Drug laws are useful for this purpose. So are traffic laws. Both can result in summonses and then, often enough, bench warrants, which are particularly useful in perpetuating cycles of debt in servitude. Summoned to appear in court for one of these sometimes-minor violations, a man who believes he will be fined more than he can afford does not appear. Because he does not appear in court, a warrant is issued, at which point, for lack of the price of the judge’s dinner, he becomes an outlaw, as Alice Goffman writes in On the Run: Fugitive Life in America.
Public education is supposed to be the answer. We hope that the yellow brick road out of poverty and onto the sunny uplands of post-racial America runs through the schools.
But does it? Let’s look at what happens to Black children in Baltimore’s schools.
- In 2013, just 13 percent of Black eighth graders read at or above grade level.
- Just 8 percent of eighth-grade Black males read at or above grade level.
- Just 7 percent of the Black males in the eighth grade who are eligible for the National School Lunch Program read at grade level (according to the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress).
As the data show, and as the website and podcast Dropout Nation has documented, Baltimore schools are not teaching their Black children to read.
According to the Maryland State Department of Education’s Maryland Report Card, 84 percent of all classes in high-poverty high schools in the state — but only 78 percent of classes in Baltimore — were taught by high-quality teachers in 2014. According to the U.S. Department of Education, 35 percent of Baltimore teachers were absent more than 10 days of the school year in 2009-’10 — an extraordinary and unacceptable level of teacher absenteeism.