Across the country, urban school districts like Metro Nashville Public Schools have consistently failed to bring a sufficient number of students to proficiency in the most critical subject areas. It’s almost as if adequately educating Black and brown children (who comprise the majority of these districts) is some exercise in monumental futility and not the very thing administrators and teachers are paid to do.
We are aware of these failures, and we’ve learned to accept them. We lottery around them and pay for private schools while ignoring them. We move counties to avoid them completely.
More important: We excuse these failures by rattling off the oft-cited excuse that urban school districts, Metro Nashville Public Schools included, are seriously underfunded. We tell ourselves that they’re the victims of vengeful state departments, still reinforcing the age-old American belief that Black children can’t learn — indeed, that they don’t deserve to…