Portside

How a poor New Jersey town and its teacher's unions turned around its schools.

A history of ntergenerational poverty and racial segregation

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Never in U.S. history has a local school board - or any other board, appointed or elected - chosen to close 49 public schools. School closings are part and parcel of a strategy for remaking the American metropolis and will further cement economic inequality. "Today is a day of mourning for the children of Chicago. Their education has been hijacked by an unrepresentative, unelected corporate school board. Closing schools is not an education plan."

Closing 50 of our neighborhood schools is outrageous and no society that claims to care anything about its children can sit back and allow this to happen to them. There is no way people of conscience will stand by and allow these people to shut down nearly a third of our school district without putting up a fight. Most of these campuses are in the Black community. Since 2001 88% of students impacted by CPS School Actions are African-American. And this is by design.

Here come the contract demands that the Philadelphia School District would like to cram down the throat of the city's unionized school teachers. The so-called City of Brotherly Love is on the brink of setting a new standard in squeezing middle- class workers to death. It's not like we haven't seen this story before: Working men and women asked to take a sizable pay cut...and work longer hours...and pay more for shrinking benefits.

Poverty, inequality, violence, race and investment matter. They must be a part of any long-term solution.