Professor Lynne Weikart, PhD

The federal government hasn't built public housing since the 1960s. President Johnson pushed Congress to pass the 1968 Housing Act that became a major time of construction of public housing almost doubling such units across the country. In addition, Bobby Kennedy and Senator Jacob Javits pushed through a 1966 amendment to the Economic Development Act that provided private developers with incentives payments to invest in poverty areas.   Once the Reagan era began that was the end of public housing. Instead, Reagan signed the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which slowed building of low-income housing further. First, the act repealed accelerated depreciation and the use of depreciation deductions to offset other ordinary income, precipitating a sharp drop in multifamily housing production. Second, the law placed a cap, for the first time, on states’ authority to issue tax-exempt bonds for multifamily housing and imposed income limits on eligible households. Third, the act created the Low In

It has been proven time and again that American schools are divided by class. Those in well funded school districts score fine on tests; those in poorly funded districts do not do well on tests. The resources schools receive are based upon the local property tax and where there is wealth, there is a decent public school. I can understand people concluding that we should change the way we fund our schools. What I can't understand is how teachers can be blamed for the test results of their students who are in these poorly resourced schools. It is bizarre. These so-called reformers who blame teachers for students failing standardized tests have taken leaps of logic down the rabbit hole. If a school is the center of a poorly resourced community, those students will reflect that poverty. Poverty has enormous impact on children which has been proven time and time again. To believe that teachers can make up for that poverty and somehow change the trajectory of that child is simply th