The issue I am planning on addressing in my brief is the lack of hands-on cultural immersion at grade school levels and a fault in different states’ education systems. Policy discussions occurring right now are systemic racism and education funding. While entrenched racism is something that has perpetuated for centuries, with the increase in awareness of police brutality over the past year, the resurgence in power of the Black Lives Matter Movement, and more conversations about altering education on a federal level under the new presidential administration, this topic is timely.  Almost all schools base their curriculum off of textbooks, where authors decide for themselves what were important moments in history and assign to those events positive and negative connotations implicitly. I suggest then that schools should include an interactive program every other year at a minimum to engage students with minority figures. Examples include pen pals with incarcerated black and brown people who are victims of the War on Drugs, descendants of Native Americans stripped of their land, or DREAMers; field trips to overcrowded jails and historical sites; and guest speakers from people alive during the Civil Rights movement, descendants of those impacted by the Chinese Exclusion Act and other anti-Asian efforts, or Holocaust survivors. The progression American citizens’ thinking through revamped education systems should lead more to accept different minority groups, make the nation more competitive and respected on a global scale, and decrease incidents of terrorism against minorities on US soil.

The cause of the issue I’m addressing in my brief is mechanical. While I believe that systemic racism is an intentional cause of the issue, as people have always sought out ways to caste others, and now there is a purposeful control of the historical narrative fed to American youth, this system is working exactly the way it was intended to work. Therefore overall, I would categorize this issue as mechanical. The majority does not want to see control leave their hands and as a result, education systems were designed to perpetuate ideas of hate in some areas by purposefully leaving out important historical ideas and including in the curriculum extremely biased work. The education system, just like the legal system, is not failing, it is succeeding and working exactly how it was designed.

The policy instruments that I would incorporate are capacity builder and inducement. Capacity builder is from having representatives come to the school and speak to students and faculty. Inducements would come in the form of saying to schools ‘if you offer these programs every other year, you will receive an increase in funding not just to support these endeavors but for the school as a whole.’ The benefits to these approaches are creating deeper knowledge and encouraging good behavior respectively. Drawbacks include that it is hard to evaluate the effectiveness and it is difficult to know the true motive while also being costly respectively.