THE PROVERBIAL BAND-AID ON A CANCER.

National Review's George Weigel suggests that professional basketball players share the wealth.

Tens of millions of dollars would become instantly available if every professional athlete who declined to play last week would donate a boycotted game’s or games’ salary to league-managed funds in support of scholarship assistance to the parents of underprivileged children. The leagues would then partner with the local Catholic diocese in a given team’s geographic area to make those scholarship funds available to parents through the schools, which would be required to use the funds for scholarships and scholarships only. The leagues would donate their collection and distribution services, and the dioceses would pledge to make all monies received from the leagues and the athletes flow to the schools through their diocesan scholarship programs, or parish-based scholarship programs. No funds would be skimmed on the path between the athletes and children in need; all the donating athletes would know that they had actually helped someone who badly needed their support.

And for a year at last, the unjust playing field in American elementary education would be leveled a bit, and thus made more just.

What inspires Mr Weigel's post is his understanding that the government high schools in low-income areas are dropout factories, or, to use the Illinois language, comprehensive schools.  And why limit the scholarships to enrollment opportunities in the diocesan schools?  He might hold a think-tank gig as a "Catholic Studies" boffin, but he's limiting his thinking.  In Rockford, to continue the Illinois theme, that would mean one or a few lucky kids might get a full ride at Rockford Boylan.  (In the odd world of Rockford sports coverage, that's what makes the Rockford television stations the only television stations in Illinois that pay attention to the Green Bay Packers.  Not because their signals carry into Monroe or Beloit or Janesville or Delavan.  Rather, a Boylan graduate currently plays for the Packers.  Change that and the Packers might be as invisible as the Chicago Bulls.)  Arguably, we could extend the charity to potential matriculants at Rockford Lutheran (in the upper Midwest, if you ask "are you Catholic or Lutheran?" are you microaggressing against Baptists?)  There's also the more ecumenical (or is it catholic in the original sense of the word) Rockford Christian, and, if you want to be somewhat non-sectarian, there's Keith Country Day.

The charitable efforts from professional basketball might give a few kids a chance at learning something.  In neighborhoods where the government high schools are doing everything but inculcating bourgeois habits, though, those efforts might still be in vain.  The lucky few students might still be collateral damage standing on the corner waiting for a school bus when the local cartels determine control of the opposite corner, or just at the wrong party at the wrong time.  That's the real systemic injustice.