It’s funny how we talk around things, isn’t it?

There is much more to bad schools than bad schools.

I’ve been an educator for 12 years. My close friends, parents, and wife are all educators. They’ve taught me a lot about schools and schooling.

Many schools in the inner city are a shambles. However, the teachers, the administrators, and the parents are not exclusively to be blamed. Schools are a social mirror, reflecting the way we’ve dismissed other people’s children and their rights to equal access and opportunity. Schools are in trouble for reasons we have failed to confront for decades.

Our inner-city schools are in trouble because we’ve used them to foster racist systems of inequity. We’ve ghettoized neighborhoods of color as we have fled to the suburbs.

Our inner-city schools are in trouble because time after time the Supreme Court has failed to recognize the relationship between de jure segregation and de facto segregation and the fundamental inequity both create for inner-city schools. Although bussing was a good attempt, it allowed us to ignore our ideological and philosophical abandonment of inner-city schools and neighborhoods.

Our inner-city schools are in trouble because the best ideas we have for improving inner-city schools are to use a poor test, to test students more, and then teach to the test to get them to pass the test. Many inner-city schools have become inhumane places of student compliance not creative excellence. Inner city kids don’t need more tests…they need the kind of schools we reserve for our wealthiest kids.

Our inner-city schools are in trouble because they increasingly serve the nation’s hunger for individual exclusivity, not an engaged citizenry. Diplomas are valued for their exchange value; for what schools they can get a student into, not for the learning it took to receive them. We have transformed the value of an education to make it a kind of currency, making education institutions vulnerable to the fluctuations of market recessions. When ruthless economic competition becomes the lens through which we value our schools, it is those who can’t compete because of our political and economic policies who are the inevitable losers.

I appreciate the conversation the documentary “Superman” is starting. However, nothing in schools will change unless we insist that every child, even those we don’t know, receives the same education we insist on for our children in Bellevue. The context, not the schools, is corrupt.

Paul Sutton lives in Bellevue.