- Konnor Gay
Okay, so we’re gonna be doing our “Yo is this Racism” podcast. I’m Connor and I’m gonna let my two other teammates introduce themselves here.
- Cherish Grant
I’m Cherish.
- Jaelen Ham
And hi, I’m Jaelen and I’m just going to start out here today and we’re going to be talking about some of the inequities we see in our education system and some of the repercussions that this has on larger society. And I’m just going to start off by explaining some of the funding that we use for our education system and how that kind of feeds into these inequities. So essentially, although, you know, segregation was ruled illegal and brown versus board a really long time ago in like the, what six, I don’t know, 1960s? But going forward, we kind of still had this segregation that we see in our suburban and our urban communities where we have more diverse communities and our urban areas, and these are areas that, you know, aren’t kept up as well. And they’re not as nice, their properties aren’t as expensive, and then in our suburban areas we have these nicer properties, higher property taxes and essentially, most of the funding for our schools comes from the property taxes. So obviously in our suburban areas where these properties have more value there’s going to be a larger property tax, which means that that school is ultimately going to get more money, and that means it gets more resources and a better education for its students and in the bigger picture. So this is where we start to see inequities between some of our different races and our different cultures in the country based on where they live.
- Konnor Gay
I think that was very well put. I also found a video that explains this topic pretty well. It’s a video by Act.TV, it’s on YouTube. It basically says what Jaelen just explained there. It also does a good job, explaining how redlining in the past has kind of led to the current inequalities in the education system. Like you were saying, it’s about the wealthy neighborhoods providing more funding to the schooling, because they are wealthier neighborhoods it’s based off of the Taxes. And so, in the video, it was talking about how the redlining in the past has led to a lot of minorities being in these less fortunate, less well off neighborhoods. And that causes inequality in the education system.
- Jaelen Ham
I actually also looked, for one of our diaries I looked at these deed covenants that used to be existing in Columbus and this kind of goes into this, bounces off of this, redlining idea. There used to be, like actual, like cut, like D covenants and laws, saying that in certain areas of Columbus, you know, black people couldn’t buy and sell land. So those covenants stayed in place for way too long, it was like until the 21st century, like.
- Konnor Gay
Really?
- Jaelen Ham
Recently, a couple years ago, like maybe 510 years ago, I want to say that they were actually abolished. So, systemically, like African American people have not been able to buy land in some of these nicer areas of Columbus where they have access to better schools.
- Konnor Gay
That’s crazy I didn’t know it was ,like, it was that much of a recent thing that caused these, because in the video I had watched it was talking about how it’s an issue that’s passed through generations, right? And that’s how you can see that even the, like, as far back as ,like slavery, right? And Jim Crow laws that’s what perpetuates the issues now because the generation before them wasn’t wealthy enough to get them into a nice neighborhood and there’s not an easy way to get out of that loop. I did want to say, Cherish, when I was reading your diary of systemic injustice on this, I’m glad that you pointed out that, like, people that live in America in general are pretty privileged. Because even though that is the case, I don’t think that doesn’t mean that we don’t have anything to fix here. So.
- Cherish Grant
I think that’s a very important thing to point out, especially when talking about anything that has to do with systemic injustice just because I feel like a lot of times we’ll talk about if it’s more so, like we’re playing this black and white game when, really, like even as a black person, even as a white person like, a minority, we can go to school on the bus, we can get paid a decent amount of money. Sometimes, so I feel like it’s a very important thing to talk about and, like you guys were pretty much like saying earlier, it’s like a general generational thing, because I can personally speak on the experience of being in schools that didn’t have that funding like I literally went to a school where we had to share laptops between classes and then I went to a more like predominantly white school and everybody has pretty much their own laptop able to take it home kind of thing so. It just pretty much starts as a generational thing in a family, but it also starts as a whole worldwide system issue as well just because there are not a lot of programs to help schools get that kind of funding, because they’re used on other things that sometimes we feel like we don’t need more so.
- Konnor Gay
Yeah, did you want to get into that? Because I also did want to ask you about your proposed solution to the problem which you had written in your systemic injustice diary.
- Cherish Grant
I think more so that there are a lot of things that I think more like tax dollars kind of go to that could more so, like going to the children who need it to schools, who need it. And I also, in my diary, I kind of talked about this pressure of economic mobility and the students who come from poorer families, more so. And, just like schools that don’t have enough textbooks they don’t even have enough teachers to even help out. So I, and I feel like more so gearing it towards that there should be more programs in schoolings to help out families who don’t even have the money to send their children to the schools to get a better education. Even there was another assignment that we had pretty much connecting our injustices and our diaries with to books that we read and it was Persepolis and it’s pretty much like the same exact thing you know. We as a family are trying to save up all this money to send off one kid to get a better education to pretty much help our whole family get out of this system. And I feel like the government and people in the communities around us should be able to input that kind of money into their students, just as much as they do in a more like white neighborhood as they do for private schools.
- Konnor Gay
Yeah, I think Jaelen in your diary you’d kind of talked about how that would like to come about. It was, I believe you talked about was it um, I guess, making it less having the funding for schooling be less dependent on the neighborhood and more, you can go ahead.
- Jaelen Ham
Yeah, so my major is public management leadership and policy so i’ve taken a lot of like government classes and basically i’m an education policy and Like really the funding for schools is so dependent on the properties and how expensive the properties are because just for some reason in our system like they decided it would be a good idea to fund the schools, based on the property taxes so like a very large percentage of the funding for like any given school district is based on the properties that are in an area so obviously some resources are allocated by the state and even a little bit by the Federal Government, but the federal government really is not very involved with the funding of our schools in the country, so a lot of it is based on the State it’s probably like I don’t want to give like wrong numbers, but I would say generally the state is like 30% responsible, and then the local governments and, like the cities are like 70% responsible for the funding, so if we brought that to a larger like state level and might be able to and we’re less dependent on the properties and the value of the properties that’s where it might be able to even out some of that inequity that we see in like those significant differences in the amount of money that our schools or schools have in general.
- Konnor Gay
I think that’s a great way to wrap that up.
Loved your cooperative podcast. Great job.