“Everything in American education is broken.” This is an argument that many continue to use to support their claim that Kansas City needs more quality school options. But what if the problem is not that we don’t know how to educate our children, but that we have stopped prioritizing the education needs of the Black and Brown children that need the most support?

“If the educational system had broken at some point, a look backward would reveal an end to progress—a point at which the system stopped working. Yet that isn’t at all the picture that emerges. Instead, one can see that across many generations, the schools have slowly and steadily improved.” – America’s Not-So-Broken Education System, Atlantic 2006.