ABSTRACT
In one of the most bizarre developments in education in our lifetimes, public schoolteachers are becoming the focal point of attacks on public schools. Little notice has been paid to the fact that as income and wealth inequality grew, so grew the dismal disparities in graduation rates and reading and math achievement. As more adults have lost their jobs, as homelessness has increased, as services for low-income people have been discontinued because of spiraling state budgets, standardized test scores fell. As programs that had helped students from families in poverty get into college were discontinued, as tutoring diminished or was taken over by for-profit companies that had little knowledge of students or their communities, as class sizes became larger and larger, schools and their teachers were blamed for the results of this economic trickle-up debacle. For eight long years federal, state, and local funding dwindled further and further in many of the communities—rural and urban and suburban—that needed funding the most.
