Читать книгу Five Practices for Equity-Focused School Leadership - Sharon I. Radd - Страница 15

Inequity is institutional as well. In other words, the laws, rules, processes, and organizations we use to engage in schooling and other aspects of our lives all work to continue historical and current patterns of inequity. Decades of tax, finance, and banking policies and practices have been built on top of the GI Bill, such that it is easy to avoid noticing how these institutionalized policies and practices actually serve to reproduce and entrench existing inequities. Housing inequity, for example, contributes to school inequity: Because housing in the United States is racially and economically segregated, and children in the United States tend to go to schools near where they live, children end up going to school with other children of their same race and income level. Because school budgets are funded primarily at the local and state level through property taxes, economic housing segregation leads to inequities in school funding patterns. This pattern is institutionalized through recent court decisions reducing federal involvement in school desegregation efforts; through federal and state housing policies and programs; through banking practices that resulted in families of color losing far greater ground than White families following the 2008 economic and housing crisis; and through local decisions about attendance zones that create neighborhood schools. It's a complex and complicated web, and without certain pieces of historical knowledge, it is easy for one to look at it all and determine that the system is fair and neutral, rather than recognize that inequity has been and is historical, structural, and institutionalized.