Kevin Coval - OTL #52: Adam Mansbach & Kevin Coval Excerpt #4 lyrics

Kevin Coval: Yeah Arne Duncan obviously is an idiot and he's now - and a lot of the Chicago men who have created the blueprint for privatized education are in DC making the same plan for the country. This is, I think, a space to really work on this is where we need to re-imagine what public education should be, who it should be for, and who should have access to a quality public education, because they are radically changing those conditions for people who are poor. If you can afford a private school, or if you are lucky enough to be some of the few saved to make it into a great local charter school who teaches you how to be white and also work in the service industry for wealth white people, then you are saved, but if you are one of the ma** of young black, brown, poor kids then you don't have that same opportunity. And so, not only is this fight real, because it's now being waged on the national level, but also in Chicago, the way that they re-districted kids and sent them across gang lines. They might claim unknowingly, but if you ask any kid from three years old to like a granny on the block, they'll tell you that you can't go past this certain block. We have kids who are trapped within it, sometimes block to block system, because of turf wars. And that has a lot to do with the Chicago police force and the FBI decentralizing gangs in the city. You know, taking out the generals and heads of organizations because they were getting more and more business savvy. They were starting to look more and more legit. They were sending some of their people to college to do computer programming, so they started to knock out the heads of gangs and send them to prison forever