Canceling student debt would help level the educational playing field. That’s why some people hate it.

I am a product of Philadelphia’s streets, its neighborhoods, its poverty, and its chaos. But I am equally the product of Philadelphia’s public school system, and the lessons I learned in the best of those schools helped to level the playing field for me.

In a country that uses education to bludgeon those who would dare to climb out of its racial and economic tar pits, the playing field is never supposed to be level. Our society is designed to slant toward those who already have the advantage, and if it doesn’t, there is usually hell to pay.

That’s why I’m so interested in the pitched battle over President Joe Biden’s plan to cancel a total of $400 billion in government-held student loan debt for about 26 million Americans. Biden’s plan would provide between $10,000 and $20,000 for each qualified borrower. But Republican-led states sued to stop the plan, and last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments on either side of the debate. It is expected to issue its ruling by June, and I don’t believe the court’s conservative majority will rule in favor of the people. They will instead rule in favor of the system.

“Education has the power to open doors, but too often, the lack of education slams them shut.”

It is a system that touts education as a right, while simultaneously treating it as a privilege. To be sure, education has the power to open doors, but too often, the lack of education slams them shut, especially for the impoverished and people of color. Money, power, race, and class determine who has access to the best available education, but student loans can make it seem that we all have equal access. We do not.

The poor borrow money to pay for college. By doing so, they hope to move up economically, but the jobs they secure rarely offer the kind of compensation that can quickly repay the loans. The poor are then saddled with decades of debt, and end up paying interest far beyond what they originally borrowed.

Even Clarence Thomas, the conservative Black Supreme Court justice who will likely vote against Biden’s student debt relief plan, once called his own student loan debt a “crushing weight.” Sadly, conservatives like Thomas seem to want others to remain under such weight. That way the social order remains intact, and the poor never catch up to the wealthy.

I resent such thinking because I know firsthand how difficult it is to rid oneself of student loan debt. I took out government loans to go to college, and decades later, I still have debt remaining. Like millions of others across the country, I would benefit if Biden’s plan was allowed to move forward. Perhaps more importantly, the plan would aid me as I am now paying college tuition for two of my three children.

Canceling student loan debt for me and countless others would mark a generational shift in our family’s economic fortunes, and while some will stop trying if Biden’s plan is stymied by the court, I have no intention of doing so. I will work my fingers to the bone to protect my children from student loan debt because experience has taught me that such debt is a trap.

» READ MORE: What to know about the landmark Pa. school funding case decision

Sadly, America’s education trap begins long before college. For example, when property taxes pay for public education, communities that boast higher property values can invest more in their public schools, while poor communities have less school funding. Pennsylvania’s Commonwealth Court recently ruled that process unconstitutional, but identifying the problem is one thing. Fixing it is something else altogether.

Repairing an educational system designed to create perpetual inequity takes political will, a desire for social justice, and a wholesale commitment to change. We don’t have that. Instead, we have politicians who pay lip service to changing the system. We have city leaders who give tax abatements to developers when that money should go to education. We have demagogues who want to spend millions on prisons and pennies on schools.

But that’s just the point. Our educational system is not designed to close the gap. It is designed to keep the gap firmly in place. That’s why when Philadelphia overhauls the admissions policies for our best magnet schools, the racial and economic disparities in such schools remain the same. It’s why the parents of privileged kids at Masterman can complain that the school is being “systematically dismantled” when students from poor neighborhoods somehow make it into their midst.

Education in America is not meant to be equal. Perhaps when we face that unpleasant truth, we can finally change things for good.