Iowa

17 percent of all African-American students received out-of-school suspensions in the 2009-2010 school year compared to 7 percent of Latino students and just 5 percent of White students. Even more shocking, 25 percent of African-American students with disabilities were suspended the same year. In "Opportunities Suspended: The Disparate Impact of Disciplinary Exclusion From School," the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at the UCLA's Civil Rights Project analyzes data from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights on school discipline and suspensions in the 2009-10 school year. The comprehensive report reveals the unconscionable disparities regarding which students are pushed out of the classroom and locked out of school.

The 2012 version of the Annie E. Casey Foundation's annual "KIDS COUNT Data Book" provides a wealth of information about the well-being of our nation's children, including state-by-state data on educational opportunities, economic security, access to healthcare and family and community environments. The report illustrates the deep disparities between children of color and their White peers and between children from wealthy and low-income families in access to the opportunities and supports necessary to succeed in school and in life. Overall, the report finds that a higher percentage of students of color are living in poverty, not attending preschool, not graduating on time and don't have health insurance compared to non-Hispanic White children.

Higher graduation rates typically correlate to lower incarceration rates. Why then do states with higher graduation rates for students of color also witness higher rates of incarceration for the same population? Because our criminal justice system, and the school-to-prison pipeline, disproportionately affects students of color. 

Far too many states continue to deny public schools the essential resources they need to provide every child with a fair and substantive opportunity to learn. The Second Edition of Education Law Center's Is School Funding Fair? A National Report Card rates the 50 states on the basis of four "fairness indicators" - funding level, funding distribution, state fiscal effort, and public school coverage - and provides the most in-depth analysis to date of state education finance systems.

Severing the link between school finance and local property taxes would help to eliminate the funding inequities that plague our schools and that deprive low-income students of the resources and opportunities they need to succeed. In the Sunday Dialogue section in the New York Times, Dr. John H. Jackson, President and CEO of the Schott Foundation for Public Education, argues for a more just method for funding our nation's schools.

Providing every child with a fair and substantive opportunity to learn is nothing less than a moral imperative. But as parent and student organizers across the country know all too well, today's education policies, which push competition and privatization, are not sufficient for "addressing the structural inequities that make separate and unequal education a persistent fact of life in America today," writes Rev. Jesse Jackson in a must-read column for CNN.

If it takes a village to raise a child, the same village must share accountability when many children are educationally abandoned. In New York City, the nation’s largest school system, on average student outcomes and their opportunity to learn are more determined by the neighborhood where a child lives, than his or her abilities.