Good take from Marc Tucker:
“David Brooks wrote a column that ran in the New York Times on May 1 that got me thinking. In it, he points out that the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood that Freddie Gray lived in was not exactly neglected. Yes, Gray was poor. But when Kurt Schmoke was mayor, he got the famous Baltimore developer James Rouse and Habitat for Humanity to pour more than $130 million into new homes and new school curriculum, new job training programs and so on for Gray’s neighborhood. Townhouses were built for $87,000 and sold to residents for $37,000. Today, the schools in the city spend more than $15,000 per pupil. Nationwide, Brooks points out, the federal government spends more than $14,000 per person on antipoverty programs. Nonetheless, Freddie Gray left school four grade levels behind. By the time he died, he had been arrested more than a dozen times.”
