserve better than to see fences thrown up to deny them that right in the future.”
Our school system can no longer put up fences for black and brown children. On this 65th anniversary of the Brown vs Board of Education decision, we are going to tear down those barriers and create an education system that works for all people, not just the wealthy and powerful.
Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) is an independent senator from Vermont and a candidate for the 2020 Presidential Election. This piece was submitted exclusively to the Citizen Times for publication.
https://www.citizen-times.com/story/opinion/2019/05/17/bernie-sanders-asheville-nc-2020-election-brown-v-board-education-segregation/3694881002/