Education is the key issue for all of us — in Kansas and throughout the nation

One of the most consequential lessons I teach in my A.P. U.S. history classroom each year is on the landmark Supreme Court decision Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In the collective memory of American high school graduates, it is commonly understood that the decision galvanized the civil rights movement and ended explicit segregation under the law (though segregation persists in other ways). What is less understood is the far-reaching constitutional implications — obligations, even — that are enshrined in the decision, and which we have failed to uphold: Wherever a state establishes a public education system, it is the federal government’s responsibility under the 14th Amendment to ensure every child has equal access to a great education.

Even as states like Kansas fail to sufficiently fund public schools, pundits quickly write off school funding as a state-level issue. But in the opportunity gap between the poor and the affluent, and in the perennial struggle to adequately and equitably fund our schools, it is self-evident that the federal government has a school funding emergency of its own.

In 1965, Congress passed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. The law intended to meet our constitutional obligation under Brown v. Board by offering provisions like funding to at-risk schools and students, professional development to foster excellent teachers, bilingual education and after-school programs.

But the law has been much amended in the last fifty years, and as the Republican Party’s right wing pulled its members farther from President Dwight Eisenhower’s philosophy of good governance and into the trickle-down economic theory of tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, these programs were left behind. Our current 3rd District congressman, Rep. Kevin Yoder, voted just last year to cut $2.4 billion from education to pay for last year’s edition of such tax breaks. Today, Title I investments only increase per student funding in at-risk schools by 5 percent — a few hundred dollars annually.

No wonder the opportunity gap has only become wider. The conventional “wisdom” that education is a state issue was born of an unwillingness to meet our obligation: these critical federal programs became small not by design, but by neglect.

Shortly before Donald Trump was elected president, I had graduated with a master’s degree in school administration from night classes at Baker University. I hoped to find a job in administration to continue the work I had done as a teacher helping young people find opportunity, and play a small role in closing the opportunity gap for a school in need. But my frustration reached a breaking point when it became clear that Trump and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos intended to accelerate educational inequality to pay for another tax break for billionaires like themselves.

After years of seeing career politicians in Congress fail teachers, students, and working families like mine, I decided it was about time that a teacher runs Congress, and that these times may well demand a teacher’s voice in the people’s house to sound the alarm.

The consequences of Congress’ unpaid debt to public education exceed even inequality itself. The United States is less innovative in technology, math, and science than our adversaries and economic competitors. The most important problems of our time — climate change, cybersecurity, building a 21st century economy that can sustain middle class live — require federal commitment to public education. The opportunity gap is both a moral quagmire and a full blown national security crisis.

We will end up paying this debt in some currency — either in investment dollars now, or in the effect of our domestic decline and diminishing influence in the world. If you share my view that the choice is clear, I hope I can earn your vote in the Democratic primary on Aug. 7.