Fairness in education should start here

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The state tax cap should also be modified to exempt districts that fall below a certain level of spending per pupil. This would make it easier for districts seeking to close the spending gap per student through tax increases.

Towns and villages should also make zoning changes to permit more affordable housing. This would allow more students from less affluent families to attend high-spending schools.

This would also help address an 800,000 housing unit shortfall in New York that hurts businesses seeking employees, married couples from buying their first homes and empty nesters from downsizing. It would also enable Nassau to become less segregated.

The state should offer both carrots to encourage the development of affordable housing and sticks to penalize those who refuse to do their part. Perhaps by giving less state aid to municipalities.

President Lyndon Johnson said in a 1965 commencement speech at Howard University, “You do not take a person who, for years, has been hobbled by chains and liberate him, bring him up to the starting line of a race and then say, ‘You are free to compete with all the others,’ and still justly believe that you have been completely fair.”

Yes, it is now nearly 60 years since Johnson

View Point

spoke those words and much has improved. But much hasn’t.

Blacks spent more than 250 years as slaves, barred from learning to read or write. They faced another 100 years as second-class citizens under Jim Crow. And blacks have faced systemic discrimination that continues to this day.

It is time for public schools in New York to be part of the solution, not part of the problem.