In this post, Jack Schneider explains why he and his wife chose to send their daughter to the public school across the street.
Schneider, a historian of education (like me), knows that many of his friends and acquaintances don’t agree or approve.
They are not bigots, but they nonetheless are uncomfortable when confronted with the opportunity to react with people of a different race or class from themselves.
Yet, says Schneider, that is exactly why he and his wife wanted their child to attend a public school.
They want her to learn to live in the world and not to be afraid of those who are different from her.
Instead of fleeing to the whitest, most affluent school they can find, he says, parents should be fighting for diverse public schools.
He writes:
The purpose of education, we might recall, is to lay the ground so that young people may find their way through the world in whatever manner they wish, and find their place in it whatever that place may be. The aim is not merely to promote the accretion of knowledge — something segregated schools can do as well as integrated schools — but also to expand the mind and nurture the soul. Education should broaden. It should transform.
Which schools are best prepared to execute this task? Certainly those with qualified teachers, rich and varied curricula, adequate resources, and positive cultures. But also those with diverse student bodies capable of expressing a full range of experiences — student bodies that will expand the way that young people perceive the world and relate to each other. Just as no parent should compromise on the former of those characteristics, none should ignore the importance of the latter.
Truly diverse schools are an educational imperative. Not just because they are a bulwark against racial and economic injustice. But also because they teach young people how to see and be seen in new ways. They are places that serve all students. And insofar as that is the case, all parents should be fighting for them.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Given the degree of SES segregation in housing, this would seem to be to be a good argument against requiring poor children of color to attend neighborhood schools filled with other poor children of color.
I don’t find interacting with ghetto blacks “uncomfortable”. I find it terrifying.
We know.
Dienne: what you said.
Not hard to figure out…
😎
Then that’s precisely why you should push yourself, Jim, to extend your personal boundaries, to face and overcome that. Are you familiar with Yeats’s theory of the masks? It is through interaction with the Other that we grow.
I agree with this. We were interested in just the same things when we lived in Northern Ohio. We bought our house, we met the teacherscand principal, we had hope and anticipation.
Then we learned the demographic reality. After the fact.
The district had taken all the kids from Section 8 housing and moved them to our school. Their home schools were torn down and interstate took over. The typical parent who lived in our neighborhood had gotten babysitter permits in the adjoining district (same city) so they could send their kids to that school. So our school had almost zero neighborhood class kids in it. My son’s first grade was 90% inner city. Some kids in the room were 9-10 years old and talked about being sexually active, drugs, and sordid exposure to the bad things in life. Learning was slow-paced but we kept him there for a year and a half.
There were other schools to which the displaced students could have been dispersed but rather than integrate all schools they chose to put the students together in one school. My other son started kindergarten the second year we were there. They got an education beyond the classroom. And on some levels I think that was great.
However, in attending Summer School Enrichment Camps on a middle school campus, my younger preschool son had found hypodermic needles on the campus of the school. He brought them down to show me he’d found Ninja Turtle needles. I freaked out. I didn’t know where they’d come from, who had them, if he had stuck or scratched himself, etc. I took them in to the school and asked what to do, what was their procedure, etc. They said just put them in the trash. I asked if there was paperwork to file or anything to do about this. They shrugged and looked at me like I was nuts.
My husband found another job and we moved away.
No it isn’t perfect anywhere but when policies are so lax that this can happen, we didn’t care to continue living there. Sad because we lived it there otherwise. We weren’t being snobs but we simply wanted our kids to be safe.
Point being: this is what segregation can do to a learning environment.
Anybody who has an easy answer, please step forward. Even knowing that we can have high quality schools with a significant proportion of students from low economic backgrounds, we have the unfortunate habit of not living in nice, neat, mixed communities.
I went to integrated schools in the 40s and 50s in Cincinnati. I am now surprised at the number of people I meet that not only went to all white schools, but don’t even know many, or any, blacks. I didn’t know I was so unusual. PS Cincinnati public schools outlawed school prayer in the 60s. 1860s. I am also disturbed by the people in education I know that send their children to private schools.
Dallas schools are less than 5% Anglo and less than 10% middle class–and most of the middle class and/or Anglo kids are clustered at few magnet campuses.
Race and low-income kids aren’t what drives parents out of DISD; it’s the corruption and dysfunction that has turned schools into rundown testing centers that only profit a handful of vendors (whose kids all go to private schools).
Rotting portables, a carousel of substitute teachers, constant testing–while the kids run wild because they are ignored by the administration. That’s what the parents object to. The rich and middle class can get out; the poor have no choice but to stay.
Our district is “led” by Mike Miles, a Broad alum. Now we have a rash of suicides at a middle school where one of his hires is principal. Just when you think it can’t get worse, it does.
I’d be interested in exactly how diverse “the public school across the street” in this post is; how diverse Schneider’s acquaintances think “diverse” means; and whether diversity remains as valuable to Schneider when it comes to picking a middle school and high school for his child(ren).
Dear “FLERP”:
Here are the statistics for the school, if you are truly curious:
50% white; 50% non-white (8% Asian-American); first language not English = 25%; low-income = 55% (free lunch = 47%); students w/ disabilities = 30%
The school also happens to be a good school in other ways. So we are lucky. But, of course, “good” is a relative term dependent on values.
Finally, I’ll add this: diversity will always remain important to me. I want my child to be a citizen who sees her lot as being bound up with the lot of others; I want her to see that she is a part of humanity; I want her to stand in solidarity.
Thanks for the reply, Prof. Schneider.
I’m sure you gleaned the reason for my question, which is that, as I believe surveys have shown for a long time, different people can have very different ideas of what constitutes “diversity,” and that when their diversity thresholds are exceeded, non-minorities become anxious about whether the dominant culture shares their values and will often exit.
I went to public schools that were probably at least 90% white, maybe higher. My kids’s school is about 25% black and hispanic. The only reason I know that because I just looked up the demographics. I wouldn’t have guessed that high because I’ve truly never even considered race or ethnicity as an issue at the school. That doesn’t mean I’m a swell guy who doesn’t “see race.” What it probably means is that my diversity-threshold hasn’t been crossed, and I must feel that the dominant culture shares my values.
Re: my other question, I’ve observed that a lot what I’ll call “white, bourgeois parents” (you know who you are!) view middle school very differently elementary school. To put it bluntly, these parents find lower-income minorities substantially more threatening when they’re 12 or 13 years old than when they were 7 or 8.
Again, I really appreciate your response. I think race is a really, really difficult thing to talk about honestly, even on anonymous comment threads. Using your own name takes a measure of courage that I obviously lack.
I’d be interested what your response is to the commenters who’ve taken issue with your statement that the acquaintances referenced in your piece “are not bigots.”
Professor, it’s good to see that you felt the school you mentioned would provide your youngsters a quality education. Having chosen diverse public schools in St. Paul, Mn for our 3 youngsters, we found similar benefits.
Do you also respect the wishes of African American and American Indian families that want a k-12 school in which they are a majority – such as can be found at historically black colleges and universities and tribally controlled colleges. DO you think these should be options available at the k-12 level?
I see you are a professor at Holy Cross. Have you also spoken out about the problems of child abuse that have been so pervasive in the Catholic church? Hope so. Sadly, this also is a part of the American scene for too many youngsters and adults.
The fact that neighborhoods and their schools schools are segregated by class and/or race is often used as a rationale for privatization, as if it’s a sincere attempt to remedy this longstanding, deeply embedded problem, a problem that goes back to one of the Original Sins in the founding of this country.
But if public schools run by elected boards, which are at least nominally subject to democratic feedback, cannot resolve this, does anyone really think that privatized, for profit (directly or indirectly) charter or voucher schools will? If anything, charter schools have been conclusively shown to exacerbate class and racial segregation.
exactly
All this is going to change with time. The neocon fascist oligarchy will become increasingly isolated as a result of its own hubris, its toxic combination of arrogance and stupidity, resulting in severe economic upheaval and turbulence to redress appalling inequities resulting from the current public school deforms, the breathtaking waste of national productivity on empire, and the terrible psychological cost to everyone else of an essentially unproductive, parasitic managerial class. The oligarchy is putting in place unprecedented mechanisms for total surveillance and violent suppression and control, of course. But I suspect that in the not-so-long run, the oligarchs will either learn to share, or they will put themselves and their kind in great danger. I sometimes think/fear that we are living in France in the buildup to the revolution and that the wealthy in the U.S. are essentially clueless about how desperate and hopeless the mass of people feel their lives to be and about the extent to which the new ruling class is despised even by (and sometimes especially by) those currently serving them and about the extent to which no one, and I mean no one except members of that class, is buying the propaganda anymore. It’s no wonder that the oligarchs are so desperate to seize control of the schools, for even they are not so stupid and out of touch as not recognize, at some level, the extent to which they need new mechanisms for indoctrination and conditioning of the young if they are to hold onto power.
In the meantime, our racial mixing will proceed exponentially. Soon race will have as little meaning culturally as it has long had scientifically, and people will come to view cultural traditions as ways of living and being to be adopted rather than as given at birth. Most young white people I know don’t see race at all, though many young blacks and Hispanics don’t yet have the freedom (or in some cases the desire) to do that. The very notion of race seems as quaint to many young white people today, and to some young blacks and Hispanics, as the horse-drawn buggy and the gas lamp, and that’s a very good thing indeed.
So, I suspect that in the not-so-distant future, things are going to be very, very different. The next fifty years are going to be difficult and strange times, but it may be, it just may be, that something beautiful will be born from it all. The thing about totalitarianism is that there is no future in it despite all the unprecedented power that technology can bring to bear. The days of the old hydraulic empires are long, long gone, and they cannot be resurrected, so the dream hatched at the Project for the New American Century and instantiated as undercurrent in so much policy today was an utter fantasy, though the oligarchs are not yet hip to that.
I just read the wonderful obituary of Lee Lorch, a “Desegregation Activist”.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/02/nyregion/lee-lorch-desegregation-activist-who-led-stuyvesant-town-effort-dies-at-98.html?ref=obituaries&_r=0
I hope that one day I have 1/10th the courage.
Good for you Mr. Schneider- your heart seems in the right place.
Mr. Schneider, you took the words right out of my mouth. Thanks for a very reassuring article in an age where such sentiments are rarely heard. I am running for school board here in Tucson, and actually had one teacher suggest that “segregation” is no longer relevant. We shouldn’t even think about it because we shouldn’t have to anymore. Your article was like water to a thirsty soul!
Thank you, Mr. Schneider!
Good for Mr. & Mrs. Schneider! I teach in a Catholic School , but one of its best features is the diversity of students who go there. The majority of our students qualify for free or reduced priced lunches, but we are currently serving white, African, African American, Vietnamese, Chinese, Native American and Mexican children.
“They are not bigots” Sorry to burst your bubble Jack, but they are.
That’s what I said when EduShyster posted this article.
I was thinking the same thing.
If that is not a bigot, what is?
Does one have to march around in a white sheet?
I think that there is a difference between “bigot”-a person who is utterly intolerant of any differing creed, belief, or opinion-than “prejudiced”-an unfavorable opinion or feeling formed beforehand or without knowledge, thought, or reason.
Perhaps the better word might be prejudiced in this case.
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx The school reflects the community. I was fortunate to grow up in a NYS university town (& so a fair minority of other-national professors, students), small enough so that there was only one regional h.s. (thus pulling in all minority residents; about 10% black). So any class was 10-15% minority. Sure, the black kids hung out together but it was quite possible to have black friends (& Cubans & Hungarians, back then).
40 yrs later we were attracted to our NJ suburb because it was similar. There’s a lot more segregation in NJ– the very next town is about 30% black compared to our 10%, & the one beyond that is 65%. But the key factor is the same: only one h.s. per town, which pulls in any minority residents. So my kids, being ‘different’ (non-conformist musicians) had much in common w/minority kids & were able to grow up w/black, Asian, Hispanic bffs. Which means as adults & musicians they’ve formed a network that includes those nearby towns; in college reached out to any ‘color’; their friendships & music is enriched.
I see now how unusual this is, given the stark absence of other races/cultures in many Midwestern towns, & the inner-city absence of whites created by economic racism. Yet it still says to me that the p.s. model works best: it will pull in whoever lives there. The privatization model appears to be splintering neighborhoods.
Excellent essay and every word true– BTW, a good law review article on this very topic is by Rob Garda at Loyola in Ne Orleans: http://works.bepress.com/robert_garda/1/