This week the Michigan League for Public Policy released a new report on the crisis of education in our state. It identifies the failures of decades of so-called reforms and argues for an honest look at systemic racism embedded in these efforts

The report urges legislators, leaders, and all concerned people to face “the inescapable truth of deep inequities in educational opportunities and outcomes for children based on race, ethnicity, place, and income.”

It continues, “While all children can learn and deserve a top-notch education, children of color and those living in low-income communities face barriers to educational success from cradle to career. Attempts to improve Michigan’s educational system without addressing those barriers will undoubtedly fail.”

The study puts the failure of state educational efforts into a broader context explaining that “educational disparities do not occur in a vacuum and can be traced to public policies that limit employment and housing options for many parents, fail to adequately recognize the added costs of teaching children who live in high-poverty neighborhoods, and view investments in teachers as a “diversion” of school funding away from children.”

The report concludes with a series of recommendations to lawmakers. These recommendations are not new, but they point to how inadequate recent legislation has been in addressing the needs of our children.

The first step, the report says is for policymakers to “consider the impact of potential budget and policy decisions on children of color and low-income communities.” It goes on to recommend investment in “efforts to reduce poverty and ameliorate the impact of poverty on learning.”

These first two recommendations should guide any decision, anywhere. The simple question, “How does this affect the children” should be a basic standard of judgment. By this standard, most of the policies enacted by our city fail.  Water shut-offs, foreclosures, punitive testing, lack of transportation, escalating rents, and the use of public money to build jails and entertainment centers all fail to meet this basic standard.

As we consider this report, I was reminded of one published more than a year ago by the Michigan Civil Rights Commission. It was described at the time as “a searing 135-page report,” documenting the impact of “systematic racism” and the “complete failure of government.” The subject was the Flint water crisis. That report also “delved into the history of race and racism in Flint.”  It linked structural racism to emergency management legislation and “called for changes in the state's emergency manager law and more training on racial bias at all levels of state government.”

"It is abundantly clear that race played a major role in developing the policies and causing the events that turned Flint into a decaying and largely abandoned urban center, a place where a crisis like this one was all but inevitable."

The Flint report concluded with this warning. "We cannot predict what the next crisis will be, when it will occur, or in which decaying urban center it will happen. But we do know that unless we do something, it will occur, and it will disparately harm people of color."

These reports are bringing to the forefront of public discussion a reality that most of us know every day in our bones. It is a reality that diminishes the lives of all of us, but especially those of our children. The urgency for deep, structural change has never been clearer. Care for the children. Advance democracy. Provide the basic necessities for life. Our challenge is to find new, collective ways to craft just futures for our children and ourselves.