Last week, I wrote a post about students in Mississippi getting arrested for things as trivial as dress code. Renee Moore responded:

Thank you so much for giving this sad story the attention and the angle it deserves. This is not just another excuse for people to point their fingers here at MS, but really to point a finger at our collective selves for becoming so callous.

This was worth saying because it’s not just about Mississippi. Too many people equate “backwards” with the South. The next day, I found out that some New Jersey kids won a $500,000 settlement after the assistant principal made them eat off the floor of the gym in front of other kids. The AP was moved to another school, but the whistleblower (a teacher) was fired and given $75,000 in another settlement after.

Jesse Turner also dropped a few pearls of wisdom in this.

Reading this made me think of Bob Dylan’s song ” Blowing in the wind” where we are asked “How many roads most a man walk down
Before you call him a man? Well how many times do we arrest a child before he becomes an inmate for life? Tell it on a mountain Jose something is rotten in Meridian MS. It represents that greater problem America’s refusal to stop feeding our school to prison pipeline problem.
A Trillion dollars of NCLB’s testing and mandated scripted curriculums have failed our children, families, and communities living in poverty. Ignoring the our nation’s failure to desegregate our schools has brought to being the world leader:
Not in math,
Not in science,
Not in Literacy,
But, in being at the world leader in the incarceration of our won citizens.

In Langston Hughes Let America Be America he ended with the verses:

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath–
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain–
All, all the stretch of these great green states–
And make America again!

Jose it is time we heed those word “We, the, people must redeem….
Arresting children does not redeem America, but condemns it.
I reject incarceration of students as education.
I long ago decided to line up on the side of redeemers in this struggle for equity.

I’m a fan of these two. Well said on both ends.

Jose, who thinks Sundays are awesome for sharing …