Instead of spending that monthly sum on a mortgage or socking it away for retirement, she’ll be mailing it off in interest payments. Each monthly paycheck will have $500 taken out of it to cover the interest she owes, leaving her with significantly less spending power than her peers with similar salaries. How long will this person be making this $6,000 annual interest payment? Potentially forever, if she doesn’t earn enough to pay off the original balance of $30,000. If her interest rate is 20 percent annually, she’ll owe her credit card company $6,000 each year in interest. But she has new bills to pay by the time she is reinstated in her position, she has run up $30,000 in debt. Twelve months later, after a change in management, she is brought back to her job at her previous salary-erasing any outward signs of injustice. To get by, she uses a credit card with a relatively high interest rate to pay her bills. Imagine that a person has been unjustly fired from her job, resulting in a year of lost income. To fully understand the concept of the education debt, it’s worth exploring the analogy in some depth. It would require addressing the specific historical injustices that affect student learning-paying down what the scholar Gloria Ladson-Billings has called the “ education debt.” Given this context, producing equal educational outcomes would seemingly require more than equal funding. Yet generations of inequality have constrained opportunities for people in marginalized communities, often most forcefully through racially isolated neighborhoods with vastly uneven access to mainstream social, political, and economic life. The idea that equal inputs will produce equal outcomes presumes a degree of similarity across families and neighborhoods. How can this be? How can advocates allege that urban schools need more money when disparities in student achievement do not appear to be the obvious result of disparities in spending? Those who advocate against increased funding for urban schools are quick to point to this fact as evidence that more money won’t make a difference. Even in those cases, however, achievement disparities between suburban and urban schools persist. And in states including Minnesota, New Jersey, and Ohio, city schools regularly outspend their suburban counterparts. In most states, though, spending on education in rich and poor neighborhoods is relatively equal. Hampered by reliance on local property taxes, they contend, urban schools lack the resources they need to ensure their students succeed. Supporters of urban education frequently make the case that city schools are underfunded.
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