Four Million Children Might be News (Texas)

[donsu]

http://www.counterpunch.com/moses09162004.html

The morning after Texas district judge John Dietz ruled that the state's school system fails to satisfy criteria set forth in the Texas constitution, I'm browsing some of the "top headline" sources on the internet to see how the fate of 4 million Texas schoolchildren rates on the national news scale.

"More than 130 years after Alferd Packer ate his five companions to survive a Colorado winter, a museum curator is making a case that the notorious cannibal was innocent of murder," reads a report from the Associated Press that I find seven stories from the top at Yahoo's US National News. But no news of Texas education in the total of twenty stories that are either listed as "top" or "more."

(here are reports of the coverage of other media - the same, no story)
-snip-

As the school buses pass my window here in Texas, taking kids to their unconstitutional destinations, I'm reading parts of the US Supreme Court decision in 1973 that set the precedent for not putting Texas education on the national agenda. The Rodriguez case, which was the first of the "Edgewood" cases to be filed--way back in the summer of '68--set the Supremes to fidgeting over the prospects of "wealth equalization." They said they could handle a lawsuit where folks were completely deprived of some good because of poverty, but the if the High Court started getting involved in cases where relatively poorer people were only relatively deprived of such things as education, well you know, the great black-robed scions might have to stop taking summer breaks!

The dissenting judges in 1973 were Thurgood Marshall and William O. Douglas, not bad company to keep on a morning such as this.

"The Court today decides, in effect, that a State may constitutionally vary the quality of education which it offers its children in accordance with the amount of taxable wealth located in the school districts within which they reside," wrote Marshall (with Douglas concurring). "The majority's decision represents an abrupt departure from the mainstream of recent state and federal court decisions concerning the unconstitutionality of state educational financing schemes dependent upon taxable local wealth. More unfortunately, though, the majority's holding can only be seen as a retreat from our historic commitment to equality of educational opportunity and as unsupportable acquiescence in a system which deprives children in their earliest years of the chance to reach their full potential as citizens. The Court does this despite the absence of any substantial justification for a scheme which arbitrarily channels educational resources in accordance with the fortuity of the amount of taxable wealth within each district."

(and he continues)
-snip-
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we also murder children in Iraq everyday, be it by dirty water, depleted uranium poisoning, bombs or bullets. they don't even have the chance to go to school to learn diddly and grow up ignorant.