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School boards and superintendents in urban and large suburban school districts sometimes distribute pivotal human, curricular and construction resources in a way that becomes unintentionally uneven, causing an opportunity gap between children living in well-off versus poor neighborhoods. This widely acknowledged problem rarely inspires the attention it deserves. Appleseed seeks to engage the issue in a three-step process:
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Identify the extent of the problem by highlighting disparities using a three-year sample period. |
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Identify those “mobilization moments” when community organizations ought to be present at the table (but usually are not) so that leaders can make their views known and better represent economically poor and politically powerless individuals. |
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Advocate through Appleseed Centers and National Appleseed channels to enact change. This work would be accomplished in conjunction with existing local and national organizations. |
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School board members make one-at-a-time decisions that have long-term consequences. Among them: the number and nature of Advanced Placement courses at a given high school; assignment of principals, teachers and guidance counselors; the age and re-conditioning of school buildings. All of these actions at first blush appear to be neutral choices. Yet, when the best resources are persistently handled in a way that favors affluent areas in a single school district, inequity becomes a repeating pattern locked in over decades. The result is an opportunity gap that finds some students receiving an inferior education simply because of their zip code.
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