Saddle up the Messenger Hoss:
4 Million Children Might be News
By
GREG MOSES
2004
(7 a.m. Central Daylight Time)–The morning after
Texas district judge John
Dietz ruled that the state’s
school system fails to satisfy criteria set forth in
the Texas
constitution, I’m browsing some of the “top
headline” sources on the internet to see how the
fate
of 4 million Texas schoolchildren rates on the
national news scale.
“More
than 130 years after Alferd Packer ate his five
companions to survive a Colorado winter, a
museum
curator is making a case that the notorious cannibal
was innocent of murder,” reads a
report from the
Associated Press that I find seven stories from the
top at Yahoo’s US National
News. But no news of Texas
education in the total of twenty stories that are
either listed as
“top” or “more.”
“Three men shot to death in a Willowbrook parking lot
apparently were
victims of a planned ‘hit’ that by a
fluke occurred just as a village police officer drove
past,
law enforcement sources said Wednesday,” reads a
story out of Chicago that gets number seven billing
at
Google’s US news page.
“The Times Fills 2 Editing Posts,” reads headline
number
six under New York Times national headlines.
The Education section also finds other things to
talk
about.
With Hurricane Ivan consuming three of the top dozen
stories at USA
Today’s “Nation” page, it’s Southern
weather that rules the day.
Maybe we can find the
headline at CNN US? Nope. But
if you look under local news from the US Southwest you
will find
this number one headline: “Former anchorman
out of prison.” Or this headline, ranked second:
“Henna tattoos cause family pain.” The Education page
leads with a story about college
affordability.
As the school buses pass my window here in Texas,
taking kids to their
unconstitutional destinations,
I’m reading parts of the US Supreme Court decision in
1973 that
set the precedent for not putting Texas
education on the national agenda. The Rodriguez
case,
which was the first of the “Edgewood” cases to be
filed—-way back in the summer of ’68—-set
the Supremes
to fidgeting over the prospects of “wealth
equalization.” They said they could
handle a lawsuit
where folks were completely deprived of some good
because of poverty, but the if
the High Court started
getting involved in cases where relatively poorer
people were only
relatively deprived of such things as
education, well you know, the great black-robed
scions
might have to stop taking summer breaks!
The dissenting judges in 1973 were
Thurgood Marshall
and William O. Douglas, not bad company to keep on a
morning such as
this.
“The Court today decides, in effect, that a State may
constitutionally vary the
quality of education which
it offers its children in accordance with the amount
of taxable wealth
located in the school districts
within which they reside,” wrote Marshall (with
Douglas
concurring). “The majority’s decision
represents an abrupt departure from the mainstream
of
recent state and federal court decisions concerning
the unconstitutionality of state
educational financing
schemes dependent upon taxable local wealth. More
unfortunately, though,
the majority’s holding can only
be seen as a retreat from our historic commitment to
equality of
educational opportunity and as
unsupportable acquiescence in a system which deprives
children in
their earliest years of the chance to
reach their full potential as citizens. The Court does
this
despite the absence of any substantial
justification for a scheme which arbitrarily
channels
educational resources in accordance with the fortuity
of the amount of taxable wealth
within each district.”
“In my judgment,” continued Marshall, “the right of
every
American to an equal start in life, so far as
the provision of a state service as important
as
education is concerned, is far too vital to permit
state discrimination on grounds as tenuous
as those
presented by this record. Nor can I accept the notion
that it is sufficient to remit
these appellees to the
vagaries of the political process which, contrary to
the majority’s
suggestion, has proved singularly
unsuited to the task of providing a remedy for
this
discrimination. I, for one, am unsatisfied with the
hope of an ultimate ‘political’
solution sometime in
the indefinite future while, in the meantime,
countless children
unjustifiably receive inferior
educations that ‘may affect their hearts and minds in
a way
unlikely ever to be undone.’ Brown v. Board of
Education, 347 U.S. 483, 494 (1954). I must
therefore
respectfully dissent.”
But it was the refusal of Marshall’s peers that
sent
the issue of equalized education back to the Texas
courts and a series of state-level
rulings known as
the Edgewood cases of the early 90s. Texas courts
today are doing the work that
national courts refused
to do thirty years ago, and in the process historical
contributions are
being made to the human rights of
children everywhere.
For these reasons and others
that might be given with
more time and space, can we please ask the editors of
the national desks
to dig a little deeper into their
Associated Press dispatches and post the ones about
Texas
education? After all, attention to the human
rights of 4 million children today will bring you
so
many more avid readers tomorrow.
