Education, economic opportunity best defense against violence

by Cheryle R. Jackson

A 10-year-old girl was struck by a stray bullet as she knelt down to tie her blind sister’s shoes. A 13-year-old girl visiting Chicago fatally was wounded only hours before she was to board a bus with her family back to her East Coast home. A 16-year-old boy was shot in the back as he played basketball on a court a stone’s throw away from his house.

All three of these victims were caught in the crossfire of gang violence that seems to have erupted anew across the city. And all three, according to news reports, were looking forward to the first day of school. They never made it.

As I read these tragic stories, I was reminded again of the critical link between education and economic opportunity, or lack thereof, and the violence robbing our communities of our most precious resource: our children.

Last week, in his acceptance speech before the Republican National Convention, I was glad to hear Sen. John McCain say that education is the No. 1 civil rights issue of the 21st century. I agree with him wholeheartedly, but I would add to that economic opportunity–access to job training, good-paying careers and capital for start-up businesses–as essential to ending the cycle of violence in poor communities.

I am not making excuses for violent behavior, but violence, I believe, is a direct byproduct of undereducated people with no economic opportunities. We don’t need research studies to prove this point. We see it every day in neighborhoods around Illinois where schools are inadequately funded by a system that rewards students living in well-to-do communities and short changes everybody else.

Education funding reform is essential to reversing the cycle of violence in urban communities that are largely segregated by race. That is why the Chicago Urban League, together with the Quad County Urban League, filed a lawsuit against the State of Illinois and the Illinois State Board of Education last month asking the court to declare unconstitutional the state’s funding formula that leaves so many African American and Latino children behind.

McCain offered school choice as a solution. While the Chicago Urban League supports the innovation and success of charter schools with smaller class sizes, it is imperative that we fix the public education for the majority of children, not just a lucky few.

If we do not fight for equity in our schools, we will continue to set our children on a pathway leading to a life of crime, violence, poverty, drugs, unwanted pregnancy and long-term unemployment. In order to solve the violence problem, we have to concurrently tackle the problems of a poor educational system and lack of economic opportunities that breed violent offenders.

Students need better schools, true, but their parents also need better-paying jobs in order to create stable home environments for children to thrive in after the school bell chimes.

The Chicago Urban League is working hard to connect people to economic opportunities by creating job training programs, helping small businesses build capacity to create new jobs and smoothing the pathway to jobs in the corporate world. But all our efforts will be in vain if people do not have the basic educational skills to leverage those opportunities.

I want the best for Chicago’s children – all of them – and I believe that our lawsuit is an important step to changing the culture of violence that takes our attention away from the important issues to focus solely on survival.

The way I see it, the only thing worse than not fighting for our children’s education and for economic opportunities that will sustain them as adults is not fighting to ensure our children’s safety. What’s painfully clear is that you cannot have one without the other.

I pray that those in power will wake up and realize that reforming the state’s discriminatory educational funding system plays no small part in creating pathways to a better future for those who so desperately want to believe that the good life is within their reach.

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