Journal of Teacher Education

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A Letter to Our Next President

Gloria Ladson-Billings
Journal of Teacher Education 2008; 59; 235
DOI: 10.1177/0022487108317466
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A LETTER TO OUR NEXT PRESIDENT

Gloria Ladson-Billings
University of Wisconsin-Madison

The next president of the United States faces monumental challenges in the areas of national
defense, the economy, and health care. However, one daunting domestic issue the nation must face
is the continued educational inequity that exists between children of color and their white counterparts in our schools. This article looks at four facets of the educational equity challenge and
reframes the discourse from one of achievement gaps to education debt. The four facets of that debt
are historical, economic, sociopolitical, and moral. Without this more robust look at how these disparities occur, the nations schools will continue to tinker with peripheral issues such as more testing, continued grade retention, and punishing students and teachers, and fail to solve our real
education problems.

Keywords: achievement gap; education debt; educational equity

Dear Mister/Madam President:

The very fact that this letter begins with
addressing either a man or woman in the office
of President of the United States is in itself a
cause for celebration and a tribute to the historic nature of this years presidential contest.
For this we allregardless of political persuasionshould feel more deeply invested in the
promise of democracy to include all Americans
regardless of race, class, and gender.
My letter to you is linked specifically to the
question of public education and what I
believe are the more pressing issues facing
your administration and the nation at large
regarding the future of public education in our
society. To address these issues I want to speak
specifically to the question of what has been
called popularly the racial achievement gap.

The achievement gap has been on the lips

of almost every politician, education researcher,
education leader, and education policy maker
in the nation. The provision of the reauthorization of the Elementary and Secondary
Education Act, more conventionally known as
No Child Left Behind (NCLB), that profoundly
illuminated this achievement gap was the
requirement to disaggregate student test score
data based on categories such as race, special
needs, and English language proficiency. We
know that African American and Latino
students score substantially lower than their
White and (some) Asian American counterparts. According to the National Governors
Association, the achievement gap is, a matter
of race and class. [And], across the U.S., a gap
persists between minority and disadvantaged
students and their white counterparts. The

Authors Note: The ideas for this article are adapted from my 2006 Presidential address to the American Educational
Research Association (Ladson-Billings, 2006)
Journal of Teacher Education, Vol. 59, No. 3, May/June 2008 235-239
DOI: 10.1177/0022487108317466
2008 by the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education

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association further states, this is one of the

most pressing education-policy challenges that
states currently face (http://www.subnet
.nga.org/educlear/achievement/retrieved
electronically 10/27/05). We want to erase this
achievement gap. Indeed, that sounds like a
noble and good goal.
However, I want to suggest that you, as a
new president with presumably a new vision,
begin rethinking or reconceptualizing this
notion of the achievement gap. Instead of an
achievement gap, I believe we have an education debt (Ladson-Billings, 2006). The debt language totally changes the relationship between
students and their schooling. For instance,
when we think of what we are combating as an
achievement gap, we implicitly place the onus
for closing that gap on the students, their
families, and their individual teachers and
schools. But the notion of education debt
requires us to think about how all of us, as
members of a democratic society, are implicated in creating these achievement disparities.
Permit me to use an economic metaphor to
explain what I mean by an education debt. No
doubt you have already sat with a team of economic advisers who have briefed you on the
economic challenges the nation faces. One of
your first jobs will be to construct a budget to
present to Congress. If you keep within spending limits people will celebrate your ability to
produce a balanced budget. But, no matter how
successful you are in producing the current budget, lurking prominently in that budget on line 3
(after defense and entitlement programs) is debt
service. That is the debt that the nation has accumulated since its beginning. It does not go away
by balancing the budget of one fiscal year, and it
robs us of opportunities to do creative things for
our present and future because we must continue to pay the huge bills of the past.
I liken the yearly exercise of constructing
the federal budget to the notion of the achievement gap. Every year public schools publish
the results of standardized test scores. At some
schools we celebrate and say we have balanced
the budget. At other schools we bemoan the
fact that the standardized test scores reveal that
we have produced yet another deficit budget. Again, lurking behind this yearly exercise
236

of producing achievement test scores is the

education debt of longstanding inequities and
educational disenfranchisement. I believe this
debt is historical, economic, and moral.
Facing our history. One of the oft-stated critiques of Americans is that we do not know our
histories. I have deliberately spoken here of a
plural form of the term history. The complexity
of our nation is such that even as it moves
throughout time, it has not moved in a straight
line or in the same way for every group or individual. The histories of groups intersect, overlap, and diverge, producing many histories,
not a single, unitary one.
As you look at our histories you will see that
over long stretches of the American narratives
certain groups of children (and their families)
have been systematically and regularly excluded
from the schooling and public education
process. Scholars in the history of education
such as James Anderson (1989), Michael Fultz
(1995), and David Tyack (2004) have documented the legacy of educational inequity in
the United States. Those inequities initially were
formed around race, class, and gender. Gradually,
some of those inequities began to recede, but
clearly they persist in the realm of race. For
African Americans, education was initially forbidden during the period of enslavement. After
emancipation we saw the development of
freedmens schools whose purpose was the
maintenance of a servant class. During the long
period of legal apartheid, African Americans
attended schools where they received cast-off
textbooks and materials from White schools. In
the rural South, the need for farm labor meant
that the typical school year for rural Black
students was about four months. Indeed, Black
students in the South did not experience universal secondary schooling until 1968 (Anderson,
2002). Why then would we not expect an
achievement gap?
The history of American Indian education is
equally egregious. It began with mission schools
to convert and use Indian labor to further the
cause of the church. Later, boarding schools
were developed as General George Pratt
asserted the need, to kill the Indian in order to
save the man. This strategy of deliberate and
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forced assimilation created a group of people,

according to Pulitzer Prize writer N. Scott
Momaday, who belonged nowhere (Lesiak,
1991). The assimilated Indian could not fit comfortably into reservation life or the stratified
mainstream. No predominately White colleges
welcomed the few Indians that successfully
completed the early boarding schools. Only historically Black colleges such as Hampton
Institute opened their doors to them. There they
studied vocational and trade curricula.
Latino students also experienced huge disparities in their education. In Ferg-Cadimas
(2004) report, we discover the longstanding
practice of denial experienced by Latinos dating back to 1848. Historic desegregation cases
such as Mendez v. Westminster and the Lemon
Grove Incident detail the ways that Brown
children were (and continue to be) excluded
from equitable and high quality education.
It is important to point out that the historical
debt was not merely imposed by ignorant, xenophobic, and virulently racist masses. The major
leaders of the nation endorsed ideas about the
inferiority of Black, Latino, and Native peoples.
If, as the new leader of the nation, you care
about our existing educational inequities, you
cannot ignore the history from which our current educational disparities emerged.
Follow the money. Having just completed a
successful presidential campaign, you know as
well as anyone how much money is required to
make a successful run for elected office. But
what is your sense of how much money it takes
to educate young people to fully participate as
democratic citizens? The legacy of separate,
segregated schooling has produced incredibly
inequitable funding streams that helped to create this education debt. In current day dollars
the funding disparities between urban schools
and their suburban counterparts present a
telling story about the value we place on the
education of different groups of students.
Chicago Public Schools spend about $8, 482
per pupil, whereas nearby Highland Park spends
$17, 291 per pupil. Chicago Public Schools have
an 87% Black and Latino population, whereas
Highland Park has a 90% White population. Per
pupil expenditures in Philadelphia are $9, 299

per pupil for its 79% Black and Latino population, whereas across City Line Avenue in Lower
Merion the per-pupil expenditure is $17, 261 for
a 91% White population. New York City Public
Schools spends $11,627 per pupil for a student
population that is 72% Black and Latino, whereas
suburban Manhasset spends $22,311 for a
student population that is 91% White. (figures
from Kozol, 2005).
One of the earliest lessons one learns in statistics is that correlation does not prove causation, but we must ask ourselves why the
funding inequities map so neatly and regularly onto the racial and ethnic realities of our
schools. Even if we cannot prove that schools
are poorly funded because Black and Latino
students attend them, we can demonstrate
that the amount of funding rises with the
increase in White students. This pattern of
inequitable funding has occurred over centuries. For many of these populations, schooling was nonexistent during the early history of
the nation, and clearly Whites were not prepared to invest their fiscal resources in what
were perceived to be strange others. The
fundamental question is why does the nation
regularly allocate $10,000 per pupil less for
African American and Latino students than it
does for White, middle-class students? This
ongoing funding disparity is another component of the education debt.
Give us the ballot. The third aspect of this education debt of which I speak is the sociopolitical
debt. You know better than most how important the franchise is to a free society. In addition
to being able to vote, democratic citizens need
the right to participate in a variety of decisionmaking processes that affect their childrens
and communities schools. For long periods of
our history, communities of color have been
excluded from the political process. In 1965 the
Congress wisely passed the Voting Rights Act
to begin to eradicate the sociopolitical debt.
In March of 1965 in Mississippi, Alabama,
Georgia, Louisiana, North Carolina, South
Carolina, and Virginia the gap in voter participation between White and Black voters ranged
from 63.2 to 22.2%. In 1988, after more than
20 years of the Voting Rights Act, the voting

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disparities between White and Black voters in

those southern states ranged from 2.0 (meaning that 2% more Blacks voted than Whites) to
7.4% (Grofman, Handley, & Niemi 1992).
Although you are probably intimately familiar
with this voter participation information (after
all, knowing voter habits is a big part of what
campaign staffs do), I call this to your attention
to remind you that the dramatic voter participation changes I referenced are a result of bold
and decisive action on the part of President
Lyndon Johnson and the Congress to remedy a
longstanding wrong. In upholding the constitutionality of the act the Supreme Court ruled:
Congress has found the case-by-case litigation was
inadequate to combat wide-spread and persistent
discrimination in voting, because of the inordinate
amount of time and energy required to overcome
the obstructionist tactics invariably encountered in
these lawsuits. After enduring nearly a century of
systematic resistance to the Fifteenth Amendment,
Congress might well decide to shift the advantage
of time and inertia from the perpetrators of the evil
to its victims. (South Carolina v. Katzenbach, 383 U.S.
301, 327-28, 1966)

The closest example of such a dramatic paying down of the education debt is affirmative
action. Rather than wait for students of color to
meet predetermined standards the society
decided to recognize that historically denied
groups should be given a preference in admission
to schools and colleges. Bowen and Bok (1999)
found that in the case of African Americans this
policy helped create what we now know as the
Black middle class. In todays political environment the notion of affirmative action has fallen
into disfavor and is treated as if it represents special preference for undeserving people.
Who are the people we want to be? This past
summer the Supreme Court (Parents involved in
Community Schools v. Seattle School District, U.S.
05-908, 2007) determined that race could not be
used to assign students to schools even when
schools have as a central goal the creation of a
diverse learning environment. The result of
such a ruling is likely to contribute to the continued resegregation of our schools. Orfield and
Lee (2006) pointed out that not only has schools
segregation persisted, it has been transformed
238

by the changing demographics of the nation.

They also pointed out, there has not been a
serious discussion of the costs of segregation or
the advantages of integration for our most segregated population, white students (p. 5). So,
although we may have celebrated the 50th
anniversary of the Brown decision three years
ago, we can point to little evidence that we
really gave Brown a chance. According to
Frankenberg, Lee, and Orfield (2003) and
Orfield and Lee (2004), Americas public
schools are more than a decade into a process of
resegregation. Almost three fourths of Black
and Latino students attend schools that are predominately non-White. More than 2 million
Black and Latino studentsa quarter of the
Black students in the Northeast and Midwest
attend what the researchers call apartheid
schools. The four most segregated states for
Black students are New York, Michigan,
Illinois, and California.
I recount this issue of school desegregation
to remind you that although the current education legislation is titled No Child Left Behind,
we enacted it when hundreds of thousands of
children were already far behind. Indeed, they
were so far behind that no attempt at leveling
the playing field by just requiring that everyone pass the same standardized test would
have any real impact on them.
The failures to fully implement school
desegregation (and, indeed, to retreat from it as
a principle) along with our failure to provide
school funding equity contribute to the moral
aspect of the education debt. These are failures
around which a president can use his or her
bully pulpit to rally the nation.
Payment past due. Almost every school child
in our nation knows some portion of
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.s (1963) I Have a
Dream speech. We focus on the dream portion
of the speech but regularly omit the portion of
the speech that admonishes us that African
Americans and others had marched on
Washington to get the nation to make good on
a promissory note it had written to each of her
citizens. Unfortunately, in the case of African
Americans, that promissory note came back
stamped insufficient funds. Dr. King refused
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to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt

or that there are insufficient funds in the great
vaults of opportunity of this nation.
Today you, as the next president, inherit both
the assets and liabilities of the nation. Prominent
in the liability column is a clearly marked education debt. It requires your immediate attention and cannot be paid down by more testing,
less funding, disinvestment in public schools,
and attacks on teachers and their preparation.
Because the debt is so enormous, it cannot be
paid down quickly. But, it cannot be ignored.
The results of that debt show up every year in
our increasing prison population, our rate of
teen pregnancies compared with those in the
technological world, our loss of economic competitiveness, and most important, our low participation in the democratic process.
The primary mission of the public school is to
make citizens. What kind of citizens can we make
if we regularly tell some students that they are
less worthy, less deserving, and less likely to be
full-fledged citizens who will know what it
means to participate in a democratic, multicultural
society? You have an awesome responsibility as
the leader of the wealthiest, most- developed
nation the world has ever seen. Along with security concerns, rising health care costs, and economic challenges, you must steer a course for
how the federal government will respond to an
education system that is failing us on many levels. The debt is massive but you have the next
four years to start on a payment plan.
REFERENCES
Anderson, J. D. (1989). The education of Blacks in the South,
1860-1935. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North
Carolina Press.

Anderson, J. D. (2002). Historical perspectives on Black

academic achievement. Paper presented at the Visiting
Minority Scholars Series Lecture, February 28, Wisconsin
Center for Educational Research, UW-Madison.
Ferg-Cadima, J. (2004). Black, White, and Brown: Latino
school desegregation in the pre- and post Brown v. Board of
Education era. Washington, DC: MALDEF.
Frankenberg, E., Lee, C., & Orfield, G. (2003). A multiracial
society with segregated schools: Are we losing the dream?
Report of the Harvard Civil Rights Project. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University.
Fultz, M. (1995). African American teachers in the South,
1890-1940: Powerlessness and the ironies of expectations
and protests. History of Education Quarterly, 35(4), 401-422.
Grofman, B., Handley, L., & Niemi, R. G. (1992). Minority
representation and the quest for voting equality. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
King, M. L., Jr. (1963). I have a dream. Speech delivered
August 28 at the March on Washington, Washington,
DC, retrieved electronically from http://www
.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkihaveadream
.htm on 09/12/07).
Kozol, J. (2005). The shame of the nation: The restoration of
apartheid schooling in America. New York: Crown
Publishing.
Ladson-Billings, G. (2006). From achievement gap to educational debt: Understanding achievement in schools.
Educational Researcher, 35(7), 3-12.
Lesiak, C. (1991). In the white mans image. Film recording.
New York: Public Broadcasting Corporation.
Orfield, G., & Lee, C. (2004). Brown at 50: Kings dream or
Plessys nightmare. The Civil Rights Project. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.
Orfield, G., & Lee, C. (2006). Racial transformation and the
changing nature of segregation. The Civil Rights Project.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Tyack, D. (2004). Seeking common ground: Public schools in a
diverse society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.

Gloria Ladson-Billings is the Kellner Family Chair

of Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum &
Instruction and faculty affiliate in the Department of
Educational Policy Studies at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison.

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