The history of public education in the United States is both a story of great promise and of systematic exclusion. These two realities continue side by side today. For white and affluent children, public education holds great promise. Meanwhile, Black, Brown, and low-income children continue to be denied access to that promise. Every year, Congress denies billions in authorized funding for Title I, a federal program that supports schools serving large majorities of students living in poverty.
A ROSe in LA explores how this “education debt” has affected educators and students at Dorsey High School, and how they’re standing up to fight for an equitably funded system that will nurture and sustain the communities of South-Central Los Angeles.
In the last 12 years, Title I was short-changed by $347 billion.
Since its enactment in 1965, Congress has failed to fully fund Title I every single year. As a result, this high school lost out on $999,857 in 2017 alone.
In Los Angeles, failure to fully fund Title I denies students more than $900 million a year.
For students and educators at Susan Miller Dorsey High School in South-Central Los Angeles, this is an everyday reality. Class sizes are so large that students rush to class just to get a seat. Dorsey has between 3 and 5 police officers on campus every day, but doesn’t have a single full-time college counselor.
A ROSe in LA was directed by Manauvaskar Kublall, Media Sutra, and created in collaboration with the Partnership for the Future of Learning.
Confronting the Education Debt was released by the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools (AROS) and argues that elected policymakers are denying millions of children—mostly Black and Brown children—the educational opportunities they deserve.
Watch AROS’s second film with MediaSutra, Better Days are Coming, about Title I and youth activism in Detroit public schools.
