Though it is now nearly a decade later, the closing of 50 under-enrolled Chicago Public Schools in 2013 still feels like an open wound to many Chicago communities, especially to the children who say their educations and lives were upended.

Community activist Jitu Brown says that right now, we are seeing the reverberations of that trauma in the city.

Here, Brown gives “the last word” on how he says deep inequities in schools are just one part of a decades-long pattern of disinvestment — and how it will take everyone to reverse that pattern.