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NEWS & LETTERS, June 2004Racist inequalities in the education systemOAKLAND,CAL.--Blacks United for Quality Education (BUQE) with the support of many other organizations, including Black Radical Congress, Education Not Incarceration, and Books Not Bars, held a community forum on May 6 to publicize the threat to end the Educational Opportunity Program (EOP). BUQE was started recently by students from California State University in Hayward, Vista Community College and others to save EOP. EOP is a 30-year-old program aimed at making it possible for students with very low income to attend college. It is threatened by the current round of educational budget cuts, at a time when tuition is increasing dramatically. In the past it enabled many Black students to be the first in their families to obtain a college degree. The meeting was opened by a poem "Rebellious Spirit," by a young woman who related the current problems to the thinking of many people who struggled. David J., who just finished Alameda College, talked about how budget cuts in community colleges make it hard to even think of attending. For students who have no money it is not unusual to take four years to complete a two-year program, because they have to work full time in addition to going to school. Financial aid is not easy to get, and if you are granted any money, it comes in only at the end of the semester, which means many Black students are discouraged from even trying. David stressed that education is a right, and it should not be made into a privilege. We also heard a budget analysis from Rema B., a campaign manager for Books Not Bars. The current California budget is proposing a $700 million cut from the University of California and California State University systems. It also includes $700 million to finish construction of a new prison, Delano II. Once the prison opens, it will take $100 million per year to operate. The current prison population is 32,000 prisoners below capacity, so why are we building new prisons? We should be closing existing ones! The problem boils down to the lack of representation of our interests in the state capital. The high school students described the conditions in their school: "Many teachers are not able to handle their class. State Administrator Randolph Ward just cut the positions of 60 janitors (among the 200 employees laid off on April 30). Even before those cuts, the school was in bad shape: floors not being mopped and the bathrooms very nasty. The lunch rooms are filthy even before lunch. It is hard to concentrate on learning in such an environment." Another young woman, who transferred to Oakland Tech from a predominantly white school, "noticed the more pronounced presence of ROTC and military recruiters. The bad, and no-hope-of-improvement conditions contribute to incarceration, to homicide rates, to seeing the military as the only way out—we need to give students a chance!" During the discussion the question was raised what is radical in calling your legislator to affect a budget priority? There were several answers. I spoke about the history of public education: how the idea of educating all children was introduced by the newly emancipated slaves after the Civil War, who did not want to just put a few of the Black children into existing schools, but demanded an education for all; how it was the experience of Mississippi Freedom Summer that taught white students to ask "what is education for" which helped to give birth to the Free Speech Movement at U.C. Berkeley; and how David J.'s questioning the purpose of education now harkens to those earlier very radical traditions. Education for all is the basis for any real democracy. --Activist |
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