“The point in our history at which we had the highest rate of equity in funding and spending was in the 1970s. In fact, the “war on poverty” — the Great Society period — made a big difference; there was far less childhood poverty than there is now. Unemployment was lower, there was a lot of federal money going into urban school districts and poor rural schools districts and school finance litigation had caused quite a bit of equalization. In 1975, for the first time, the rate of black, Latino and white students going to college was exactly equal. We had made a lot of strides. But most of those programs were eliminated or greatly reduced in the 1980s as part of the Reagan revolution and so we saw the federal dollars get cut in half for public schools. Almost all of that came out of equity-oriented programs that were facilitating both fiscal equity and school desegregation – and making investments in tiny communities. Similarly, during the 1990s — during the 1980s and the 1990s — we had many states doing as California did: putting in place tax caps and other strategies to make it harder to invest in public education and those reforms basically increased the inequality in funding for schools and in the other resources that communities receive.” Linda Darling-Hammond (via azspot)

(via azspot)

“He only works three and a half hours a day. He doesn’t do his homework. He doesn’t read his briefing papers. It’s sinful that this man is President of the United States. He lacks the knowledge that he should have, on every sphere, whether it’s the domestic or whether it’s the international sphere.” Former Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill on Ronald Reagan (via kileyrae)