This chapter examines public schools in low income communities in the U.S. by example of two low income high schools in Chicago. It addresses how alliances between U.S. corporations and local government, and public-school officials do not work in the best interest of students of color in low income communities in their pursuit of higher education. The chapter posits that schools for low income communities do not prepare students for white collar corporate positions, putting them at risk of not qualifying for higher education. Considering the claimed school to prison pipeline, the author calls for closing the educational gap between low income and rich public schools in the U.S. by eradicating racism and classism that appears to prevail in U.S. institutions of education.
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President Donald Trump, in a meeting with Senators Dick Durbin of Illinois and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina stated: “People coming to the [U.S.] from shithole countries” (Watkins & Phillip, 2018). They were discussing ideas for immigration reform, where emphatically criticized the idea of more Africans and Haitians coming into the U.S., “ […]why we want people from Haiti and more Africans in the [U.S.?], the [U.S.] should get more people from countries like Norway” (Watkins & Phillip, 2018). I am not from any African country nor am I from Haiti. I am from Guyana, and my country’s GDP is no different from Africa’s or Haiti’s, so my home country can easily be within the category of shithole countries, too. I came to the U.S. in 1992 and went straight into the Chicago Public School system. What I have learned and continue to learn about public schools, especially in low income communities, is all new to me. While spending four years at Chicago’s Morgan Park High School, I never realized that there were various kinds of curriculums: The concomitant, phantom, hidden, tacit, latent, paracurriculum, and the informal (Longstreet & Shane, 1993). I hadn’t paid attention to concepts like The goals of public education, The restoration of apartheid education across the USA, “The Zero Tolerance Policies and the “School-to-Prison Pipeline” (Smith, 2015, p. 125), which delineate how easily students can go from the classroom and to prison due to the zero tolerance policies, and what schools really teach.