Tim DeRoche Quotes

I started thinking of Huck Finn as a protoypical American myth.

By carving up our cities into attendance zones, we are perpetuating the economic and racial divisions that marked one of the darkest eras of our nation’s past.

American public schools were once explicitly Christian and even Protestant. I would argue that, until recently, they were implicitly Christian while also offering a heavy dose of moderate liberalism, the dominant American civil religion of the last century. But as our politics have fractured, this traditional approach to education has given way in many schools. What’s been sucked into the void has differed from place to place: sometimes a reactionary conservatism, and sometimes a radical progressive ideology that seeks to destroy much of what we’ve inherited from prior generations.

[Cautionary verse] is a genre that has receded from view in recent years, but it’s hiding in the shadows, ready to pop out and horrify the stultified masses. Yet it will likely delight anyone who believes that children’s literature should be more than just morality tales dressed up with colorful pictures. Perhaps poems like these can help embolden the humorists of tomorrow. The way things are going, we’re likely to need them.

The original Huck Finn is not about slavery; it’s not about race. This is a story about an abused kid looking for a safe haven.

I want to draw a direct line from the racially discriminatory housing practices of the middle decades of the twentieth century and the laws and policies that create attendance zones for public schools today.

What is this peculiar, misshapen thing that we call an attendance zone? It’s an administrative service area. Government bureaucrats carve up the map and determine who gets preferred enrollment at what school. There are no elected officials at the attendance-zone level—and no political representation. The residents of a school zone are not subject to special taxes that go to the local school. An attendance zone is also a license to discriminate. If the school is full (most of the best schools are), then the attendance zone provides the school with the ability to exclude families who live within the district’s jurisdictional boundaries but outside of the arbitrary zone for that school as drawn by district staff.

It’s commonplace for Americans of all races and income levels to use a false address to get into a school that they aren’t zoned for. School districts then sometimes hire private eyes to spy on kids and even put parents in jail for crossing the lines.

We already have a name for this practice of using your address to determine whether or not you are eligible for valuable government services. We call it redlining. Educational redlining is analogous to redlining in the housing market. In each case, valuable government services are reserved for more privileged communities, using geographic preferences as a way to limit who is eligible to receive them.

The public school system is a foundational part of our social contract. But our laws and policies ensure that the most coveted public schools are only accessible to the select few who have the resources to play the game. We have to do better to fulfill Justice Warren’s promise.

Public education in our country has long relied on certain foundational myths. Many—perhaps most—of us have largely accepted these myths as articles of faith. Now, a handful of journalists and activist parents are exposing the often-troubling realities.

Perhaps, one day, the public school system will launch a counter-reformation to address some of the core problems that have prevented it from fulfilling its noble purpose. But for now, the vested powers of the educational establishment, much like the Catholic Church in the sixteenth century, have chosen to take a purely defensive position. Heretics who call for reform are labeled segregationists, book banners, or at the very least, "divisive."

Huck undergoes a change in Twain’s original in terms of how he sees the slave Jim, and Huck undergoes a similar change in this book.

Here is the truth: 78% of public school children attend their assigned public school. If American public schools are divided along economic and racial lines (and it’s indisputable that they are), then it is primarily because of school assignment policies, not because a minority of parents look for better public school options for their children.

The core belief driving our work is so simple that it might sound radical. Even the best and most coveted public schools should be open and accessible to all families.