Why hasn’t anybody here asked why poor schools for anybody are tolerable? What are his suggestions for fixing it? Send your child somewhere else. That doesn’t fix anything. That school is still there. Why would the problems not commute with the students, if they all go en masse to some other school? OK…so how to fix the problem, rather than give a few people a ticket to run away from it?
Why isn’t anyone asking why the people doing full-time manual or unskilled labor in this country suffer from food insecurity, forget about opportunities to build wealth? What is the excuse for that?Washington and Jefferson are black names? How about Obama? Abdallah? Did he really say that discrimination against the names he rattled off is somehow not racial? All of them sound non-WASP.
Why on earth should majoring in education–his example for the occupation you should reject in favor of engineering–set someone up for future debt and underemployment? How does he think somebody learns enough to be ready for college, which he seems to think is the ticket to success?
He seems to be arguing that not only people who don’t go to college but even people who go to college and major in “wrong” things like education deserve to be underpaid. (And he wonders why there are teachers unions?)
He calls looking for systemic racism “ghost-hunting,” but he does not have a single comment on the elephant in the room, which is that our economic system is set up to generate systemic poverty. No matter how hard you work, if you don’t have the “right” major and a name that doesn’t sound like it came from a foreign country, you deserve to be among those people whose kids are going to a failing school.
He says “we should all as decent people be reexamining our biases,” but he’s not giving evidence that he actually does it. He thinks the problem is “you had a bad thought about a group”? No, he thinks that if you name your kid Jamal instead of Greg, you should expect him to accept disadvantages that start before anyone ever lays eyes on him. Well, what about the Jamal vs Greg discrimination that is based on your looks and not on how your name sounds? He thinks one exists and not the other? Why would he assume that?
He says “obviously” we should be spending more money where resources are scarce–but are we? Where is the pressure to make that happen? And should we not recognize that a school full of people with few resources to meet challenges that the family has actually need more money that districts full of secure families, not simply the same amount? He’s talking about the problem that single parents have, but what are schools supposed to do about it?
He does not suggest how to better the lives of people stuck in poor schools or how to help students in families that do not have an academic history. He doesn’t even mention income inequality.
Since the video talks about Democrats every time there is a policy he believes doesn’t work, it comes off as a video about why the Republicans feel smug about coming up with a “fix” that amounts to “if people don’t like bad schools, they should all send their kids to one of the good ones!”
