Social activist Jan Resseger points us to a sobering article by civil rights attorney Paul Trachtenberg of Rutgers University in New Jersey.
Trachtenberg describes the two school systems in New Jersey, one overwhelmingly white and successful, the other highly segregated and poor. One controls its schools, the other is controlled by the state.
She writes:
“One, the predominantly white, well-to-do and suburban system, performs at relatively high levels, graduating and sending on to higher education most of its students. The other, the overwhelmingly black, Latino, and poor urban system, struggles to achieve basic literacy and numeracy for its students, to close pernicious achievement gaps, and to graduate a representative share of its students. These differences have been mitigated to a degree by Abbott v. Burke‘s enormous infusion of state dollars into the poor urban districts, and some poor urban districts like Union City have been able to effect dramatic improvements. But neither Abbott nor any other state action has done anything to change the underlying demographics.”
Tractenberg describes a new report he co-authored, released jointly by Rutgers University’s Institute on Education Law and Policy and the Civil Rights Project at UCLA, that focuses on apartheid schools “with 1 percent or fewer white students” and intensely segregated schools with “10 percent or fewer white students.” According to the report, “almost half of all black students and more than 40 percent of all Latino students in New Jersey attend schools that are overwhelmingly segregated” —falling into one of these two categories. “Compounding the problem is that the schools those students attend are doubly segregated because a majority, often an overwhelming majority, of the students are low-income.”
Tractenberg depicts the school reform strategy of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and Education Commissioner Christopher Cerf as a radical agenda that ignores segregation and poverty: long-term state takeover of school districts; closure of so-called “failing” schools; privatization; attacks on teachers unions; evaluation of teachers based on students’ test scores; and promotion of vouchers. (Newark’s schools have been under state control since 1995. Just this past week, Newark’s state-appointed overseer superintendent, Cami Anderson, fired four principals for speaking up at a public meeting to oppose her plan to close a third of Newark’s public schools.)
Tractenberg concludes: “‘evidence’ regarding the Christie/Cerf agenda shows that: long-term state operation of large urban districts is an unmitigated disaster; private-for-profit operation of public schools, public funding of private, mostly parochial schools, and most public charter schools have produced little or no substantial and sustained improvements in student achievement; replacing existing public schools with experimental “turnaround’ schools is no assurance of substantial and enduring improvement; and school vouchers have been overwhelmingly rejected by the public every time they have been put to a referendum.”
Tractenberg suggests that his own ideas —merging smaller school districts, creating county-wide school districts, creating a magnet school program modeled on Connecticut’s—are no more radical than the Christie/Cerf agenda. He would acknowledge, however, that developing the political will for policies that will challenge power, privilege and attitudes about race and class is going to be as difficult today as it was when Dr. King tried to undertake a campaign against poverty toward the end of his life. Tractenberg suggests we need an informed and thoroughgoing public discussion about racism and poverty and school segregation, a conversation that almost nobody is having these days in America.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
i work in a county wide system, doesn’t solve the problems
It’s discouraging that this post hasn’t attracted any comments, although I guess it isn’t surprising–things get messy and uncomfortable once we dig into race, segregation, and inequality. To suggest that inequality is somehow a separate issue from racism and segregation is nothing more than a cop-out.
Nationally, black and Hispanic children are more than three times likely to be living in poverty than white children. This difference widens considerably in areas like Essex County, NJ, where some of the nation’s wealthiest leafy suburbs are immediately adjacent to cities wracked by generational poverty. As noted by historians and scholars like Richard Rothstein, this arrangement occurred intentionally, with the explicit approval and participation of federal, state, and local governments: Restrictive covenants, police intimidation, redlining, steering, “sundown” rules? These weren’t aimed at poor people, they were aimed at black people.
Professor Tractenberg recognizes the link between traditional school districts, property values, and hyper-segregation, and while he doesn’t come right out and say it, his message is clear: everyone likes to talk about fixing segregation, but no one wants to really do anything about it. Other districts should consolidate and potentially cut jobs, not mine. Other schools should take in at-risk kids, not my kids’ schools. Some other town should revamp its exclusionary zoning laws to promote affordable housing, not my town. When does it end, and when can the real work start?
If we want to make changes, we should learn from the fiasco created by the current crop of reformers. Let’s start with the conversation and be ready for lots of heated discussion. It’s easier to be against something that doesn’t work for everyone than it is to build an alternative that meets everyone’s needs.
Segregation by itself in meaningless. It is absurd to say the segregation by race has anything to do with it unless you are prepared to think racial categories are valid. What is wrong with Newark is that the middle class, both black and white moved out of Newark (lets ignore Ironbound). As long as we keep giving credence to outdated notions we cannot solve any of the problems we have.
Speaking of absurd, I have to say it’s pretty amusing to hear racial segregation pronounced meaningless at 6:31 EST on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day 2014 by someone blogging from a county that’s 98% white and counts a grand total of 27 blacks among its 25,000 residents!
If there was ever a time that a black and white middle class existed simultaneously in the city of Newark, it was fleeting, and the two groups certainly weren’t living shoulder to shoulder. The growth of the black population in Newark was mirrored by a loss of whites: between 1950 and 1967 the white population fell from 363,000 to 158,000 while the black population grew from 70,000 to 220,000. By one historian’s reckoning, in 1950 more than 90% of Newark’s black population was confined to its Central Ward, which in turn itself was 100% black.
What’s more instructive is what happened when blacks with the means to do so left Newark. They moved to mostly white cities adjacent to the Central Ward: Irvington, Orange, and East Orange; cities that would then experience (thanks to blockbusting) white flight at a pace that exceeded even Newark’s. The only other places in the county open to blacks were certain sections of Montclair, South Orange, and Maplewood, three communities that are noteworthy for their integrated overall population and a strong commitment to integrating schools, but also for how stubbornly residential segregation has endured within their town borders. Newark’s, Irvington’s, Orange’s, and East Orange’s fleeing whites, on the other hand, moved to nearly entirely white communities farther out in Essex County, to new subdivisions in Morris or Monmouth Counties, or anywhere else they pleased. All of these arrangements remain in place today; the overwhelming majority of the NY metropolitan area’s minorities live in a relative handful of cities and towns and a very small overall percentage of its land area.
I certainly understand the appeal of the “it’s not race, it’s class” argument, especially to well-meaning whites who live in leafy suburbs with exclusionary zoning, high property taxes (to support the local schools, natch), and hardly any minorities, located close to hypersegregated minority communities. We’re not racist–anyone with the money is welcome to live here, honest! Unfortunately, there’s hardly any historical evidence to support “class” as being the driving force behind this divide, and less evidence to explain why the divide exists today and isn’t going away.
I’ll consider segregation meaningless when minority kids and white kids are equally likely to be living in poverty. Until then, we know that there are few odds tougher to overcome than being a minority child attending a hypersegregated school, and that the most powerful educational intervention for minority children is to attend a racially integrated school. Tractenberg is right when he says that it doesn’t make sense to leave out racial segregation in a discussion of education reform.
Bravo, brother Tim. From where I stand and through my eyes America was founded on RACE and CLASS. How long was it before women, and I mean WHITE women were allowed to vote or not be considered something-like property by WHITE men. Those founding FATHERS, who scribed the words ‘WE THE PEOPLE’, seem to have been talking about ,people(men) who were WHITE and owned LAND, with regards to voting, especially. Throughout American history it has seemingly always been about CLASS which means,MONEY, and certainly RACE. Remember the INDIANS the first slaves and holocaust victims here in AMERICA. To this day they have sustain a number of successful attempts against them to be cleansed of their savage ways, erased as a people, and so on. I believe it was one of AMERICA’S great Presidents, Thomas Jefferson that said, “WE would never stop pursuing them(black slaves and Indians) while one remained on the face of the earth.” We could discuss this ad nauseum, but suffice it to say, until humanity thinks in terms of there being ONLY ONE RACE(HUMAN) integration is a rhetorical idea. In other words,” until the death of a white mother’s son means the same as the death of a black mother’s son”, there will never be true DEMOCRACY or PEACE. Or, as MLK put it ,”until Black people can be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin” this id a mute issue. We must either work together as brothers and sisters or we will perish as fools. The time is NOW, our children are watching. Peace and Love
I think I agree with the above poster in a sense. Segregation is not ‘meaningless’, but it has not proven to be a particularly good cause of action, and is even less so in an economic climate opposite to the boom which buoyed efforts to desegregate schools 50 yrs ago, particularly with present politics & Supreme Court. We must work with what we’ve got now.
Some successes have been seen in suits which show privatization to maintain or increase segregation, and in suits which show wholesale firing of teachers to have been without due process. Another path could be to show that state takeovers/ privatization cost the taxpayers more, without providing recourse to taxpayers– no representation.
The two-tiered schooling in NJ for instance is supported by state and property taxes levied on middle & upper-income to the point where they are being squeezed out of their communities by spiralling costs which are not returned to their locales. The uppers, as they are required to pay for the schooling of the poor & working poor, must be given a voice in how the $ is spent. The ‘accountability’ mantra must be turned on its ear, providing clear goals, financial transparency for taxpayers– strike while the iron is hot, show exactly who is profiting from Christie’s shock doctrine in Newark, Camden, who’s pulling strings & why.
But the third leg of the stool must be a concerted effort to roll back legalized graft & corruption. Where to start? I’ve signed the “get money out” petition (google); any other ideas?