This month Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa spoke out about educational disparities among Hispanic and black children during a luncheon that was leading up the Inauguration of President Obama. While Mayor Villaraigosa is a Los Angeles mayor, the issue of racial disparity in education is present across state lines. Mayor Villaraigosa described this epidemic of higher dropout rates among black and Hispanic children as being a matter of “national security.”
Issues of disparity when it comes to our nation’s children are not old news. And yet, the struggle to shed light and garner more support to address such continues. Despite the fact that our leaders before us fought to ensure that our children could attend the same schools as their peers, it is now 2013 and the playing field is still not level. There are many reasons that we can attribute this and there is a lot of finger pointing that can be done. Even so, at the end of the day as parents we want to do everything in our power to ensure that our children are not just starting school, but they are finishing school also. And, we want (and need) to ensure that they have a chance to be more than just the basis for another study on racial disparity.
For more on this read The Grio’s Joy-Ann Reid’s article here.
BMWK — Educational disparity was described as the Civil Rights Issue of our time. Would you agree? What can we do to try and change that?