How About Single Payer for Education?

Arianna Huffington @ The Huffington Post - It's time to acknowledge that over 50 years after Brown v. Board of Education we are witnessing a de facto resegregation of our schools, with blacks and Hispanics more separate from white students than at any time since the civil rights movement.

In contrast, the last 30 years have been a boom time for America's jails, with new prisons popping up at a rate even McDonald's would envy, while the number of people living behind bars has quadrupled: "Over 2 million dissatisfied customers served."

Particularly troubling is the fact that close to 150,000 children are in custody and that high school dropout rates are in lockstep with the rate of juvenile incarceration. As a result, many of America's schools have become preparatory facilities not for college but for jail.

What Abraham Lincoln said in his second annual address to Congress in 1862 applies powerfully to today's education crisis: "The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present.... As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew."

In the face of this educational apartheid, we should have no illusions about what is at stake. As writer Mikel Holt puts it: "The old civil rights movement got us to the lunch counter. The new civil rights agenda is: can our kids read the menu?" Read more.