Historical Op Ed: Dyett High School, Inequality, And The Roo ✓ Solved

Historical Op Ed: Dyett High School, Inequality, and the Roo

Historical Op Ed: Dyett High School, Inequality, and the Roots of Resistance in American Public Education. If we truly want equal opportunity in American education, we should listen to the anti-colonial demands of parents and students at Dyett High School and heed the lessons of history. In 2015, Bronzeville activists led a 34-day hunger strike to protest the closing of Dyett High School, part of Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s initiative to shutter underperforming schools, strip Local School Councils of decision-making power, and privatize. The strikers argue that a public high school must provide a curriculum that prepares students for productive, engaged futures, not lives of toil, poverty, and incarceration. The struggle echoes a century of resistance to schooling shaped by imperial politics and racial hierarchies, including Hawai‘i’s manual training regimes, Atlanta’s underfunding, and IQ testing in the Southwest. The Dyett case shows communities resisting efforts to colonize their futures and seeks a Global Leadership and Green Technology High School. This assignment invites analysis of these tensions, linking historical patterns to contemporary debates about equal opportunity in public education and a discussion of what a just curriculum and governance system would require.

The Dyett case serves as a focal point for examining how public education has repeatedly become a site where power, race, and empire intersect, and where communities organize to demand democratic control over schooling and curricula that prepare students for meaningful futures rather than mere obedience or marginalization.

Paper For Above Instructions

The struggle around Dyett High School in Bronzeville is more than a local administrative quarrel; it is a microcosm of a broader, older fight over who gets to define education, whose children count as citizens, and what counts as a "world-class" curriculum in the context of national ambitions. By reading the Dyett episode through a longer historical arc—one that includes early 20th-century imperial schemes in Hawai‘i, Atlanta’s Jim Crow–era schooling, and multilingual, immigrant, and Indigenous communities fighting for basic educational rights—we can understand both continuity and change in the politics of schooling. As a starting point, historians have traced how schooling policies have often reinforced race and empire, crafting curricula and structures that channel particular groups into narrow economic roles (Stratton, 2016). In this sense, the Dyett demand for a Global Leadership and Green Technology High School is not merely about STEM or global branding; it is a demand to reframe schooling as a space where Black and Latino youth can access futures aligned with power and opportunity rather than with social marginalization (Stratton, 2016). The Bronzeville hunger strike thus functions as a contemporary articulation of historical resistance to educational colonization and a call for a public school that honors students’ capacity to contribute to an evolving economy (Democracy Now!, 2017).

Historical patterns show that inequality in schooling has long been entangled with imperial politics and racial hierarchies. In Hawai‘i, regimes of “manual training” tied schooling to plantation-era labor markets, shaping generations of Native Hawaiian and Asian students for low-will, low-wage work. This was not merely a local anomaly but part of a broader pattern of using schooling to reproduce labor systems connected to empire (Stratton, 2016). In Atlanta, Black students and teachers endured conditions—overcrowding, double sessions, underfunding—that Du Bois described in the early 1900s as emblematic of a segregated, unequal system even as the city’s economy expanded as a hub of the New South. The persistent underinvestment in Black and Southern schools, and the racialized gatekeeping of rising economic potential, illustrate how education becomes a site where empire and race converge to limit opportunity (Du Bois et al., 1969; Stratton, 2016). In the Southwest, IQ testing was employed to justify segregation at the moment when Mexican American labor was crucial to irrigation and agricultural projects, linking schooling policy directly to labor markets and regional power structures (Blanton, 2003). These historical episodes reveal that the content and governance of schooling—what gets taught, who gets to decide, how funds are allocated—have long been instruments of social control and domination as well as potential sites of resistance and reform (Del Moral, 2013).

Against this backdrop, the Dyett struggle dramatizes a contemporary challenge: translating a legacy of critique into tangible reform that expands opportunity rather than channels people into predetermined trajectories. The call for Dyett to become a Global Leadership and Green Technology High School signals a desire to align local education with 21st-century economic needs while determining who benefits from that alignment. Yet this demand also raises essential questions about the democratic basis for selecting curricula, allocating resources, and determining school governance. If equal opportunity is to be more than a slogan, communities must insist on inclusive, representative decision-making processes and curricula that reflect students’ lived realities and future possibilities. In other words, a just public education must combine rigorous, globally informed programs with strong local ownership and accountability to students and families (Kozol, 1991; Ladson-Billings, 1994).

This analysis leads to several implications for policy and practice. First, equity requires sustained investment in schools serving marginalized communities—comparative funding that closes gaps in facilities, technology, staffing, and supports, not merely rhetorical commitments (Kozol, 1991). Second, governance structures must empower Local School Councils and parent and student voices, ensuring that school redesigns—such as the Dyett proposal—reflect community priorities rather than external market logics (Democracy Now!, 2017). Third, curricula must interrogate histories of empire, racism, and labor exploitation, using local case studies to connect global issues to students’ daily lives and futures (Blanton, 2003; Del Moral, 2013). Fourth, proponents of reform should ground their plans in evidence about effective schooling while remaining vigilant against privatization schemes that shift risk onto communities without commensurate accountability (Stratton, 2016). Finally, educators and scholars should foreground narratives of resistance—how parents and students articulate their rights, critique policy, and imagine new futures—as essential components of any equitable reform agenda (Du Bois et al., 1969; Democracy Now!, 2017).

The Dyett narrative demonstrates that equal opportunity in public education demands more than access to a seat in a classroom; it requires an ongoing redefinition of what counts as a quality curriculum, who has authority over that curriculum, and how resources are distributed to sustain schools as democratic public institutions. Historical scholarship and contemporary activism converge in the call to reimagine schools as engines of social mobility, civic empowerment, and ecological and technological stewardship—without reproducing the old hierarchies that have long limited the life chances of Black, Latino, Indigenous, immigrant, and working-class students (Stratton, 2016; Kozol, 1991; Ladson-Billings, 1994; Blanton, 2003; Del Moral, 2013).

In sum, the Bryght of Dyett—the hunger strike, the public debate, and the broader historical context—offers a powerful lens for understanding how inequality persists in American public education and how communities resist attempts to colonize their futures. The path forward, if education is to be a true public good, must combine democratic governance, equitable funding, a critically informed curriculum, and institutional accountability—rooted in a historical consciousness that recognizes the legacies of empire, race, and resistance that continue to shape schooling in the United States today (Du Bois et al., 1969; Democracy Now!, 2017; Stratton, 2016).

References

• Blanton, Carlos Kevin. From Intellectual to Cultural Deficiency: Mexican Americans, Testing, and Public School Policy in the American Southwest. Pacific Historical Review, 72(1), 41. (2003).
• Del Moral, Solsiree. Negotiating Empire: The Cultural Politics of Schools in Puerto Rico. University of Wisconsin Press, 2013.
• Du Bois, W. E. B.; Penney, E. J.; Bell, T. J. Proceedings of the Sixth Atlanta Conference. Arno Press, 1969 (1901).
• Democracy Now! Chicago Hunger Strikers Enter Day 19 Challenging Rahm Emanuel’s Push to Privatize Public Schools. Democracy Now!, 2017.
• Kozol, Jonathan. Savage Inequalities: Children in America's Schools. Crown, 1991.
• Ladson-Billings, Gloria. The Dreamkeepers: Successful Teachers of African American Children. Jossey-Bass, 1994.
• Stratton, Clif. Education for Empire: American Schools, Race, and the Paths of Good Citizenship. University of California Press, 2016.
• Honolulu Republican. May 25, 1901.
• Chicago Board of Education. Accessed May 9, 2017.
• Additional scholarly sources on education and empire as context (e.g., general histories of American education and imperial policy).