Dear Reader,
It is 1831. A Black mother in Virginia is teaching her son to read by candlelight, with a primer hidden under the floorboards. If she is caught, she can be whipped. He can be sold. The white person who gave her the book can be fined and jailed. The law says so. The state of Virginia, right after Nat Turner’s rebellion, made it a crime to teach an enslaved person to read.
She does it anyway. She teaches him at night. She teaches him for years. He grows up literate in a country that has made his literacy a crime, and one day he teaches a child of his own. The country has tried to break the chain of knowledge in her family, and she has refused.
The methods have changed. The country still decides who gets to learn.
The Law Already Changed
On July 1, 2026, federal student loans changed.
Parent PLUS loans — the loans parents take out to help pay for college — are now capped at $20,000 a year and $65,000 total per child. If a family’s tuition bill is $50,000 a year, the federal government will no longer lend them the difference. They have to find that money somewhere else, and where most families end up is a private bank loan with a much higher interest rate.
Graduate school loans now charge almost 8 percent, and the interest begins accruing the day the loan is disbursed. Not after graduation. Not after the grace period. The day the money hits the school. A freshman who borrowed $30,000 in August is paying interest on it before she finds her dorm room.
The rules changed two weeks ago and the news cycle moved on inside a week. Families are sitting at kitchen tables right now with commitment letters, calculators, and a set of numbers that has quietly rearranged what college is going to cost them.
Why is there no national uproar?
I want to give you an answer that is older than Trump.
The Real American Dream
The American Dream, we are told, is the picket fence, the bootstraps, the mortgage, the two cars in the driveway.
The founding dream is different. The founding dream is anti-intellectualism — a country where most people stay just educated enough to work the job, and just ignorant enough not to question who profits from their labor.
When the men who wrote all men are created equal said all, they did not mean the people they enslaved. They did not mean their own wives. They did not mean the Indigenous nations whose land they stood on. They did not mean poor white men who did not own property. All was marketing. The country they built was a country for a narrow class of wealthy white men who needed everyone else to stay in their place.
You cannot build a country on that contradiction and then invest in educating the people you never intended to be equal.
An educated person reads contracts. An educated person votes. An educated person organizes. An educated person sues. An educated person teaches her children to read.
An educated person is a problem.
They Have Always Known
The slaveholders knew. That is why they made literacy a crime.
Frederick Douglass knew. When his enslaver realized young Frederick was learning to read, the man flew into a rage and forbade it. He said, in front of the boy, that an educated slave would be “unfit to be a slave.” Douglass heard him. Years later, Douglass wrote that in that moment he understood the pathway from slavery to freedom. Reading was the road.
Ronald Reagan knew. A month into his 1967 governorship of California, he cut the University of California’s budget and imposed tuition where there had been none. He told reporters that taxpayers should not be “subsidizing intellectual curiosity.” Three years later, at a press conference on Reagan’s behalf, his education adviser Roger Freeman warned that California was in danger of producing “an educated proletariat. That’s dynamite. We have to be selective about who we allow to go through higher education. If not, we will have a large number of highly trained and unemployed people. That’s what happened in Germany. I saw it happen.”
An adviser to a sitting American governor compared educating too many working-class Americans to Weimar Germany — the years between World War I and Hitler’s rise, when Freeman was a young man in Vienna watching democracy collapse. He said it on the record, to reporters. The San Francisco Chronicle ran the story on October 30, 1970 under the headline “Professor Sees Peril in Education.” Journalist Jon Schwarz pointed back to Freeman’s warning in 2022 as the origin story of American student debt, and he was right. This is where the debt trap starts.
By 1981, Reagan was in the White House cutting federal student aid nearly in half and rewriting the whole system to push young people out of grants and into loans. The rules that changed on July 1 are the same project, fifty-five years down the road. As Dr. Stacey Patton has been arguing on her Substack, the ugliness is not new. The visibility is.
Pennsylvania Is the Laboratory
Pennsylvania is where you can see the founding dream operating in slow motion.
For nine years, six school districts, a coalition of parents, the NAACP-Pennsylvania State Conference, and a group of rural and small schools sued the state. The Pennsylvania Constitution guarantees every child a right to an education. But Pennsylvania funds schools mostly through local property taxes, which means a kid in a wealthy suburb gets a fully-funded school, and a kid in a poor neighborhood gets a building with no nurse, no counselor, no working air conditioning, no books, and not enough teachers. Same state, same constitution, different zip code, different childhood.
In February 2023, Commonwealth Court Judge Renée Cohn Jubelirer agreed. In an 800-page ruling, she declared Pennsylvania’s school funding system unconstitutional. The state did not appeal. The ruling is final.
The legislature acknowledged an adequacy gap of about $4.5 billion a year — what Pennsylvania would need to add to give every child a constitutionally adequate education. That gap is disproportionately owed to Black, brown, poor, and rural districts. Lower Merion was spending over $31,000 per student before the lawsuit. William Penn, just down the road, was spending $18,000. A child crosses an invisible municipal line and loses thirteen thousand dollars of education before homeroom.
Governor Josh Shapiro signed the 2026–27 budget over the weekend, and Chalkbeat reports that Pennsylvania school districts will receive $11.8 billion next year — a $670 million increase over last year. $565 million of that increase is targeted directly at the adequacy gap, with more money also going to special education and career and technical training. $157 million of the new funding is directed to Philadelphia. That is progress. Legislators like Senator Vincent Hughes and Representative Jordan Harris have been in this fight for years, and the movement pressure of parents, superintendents, and coalitions like PA Schools Work has moved the number.
Even so, the state’s total budget this year is $50.8 billion, and only $565 million of it — about one percent — goes toward closing the adequacy gap the courts declared unconstitutional. Three budgets in, Pennsylvania has put roughly $1.9 billion toward a $4.5 billion annual gap. That is about 42 percent of what the state itself has acknowledged that it owes. At the current pace of $565 million a year, Pennsylvania will not close the gap until roughly 2031. A first-grader today will be in high school before the Commonwealth honors its own constitution.
I need rural white Pennsylvania to hear this. I need suburban Pennsylvania to hear this. The same machine underfunds the Black child in West Philly and the white child in the Shenandoah Valley. Same formula, same neglect, same lost future. The grandmother in Wilkes-Barre watching her grandkid’s school cut music and counselors is living what the grandmother in West Philly has lived for decades.
Same machine. Same kids. Same loss.
They Say It Is About Money. They Are Lying.
The politicians who cap student loans, defund universities, and slow-walk school funding all swear they are doing it for the economy. They put on the suit, hold up the spreadsheet, and tell us we cannot afford it.
That is a lie, and it falls apart inside their own tradition.
Gary Becker was a University of Chicago economist and a conservative. He won the Nobel Prize in 1992 for proving that investment in education is the highest-return investment a country can make in its own prosperity.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce — the lobbying arm of American business — has spent years publishing reports begging for more public investment in early childhood and K–12, because their member companies cannot find qualified workers. JPMorgan, IBM, and Bank of America all run their own remedial training programs because high school graduates show up unprepared.
The Chamber of Commerce wants more investment in schools than the Republican Party does. The actual capitalists. The people whose profits depend on a skilled workforce.
When a conservative Nobel economist and the Chamber of Commerce both say invest, and the party of business still refuses, the party of business is protecting something other than business.
They are protecting the hierarchy.
Pay Now, or Pay a Lot More Later
Any honest conservative should have to sit with the next set of numbers.
Pennsylvania spends about $192,720 a year to hold one young person in a state-run residential juvenile facility, and closer to $220,000 a year in secure detention, according to the state’s own Juvenile Justice Task Force. Pennsylvania spends roughly $18,000 to $20,000 per child per year in the school districts that need the most help.
One young person, one year, in a state facility, costs ten to twelve children their entire education budget.
Pennsylvania spends roughly $3.2 billion a year on state and local corrections. The Commonwealth’s own Fight Crime: Invest in Kids analysis, backed by police chiefs and prosecutors, has been telling the legislature for years that high-quality pre-K cuts future incarceration dramatically. The Perry Preschool study, the longest-running randomized trial of early childhood investment in this country, returned $8.74 in social benefit for every dollar spent, with 65 percent of the benefit coming from crime reduction alone.
We know how to divert young people before they are ever arrested. The research is settled. We do not fund it.
Instead, this country waits. It waits until a fourteen-year-old with no counselor, no reading intervention, no summer program, no mentor, and no way home from school has done something desperate enough to arrest. Then it spends two hundred thousand dollars a year on him.
The money is not the problem. The money exists. This country pays it on the back end because it refuses to invest it on the front end. That is not fiscal conservatism. That is deciding some children are worth cultivating and other children are worth caging.
The mother in 1831 was told her son was worth less than the paper she was teaching him from. In 2026, the state has itemized it. Eighteen thousand dollars to teach him. One hundred and ninety-two thousand to lock him up.
The Business Model Is Eating Our Young
This country does not invest in its young people. It extracts from them.
The federal Parent PLUS loan is now capped so families have to go to a private bank. Nearly 8 percent interest on graduate loans, accruing on day one. The federal student loan portfolio brings in roughly $107 billion a year in interest revenue off the backs of borrowers, most of them young people who signed promissory notes before their brains finished developing.
Profit on debt. From kids.
The investment side, meanwhile, starves. Pre-K programs run waiting lists. School nurses cover three buildings. Counselors carry caseloads of six hundred students. Libraries lose their librarians. Reading specialists disappear.
The United States is the richest country on earth and it has the highest child poverty rate in the developed world — nearly 21 percent, almost double the average of other wealthy countries. Black mothers in this country are more than three times as likely as white mothers to die from pregnancy, and a Black mother with a college degree dies at higher rates than a white mother who never finished high school.
The full loop looks like this. Underfund the school so the child graduates underprepared. When she stumbles, arrest her and spend two hundred thousand dollars a year to lock her up. If she survives that pipeline and reaches college, sell her a six-figure loan to remediate what we refused to teach her in twelfth grade. Charge her interest until she is fifty.
Collect on both ends.
What We Do
I want to come back to the woman with the primer under the floorboards.
She knew the country was not going to teach her son. She knew the law said she could not teach him either. She knew it was illegal and dangerous and exhausting and terrifying.
She taught him anyway.
Black mothers, Black grandmothers, Black aunties, Black teachers, Black preachers, Black barbers, and Black neighbors have been doing what she did for four hundred years. We teach anyway.
Three things.
One. Find a parent with a college-bound child. Tell them what changed on July 1. Walk them through Parent PLUS. Walk them through the interest-from-day-one trap. Make sure they know what they are signing their family up for before they sign anything else.
Two. Ask everyone you know — every candidate, every legislator, every principal, every school board member, every faith leader — one question: Are we willing to pay for a child’s education on the front end, or are we going to keep paying ten times as much on the back end to lock her up? Make them answer out loud.
Three. Teach one young person this week something the system was not going to teach them. A piece of history. How to read a contract. How to find a primary source. How to question a headline. Anything. Just teach.
The woman with the primer is your great-great-great-grandmother. Maybe literally. Definitely spiritually. She taught her son in the dark because the country had decided he was not supposed to read. Because she taught him, he taught his children, and they taught theirs, and that is the tradition that gave us Frederick Douglass and Ida B. Wells, Baldwin and Morrison, and your favorite Black teacher.
So when this country tells you the cost of college is too high, the interest is just how it works, the schools are just underfunded, that nothing can be done — remember the primer under the floorboards.
She did it anyway.
Teach anyway. Learn anyway. Tell each other anyway.
The dream they wrote down is not the only dream available. We have always had another one.
Sincerely,
A Dope Black Teacher
