Nine times in a hundred and sixty years, the American government has told children they are owed an education.
Reconstruction. Plessy. Brown. The Civil Rights Act. Title I. Lau. Rodriguez. Rose. No Child Left Behind.
Not once did it say how much.
Every time an educational obligation was named without a threshold, it turned into something purchasable. Segregation academies after Brown. Pull-out programs under Title I. Private tutoring written directly into federal statute under No Child Left Behind. And finally a housing market where families buy a school by buying a house.
Nobody had to intend it. A system built to purchase, count, and defend itself can respond to a vague promise in no other way.
But the country did it right once.
In 1975 Congress named a duty, attached it to one named child, required it in writing, and gave her parent a room to walk into. Fifty years later that law is expensive, litigated, underfunded - and still standing. Every other promise in this book was absorbed.
Drawing on legal history, school finance research, and twenty-five years of the author's own work in New York City public schools, Nobody Said How Much is a history, an argument, and a method: four questions to ask of any claim anyone will ever make about a school.
