By John Ubaldi, “Ubaldi Reports”

The horrific killing of George Lloyd by a Minneapolis police officer has ignited a simmering wound of police brutality with the black and Hispanic communities feeling that a knee has been perpetually placed on their neck.  What was left unanswered is the unknown civil rights issue of our time the deplorable educational system in America.

Far too often many black and Hispanic children are trapped at the bottom of the socioeconomic realm of society with very little opportunity for social mobility.  Education has always been the surest way for many to escape poverty.

Far too often black and Hispanic children attend substandard schools with limited resources.  In 2015, the average reading score for white students on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) 4th and 8th grade exam was 26 points higher than black students. Similar gaps are apparent in math. The 12th grade assessment also show alarming disparities as well, with only seven percent of black students performing at or above proficient on the math exam in 2015, compared to 32 percent white students.   This dismal statistic hasn’t changed in the years since.

Many individuals who preach about racial and income inequality also refuse to address this glaring gap by allowing parents of black and Hispanic children the choice to opt out a failing public school system and enroll their child in a better quality school.

This has opened a racial and political divide as more white parents and Democrats oppose charter schools, where Republicans favor charter schools and choice of schools.

Throughout 2018-19 the U.S. faced numerous educational workers’ strikes that centered on increased pay for educators in the k-12 system, but one of the reasons against increased pay for teacher is the large amount of funding that has to be diverted to cover the ever growing health and created pension obligations.

The presumptive Democratic nominee for President, former Vice President Biden who has outlined greater pay for educators, increase funding for public schools, especially those targeting schools with a high percentage of students from low-income families. The school districts can then use the additional resources to increase salaries and be used for critical investments.  This must be done before resources are diverted to other areas.

What Biden has proposed is basically what every Democrat president and candidate has offered in the past, but without the needed fiscal accountability, in essence we would just be repeating the failures of the past hoping for a different outcome.  How has this ever worked!

Missing from Biden’s educational proposal are charter schools and vouchers.  Could it be that the teachers unions who oppose charter schools and vouchers also give exclusively funding Democratic candidates?  According to Opensecrets.org almost all of the teacher’s union’s donations go exclusively to Democratic candidates and liberal causes.

Those openly against charter schools and strongly support public schools seem to always want this for everyone else’s child except for their own who often are enrolled in private schools. Senator Elizabeth Warren and former President Barack Obama are a cases in point one system for your child but a different one for mine.

The true civil rights issue of our era is how many black and Hispanic individuals who often live in extremely dangerous urban cities, with their children being forced to attend deplorable public schools without any choice of attending a better quality one.

If you look across America at the cities of St. Louis, Detroit, Baltimore, Oakland, Chicago, Memphis, Atlanta, Birmingham, Newark, Buffalo and Philadelphia all of them are governed by liberal Democrats.  If one does just a basic cursory observation many of these cities haven’t had a Republican mayor in over sixty some years, with some dating back to the late 1800’s.

Even the esteemed African-American academic Walter Williams a Professor of Economics at George Mason University commented in a recent article that “Many of these cities, blacks are mayors, often they dominate city councils, and they are chiefs of police and superintendents of schools.”

Atlanta hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1879.  With this singular domination of local governance by the Democratic Party, the Georgia Milestones test assessment of English Language Arts finds students’ proficiency rate under 40%. The stunning gap between black and white students is almost 60 percent. Eighty percent of white students in APS are proficient and above; the number is 25.3 percent for black students—and the district is majority black.

Former Democratic gubernatorial candidate in Georgia and potential vice presidential nominee Stacey Abrams lost a close race for governor in 2018, with charter schools being one of the reasons as many African-American woman support in which Abrams is solidly against.

The city of Chicago which has been in the news lately hasn’t had a Republican mayor since 1931.  According to Illinois Policy Think Tank in 2015 around 70% of all black and Hispanic children in the Chicago Unified School system are not proficient to grade level in math and English, and this hasn’t changed in the years since.

The Chicago Unified School District is a fiscal disaster facing an $8.4 billion debt, considering over 70% of the children who attend Chicago schools are black and Hispanic children thus impacting the dismal educational achievement gap.

This doesn’t end here, in September 2019, the U.S. Department of Education (Department), Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued a disturbing report highlighting that close to 500 young girls over a ten year period were sexually assaulted, abused and harassed inside the Chicago Unified School District.  Many of the victims of alleged abuses were black and Hispanic children. Where was the outrage? Where was the media coverage? How come Democratic leaders aren’t asked about any of this when they have solidly controlled city governance for decades?

Just this year alone Camie Pratt, CPS’ Chief Title IX Officer, stated at a monthly school board meeting in February that there has been a 29% increase in reported sexual misconduct cases this year compared to last. What happened to the civil rights of these students? Why has this continued?

At the same time as death of George Floyd, Chicago endured its deadliest day in the past sixty years when 18 homicides occurred in a single day (May 31st.)  During that same weekend close to 30 individuals were killed, all of them were black, but what about their civil rights?  Where was the outrage and media coverage?

Continuing with the deplorable educational system found in America’s major cities, Williams comments that “In 2016, in 13 of Baltimore’s 39 high schools, not a single student scored proficient on the state’s math exam. In six other high schools, only 1% tested proficient in math. Only 15% of Baltimore students passed the state’s English test. That same year in Philadelphia only 19% of eighth-graders scored proficient in math, and 16% were proficient in reading. In Detroit, only 4% of its eighth-graders scored proficient in math, and 7% were proficient in reading. It’s the same story of academic disaster in other cities run by Democrats.”

In California, the nation’s largest and most populous state, the educational achievement gap for black and Hispanic students is that 70% cannot read nor do math to grade level despite spending billions over the past few years.

Even in Los Angles the nation’s second largest school district, only 21% of African American students who graduated in 2018 were considered prepared for college or careers, compared to 52 percent of white students and 74 percent of Asian students.

The Reason Foundation in 2018 calculated that LA Unified School District is anywhere between $8-13 billion in debt and it’s even worse now since the impact of the coronavirus on districts fiancés.

The San Jose Mercury News reported that LAUSD expects to spend $1.7 billion annually toward pensions and health care during the 2020-21 school year, an increase of nearly $400 million from 2016-17. Nearly a quarter of the revenues from per-pupil funding would not reach students at all.

With the turmoil in Seattle with protesters occupying a section of the city, seeking racial justice but for those seeking racial equality why have city leaders never been asked why only 28% of black children can read to grade level? In a heavily Democratic city with the last Republican to hold the mayor’s office was 1969.

The State of Washington mirrors the educational achievement gap of Seattle with black and Hispanic children scoring around 30% who can do math or read to grade level, an extremely dismal distinction, considering all the coverage on the protests, nothing on this.

Why hasn’t the Democratic governor Jay Inslee been asked about this? Considering the last Republican governor was thirty five years ago in 1985.  Maybe we should be asking the mayor and governor these questions?

The epicenter of the protest over George Floyd began in Minneapolis, as in other major cities across America; the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis reported that only 30% of African-American and Hispanic students in the state of Minnesota were proficient at grade level in math and English.

In the financial capital of the world, New York City this also fits a similar pattern with only 30% of black and Hispanic children able to do math or English to grade level far below their white or Asian peers.

At the beginning of the first day of the 2019-20 school year, Jason Riley a Wall Street Journal columnist and Manhattan Institute Fellow wrote that with the majority of students returning, the majority of them can’t do basic reading or math, according to state standardized test results released last week. And the numbers get even more depressing when broken down by race and ethnicity. Black and Hispanic students make up 67% of the system, while whites and Asians are about 15% and 16%, respectively. Only 28% of black students passed the math exam, versus 33% of Hispanics, 67% of whites and 74% of Asians. On the English exam, the passage rates were 68% for Asians, 67% for whites, 37% for Hispanics and 35% for blacks.

Educational advocates often state the need for additional revenue but examples in California and Baltimore show otherwise as more spending didn’t equate to better educational results.

The greatest civil rights issue of our time is going unnoticed, and those who advocate the loudest about racial inequality are themselves perpetrating this injustice.  One only has to remember the quote from Arthur Fletcher former head of the United Negro College fund, when he coined the phrase, “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.”

Right now it’s being wasted by those who advocate the loudest for racial justice; maybe we can change this dismal record.