I am writing this from my hospital bed. I am at a rehab center after getting a total knee replacement. I keep thinking how dumb I was. I didn’t hold the railing as I went downstairs and landed full-force on my knee, tearing out every major ligament. Now there is some titanium thing in there, a long row of metal staples, and standing on that leg is painful, almost as painful as bending it.
All day today, perhaps to distract myself from the pain, I have been thinking about the Brown decision. This hospital makes me think of how much change I have seen in my lifetime. Most of the change is because of the Brown decision. I look around, and both the staff and the patients are a mini-UN. My main physical therapist is a statuesque, beautiful black woman. I endured my training today on the same large mat with a young black man suffering a brain injury. His trainer was a young white woman with infinite patience and humor.
I was born in 1938 in Houston. I was third of eight children. We attended the same public schools, had the same teachers, used the same textbooks. Our school experiences and outcomes were so different that I can’t take seriously those economists who insist that teachers have a dramatic and uniform impact on all children in their classroom.
All of my classmates and teachers were white, from kindergarten through twelfth grade. The only black people I knew worked in menial jobs. They were cooks, maids, manual workers. In the supermarket, there were different drinking fountains, one marked “white,” the other “colored.” The public buses were racially divided; a movable metal marker said “colored,” and all black people rode in the rear, behind the marker.
Houston was a very conservative Southern city. The elected school board was often dominated after World War II by the John Birch Society and the Minute Women, who felt sure that the Communists had infiltrated almost every organization, and we had to be prepared for a Soviet invasion. When some teachers innocently suggested an essay contest for students about the new United Nations, the school board felt certain that Reds and pinkoes had infiltrated the school.
Race was a forbidden subject too. When the district was looking for a new superintendent, one of the leading candidates was disqualified when the press revealed that he belonged to the Urban League in his hometown on the west coast! Any organization that advocated racial equality was considered by our officials to be Communist-dominated. Certain Southern racist customs were common in Houston. If a black person entered a white person’s home, it was only through the back door. Deference was required. When I think of how things were, I cringe with embarrassment and shame.
I didn’t have any black friends, so I can’t tell you how they reacted to the pervasive insults based on nothing more than their color. They must have felt humiliated every day.
The Brown decision was released on May 17,1954. The school board responded by saying they would never desegregate. They thought they could defer compliance forever. I was a high school sophomore. I remember I went to see the high school principal to ask him why we were defying the Supreme Court. He patiently tried to explain why it was best to leave matters like this alone. Feelings ran too high. From that time forward, I became intrigued with school politics, especially controversies. My first term paper in college was about the extremists who ran the Houston schools and spied on teachers to see if they were loyal to America. In college, I wrote many papers about the struggle for desegregation. I remember the politicians across the South who loudly declared that they would comply with the Brown decision but only if families had choice. Of course, they expected that white children would still go to white schools, and black children would stay in traditional schools (there was always the fear and coercion factor).
So, from my hospital bed, many years later, I have three observations about the Brown decision. First, our own federal government took the decision very seriously in the mid-1960s and demanded actual integration, not just “free choice,” which they knew would produce no change. As conservative appointees were added to the Supreme Court, the federal courts lost heart. Now, irony of ironies, “choice” is supposed to be a “civil rights issue,” but the reality is that choice promotes separation and segregation. Now, we are supposed to believe that segregated charter schools are a great innovation.
Second, we cannot continue to tolerate the extreme educational and residential segregation that has become commonplace. It bodes ill for the future of our society to permit such extremes of economic and social inequality.
Third, the Brown decision may have been abandoned by the federal courts and the federal government—for now—but it has nonetheless had a profound effect on American society. People of African descent are no longer confined to menial jobs. There is a black President, there are black CEOs. In every walk of life, we expect to see a racially and ethnically integrated workplace.
But that’s not enough. We must persevere until black and white and other children live and learn together. We must persevere until there are no racial ghettoes. The American Dream deserves another chance. Fair housing. Equality of educational opportunity. A fair chance at a good life. It is not out of our reach unless we give up. We must not give up. We must make it work for all.
It’s so good to hear and see you up and thinking, Diane. A new generation is taking this to court, with many inspiring announcements released today.
What a perfect summary! If you have not seen “The Help” you should. I cried and cried because of the silent acceptance white America had of “the way things were” racially. I was too young at the onset but I did little for many years to erase the assumptions that surrounded my life.
Diane, thank you.
Dr. Ravitch, you are the inspiration and the hope for so many who desire for public education to live up to our historical ideals. We’re with you in spirit and mind for as long as it takes. God speed and hope you’re up and running again soon.
I really enjoyed reading this post, Diane. Thank you.
Beautifully written. I wish you could meet each every one of my students because your words are so inspiring. I hope you get some relief from the pain soon.
Thank you so much for all you are doing.
I grew up in the Ironbound section of Newark in the 70s, moving in my teens. The neighborhood was working class, no one I knew owned a home, everyone lived in rental apartments or the projects on Fleming and down by Hawkins, and we were of all colors and ethnicities, as were our schools. We didn’t know we were poor; we had the essentials. There was no segregation in the schools I attended, and my neighborhood was likewise diverse. (St. Als through 5th and Hawkins Elementary through 8th), and we all got educated, even tho there was a teachers strike during 6th grade. Imagine that.
Donna,
I grew up in Newark, too, though we lived in the Ivy Hill section, which was all white. Lots of middle class Catholic and Protestant families there, but we were Jewish and few in number. I was often a target of bullying because my last name was Goldberg. Later on, I went to a high school that had a mixture of races, nationalities, religions, and family incomes. Nevertheless our college prep classes (during the 1940’s) were almost entirely white and middle-class.
At a school dance one of the black football players asked a friend of mine to dance. She was white, a drum majorette, and very beautiful. She said “yes,” and danced, smiled and chatted with him through several songs. The rest of us looked on in wonder; we had never seen a mixed race couple dancing before.
Couldn’t have said it better, Diane. Be well and namaste.
An amazing description. We MUST continue to fight. It is so sad and ironic that we have come so “far” that we are fighting our African American president to uphold Brown vs Board…
Diane, thank you for your honesty, your reflections, your wisdom. I have this feeling, that a hospital bed makes one see life more clearly. Your clarity demands attention by all of us. Sometimes, life’s challenges put importance in perspective..
I grew up in a very mixed raced community in the seventies and it is one of the things I am most thankful for in my lifetime. I cannot for the life of me, understand President Obama’s policies. Being close to President Obama’s age, it is so difficult to understand his policies. He is destroying all that was good in America.
Continue to heal. With each of your postings, I feel your improvement. A few more weeks, and most of the pain will be behind you. Hang in there.
As a new licensed teacher of social studies also educated and raised In Houston during the late 1970s early 80s I am deeply concerned about the way our country is approaching education reform. Thank you, Diane for all you do!
Sadly, so many are living in the past keeping the fire burning through negative reminiscence. Indeed, it will be a day to celebrate when we can all live together peacefully. “…but the reality is that choice promotes separation and segregation.” Dare I disagree? In the small city where I live our Catholic schools have become independent educational venues for cultural exchange–thanks in large part to school vouchers.
The exact opposite of your experience is true here in Florida, where we have statewide vouchers and have for years. Few minority students quality for the “opportunity scholarships” fewer choose the vouchers, which are largely used by religious parents to send their children to majority white Christian schools.
The feds are investigating the opportunity scholarship program for racial bias and we have a US Senator, Marco Rubio, himself a member of a minority, arguing against any attempt to make the program less racially biased and fair. He’s fine with the fact that the vast majority of recipients are and will remain upper middle class white children.
Bravo for you small city. This big state (third largest school district in the country) proves Diane’s point without a doubt.
Thank you for your remarks. We are all wishing you well.
We’re soooo far from getting things right. Those of privilege continue to send their children to elite schools, those who want choice are too often sending their children to schools in what I envision is like a military camp atmosphere, many of our girls and, probably boys, are being used in the sex trafficking industry, and today- I read on CNN online that children as young as 11 are working on tobacco farms, usually 6 days a week, 12+ hours a day! and getting acute nicotine poisoning! (The same nicotine that helped to kill my mother!) And they say our U.S. labor laws can’t help these children, or should I say slaves working on plantations, because most are children of Hispanic immigrants?! OMG!
So when the reformers say they want to make our children career and college ready, I say BS. It’s some of those same people who need all of the above to continue so that their wallets become fatter. Have we really made any progress at all? I fear not!
This is a excellent, honest, serious, inspiring post.
Thanks for posting this!
D.R.: The elected school board was often dominated after World War II by the John Birch Society and the Minute Women, who felt sure that the Communists had infiltrated almost every organization, and we had to be prepared for a Soviet invasion.
Fred Koch, father of the two well-known Koch Brothers, Charles & David, was a founding member of the John Birch Society.
“Sons of Wichita” due out May 20th. Can’t wait to read it.
Having attended Wichita Public Schools from 1954-1966, I remember an atmosphere that was anti-semitic but not John Birch. In fact, most people in the schools thought the Birchers were odd. The koch’s were big advocates of private and parochial schools. They helped establish a private school. But I didn’t see much influence in the public schools.
I am three years older than Diane. I grew up in Florida with the same explicit rules, signage, and a host of tacit “understandings” about who could do what, where, when, for how long, and so on.
The dawning of a social conscious came at about age 13 when I happened to read a very brief editorial from a minister who identified himself as white. He asked his readers, whom he assumed were white and living in the South, to consider how their lives would be different if they were “colored.”
Thereafter, nothing in my southern environment was quite the same–conversations with people, drives in any neighborhoods, the lessons delivered at the church I reluctantly attended, what my teachers and friends said and what they meant but their silences.
This is to say that written words can matter, and that scores on tests seriously underestimate the “effectiveness” of a single teacher and a single lesson over a span of a life time. This to say that i began to understand the injustice writ small and large.
I also recall the Communist witch hunts. As a first year teacher I was handed two legal size sheets of paper with two columns on both sides, purporting to be lists of Communist and Communist-leaning organizations. I was asked to declare that I had never been a member of any of these groups and to sign a loyalty oath before I could teach in Florida, a condition for repaying the debt for my college education.
I signed, but still feel the confliction. I am haunted by something like that feeling when today’s teachers comply with policies and practices that approximate taking a loyalty oath in order to retain their jobs. I am outraged at judicial rulings that characterize the work of teachers as no more than “hired speech.” http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/school_law/2010/10/court_no_free_speech_rights_fo.html
All of us have stories, ghosts from the past, people, indelible moments, unexpected opportunities for reflecting on past, present, and possible futures. Thanks for opening this door.
Those loyalty oaths are still in existence. I cringed and still do about signing one 13 years ago. It was so unconstitutional,un-American, and downright offensive but I was desperate for work so I signed and I regret it still.
On the Diane Rehm show a whole hour program was devoted to the effects of the “Brown” decision. I t has made a humongous difference in many ways. Still, there is a LONG way yet to go. Bigotry still exists.
Interesting, when traveling in Portugal no such distinction is made between races. Our guide, a lovely white woman was married to a black man and no one thought it odd at all. Portugal has a long history of course quite different from our own.
I believe that people in the U. S. were terrified that after having condoned slavery and the way the black population was treated that if they gained equity they would take vengeance.
How much we could learn from Africa where In S. Africa that kind of vengeance was not felt. Also after the horrific perpetration of murder between the huttis and the other tribe whose name escapes me now that peace was made. Vengeance was not taken and a huge effort to bring peace was made. They understood that forgiveness was essential for their future.
WHY can we not emulate some of the best that we find where ever it is found?
Also: Dr. Ravitch, our neighbor had her knee replaced and it was PAINFUL as is the case with you. She would NEVER have her other knee done she said. In time it healed and she had the other knee done and is glad now to have had them replaced.
20/20 hindsight, why did we get our selves into predicaments about which we should have known better? We all have done things like that and we have to live with our poor decisions.
Take your time. Heal. We are indebted to you in so very many ways. AND as so many others have said. We applaud your work and this piece as so very many of your words are beautiful. THANK YOU.
Diane. Wishing you a speedy recovery. Hope all is well and take care.
Thank you Diane for sharing your experience. You are truly amazing to be able to write again so soon after knee surgery. I am four years younger than you, had a hip replacement six weeks ago, and did nothing constructive for at least three weeks. Hope you are able to sleep, as healing happens while we are sleeping. I grew up in Maryland. Not like Texas, but similar in many ways. I was twelve when Brown was decided, but it was not until at least three years later that I remember my high school admitting a few “token” black students. As a senior, I was one of about six students from my school who attended Career Day at the local black high school. I gained some respect from this, but understanding of how it feels to be black in American will always elude me simply because I am white. We have to do better, not move backwards.
Diane, this piece is worthy of inclusion in the CCSS close reading list of approved complex texts. (THAT WAS A JOKE)
It is so heartfelt and true and moving it shows what good writing really is and what it can do.
Thanks from the bottom of my heart. I continue to pray for you and your swift release from pain and swifter recovery. Both of my parents went through this and both are glad (now) that they did it, despite the initial suffering.
May you be glad also in time!
Thank you, Chris.
Hope your recovery is swift and complete.
Thanks so much for your thoughts, Diane! I was born in Nashville in 1974 and went to the somewhat newly integrated public schools. I lived in all-white neighborhood but was a racial minority at my own school, because so many angry white parents switched their kids to private schools. My white classmates and I were among the more affluent children in town, but the neighborhood from which the black students were bused was arguably the poorest and most unstable (there certainly were middle-class black neighborhoods, but they didn’t feed into my school). Apartheid still existed within the school, as those of us with high “intelligence quotients,” who were mostly white, got to take special (boring) gifted classes, and we were in the top reading group and all that, while the others, mostly black, were made to look dumb in comparison, and it was clear that everyone believed that we were born bright and they were born dumb, and I don’t remember that anyone much cared to address the fact that many of these darker skinned kids simply came from rougher backgrounds. It opened my eyes to the fact that society thinks some people are better than others, which made me very insecure, and I have always felt that our community wasted an opportunity to nurture perfectly good children simply because they had been born to an underdog group. That race gap remains, and we now have idiots saying once again in Time Magazine (a couple of weeks ago) that Africans must be genetically more intellectually challenged than Europeans and other such nonsense. We have so much work to do!
May you sleep well and respond to therapy and rebound. Picture the virtual flowers I am sending you. Imagine the flattering words I am thinking about your humanity and determination. Dream of the inspiration you have fostered in me and hundreds of others who call you our guru. Nite nite sweet princess.
Common Core has wealthy parents running to private schools or home schooling. That will obviously do nothing to help school equity or the Dream that inspired us all to do better.
Please get well and rest up! We need you!
Bravo, Diane! I am sorry for your pain and hospitalization and continue to pray for your speedy recovery. But despite your circumstances, you have eloquently articulated our recent history and our choice for the future. God bless you and keep you. Your voice is so needed and such a comfort to me. blessings, Jayne
Thank you for having the courage to write without holding back.
Now for the truly daunting part—rest and rehab!
😎
You are an amazing person. While on the mends from a very serious knee surgery, you think not of yourself, but of others through your reflection of your past and to the present regarding the Brown decision. I hope your recovery is fast and painless. I admire you immensely. Thank you!
Great post. Thank you!
1. Today, a century and a half after the end of slavery, 38.2 percent of African-American children live in poverty.
2. Today, a century and a half after the end of slavery, we routinely jail or imprison people for breathing while black. A recent study in California found that white teens in that state used pot at higher rates than did black teens but that black teens were 17 TIMES as likely to be arrested for it. We in the U.S. have the highest rate of incarceration of any nation on Earth. Fully 2.9 percent of our population is in prison, in jail, or on parole. Although African Americans make up only between 12 and 13 percent of our population, they make up 40 percent of the prison population.
3. Today, a century and a half after the end of slavery, there are more African-American men in prison and in jail than there were enslaved African-American men in 1850.
4. Today, a century and a half after the end of slavery, U.S. schools are more segregated than they were in the late 1960s:
Click to access orfield-historic-reversals-accelerating.pdf
And we are supposed to react to this by
1. testing more, which has done nothing to change the “achievement gap” and will almost certainly increase that gap
2. giving parents more school choice, which is guaranteed to increase segregation
3. pouring many, many billions of dollars into summative standardized testing, evaluation schemes, data systems, and computers for taking tests instead of into prenatal care and wrap-around services from birth on
We’ve still got a long, long way to go before this stain is lifted from our nation. I look upon the young people coming up, and I am very, very hopeful, for they are not ignorant and prejudiced like many of their elders.
Everybody knows that the game is rotten
Old black Joe’s still pickin’ cotton
For your ribbons and your bows.
Everybody knows.
from the song “Everybody Knows” by Leonard Cohen
Love and healing to you, Diane, from all of us who take courage from your courage, determination from your determination, hope from the fact that a voice of compassion and reason, like yours, his being heard widely.
After the shocking betrayal by the Obama administration of our hopes for reversal of the damage done by NCLB, after its conjuring of the even more pernicious and damaging Son of NCLB, it means a lot to us, to millions of us, to know that you are there, in your hospital bed, with your laptop, doing battle.
Pretty darned impressive, that.
The power of your facts really needed to end in that expression of hope and in those lyrics. Well done.
Great post –which reminds me a lot of my childhood as well!
Besides charters, selective enrollment magnet schools are now being created in order to support segregation. How ironic, since the original purpose of magnets was to promote integration. I supported them for years because I knew that we needed programs where gifted students of all colors could learn together, but that’s not their purpose anymore.
I mean, for example, in Chicago, there are already enough of those schools to serve the 3-5% population of gifted students, but the mayor and his appointed school board keep opening more of them. Now, they are planning to build yet another one, in honor of Barack Obama, which is to be located on the Northside. That is not where Obama lived and worked, nor where most kids of color live, but where many white students live (and where there are already enough of such schools).
I can no longer support this, as it is clearly a blatant attempt to lock in segregation in an already highly segregated city.
How sad that this is being done in the name of the first black president –whose own policies promote segregation.
Sorry, forgot to include the link:
“Chicago to add new Barack Obama College Prep High School: Advocates for Latino and black students fume over North Side location”
http://www.wbez.org/news/education/chicago-add-new-barack-obama-college-prep-high-school-110073
Thank you for your thoughtful reflections. I would also like to bring to your readers’ attention the importance of not forgetting our Native American students (or American Indians, as we say here in Montana). These people are the often the forgotten minority, even though they were here first. While textbooks have units on MLK and the struggle for civil rights, as well they should, there are fewer units on Indian Boarding Schools or on other unfair policies and actions toward our indigenous tribes.
Diane,
You remind me why I was proud to be an American. You are a treasure.
Be well.
Beth
Diane, thank you for this great post that focuses on the two threats to equity and community in the United States today. De facto segregation, mostly by residential patterns and economic inequality has increased. A great public school system that provide equal educational opportunity for all students in a diverse society is under attack from the corporate reformers and the far right. We have lost a lot of ground, but we can get it back.
What a beautiful essay! Thank you, Diane and get well ASAP!
In order to truly bring about educational equity for all children, we must first face the truth in education, which is:
The status quo of education in our country is education by color and zip code. Sixty years after Brown, the vast majority of poor black children are still restricted to all black schools. Their “choice” is to hope they get into an all-black charter where they will be taught by inexperienced teachers.
Like Diane, many of us know that the huge disparity between the education for the affluent and the education for the poor is weakening our country and has the potential to destroy our great democracy.
Hopefully, the federal government will commit once again to educational equity for all children. This can be accomplished, not through all-black test prep charters, but through open enrollment for all public schools, fair housing and job programs in all communities.
In the meantime, each of us can do what we can. Just this year a friend of mine stepped in when her Hispanic friend’s daughter was almost pushed out of her suburban school because her test scores were too low. Once the school was sufficiently intimidated, they apologized and offered the girl extra tutoring. She is now doing fairly well and has a B average.
We’ll soon be back to our democratic ideals; I’m sure of it!
What a beautiful essay. I was moved. I was changed yet again.
Healing energy to you, Diane. Ask you doctors if you can take arnica montana, a homeopathic remedy for facilitating regenerative tissue . . . . . It is commonplace in Europe, and it works.
From the seminal “American Apartheid,” by Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton:
“Residential segregation continues unabated in the nation’s largest metropolitan black communities, and this spatial isolation cannot be attributed to class. Although whites now accept open housing in principle, they have not yet come to terms with its implications in practice. Whites still harbor strong antiblack sentiments and they are unwilling to tolerate more than a small percentage of blacks in their neighborhoods. Discrimination against blacks is widespread and continues at very high levels in urban housing markets.”
These words were written in 1993. If anything, the dynamic described in this paragraph has gotten worse, not better, especially in most of the metropolitan areas of the northeast and midwest, including some deep blue counties and states. Younger and supposedly more tolerant white Americans are exhibiting only a slightly greater willingness to live alongside or even in the same town as blacks–and to send their children to school with black children. At this rate, it is likely that people will be making similar observations on the 100th anniversary of Brown.
“The organization of public schools around geographical catchment areas . . . reinforces and exacerbates the social isolation that segregation creates in neighborhoods. By concentrating low-achieving students in certain schools, segregation creates a social context within which poor performance is standard and low expectations predominate.”
Again, 1993. Only a small handful of charter schools existed in the entire country; just a scattered insignificant number of choice or voucher programs. Segregated schools follow from segregated neighborhoods, and if charters and choice worsen segregation, it is a tiny patch on a vastly larger problem that wasn’t of their making.
It’s easy and cost-free to say that segregation is bad and needs to be fixed. It seems like a lot of people think it can be fixed without involving their town (hey, anyone with the money is free to buy a house where I live!), their job, or their kids’ schools. I don’t know if that’s hypocrisy or having blinders on. If you’re white, you don’t have to opt-in to segregation’s benefits; they’re just there. What our governments and businesses have done or not done with respect to segregation is largely reflective of the will of white people.
In the face of the failure of all of us to even move our little fingers to do something–anything!–about residential segregation, I support well-regulated nonprofit charter schools as an incremental solution. Education isn’t a silver bullet–even highly educated and affluent blacks live well beneath their buying power and integrate fairly infrequently (self-segregation is largely a myth, just to put a preemptive stake through that old zombie). There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that charters or choice are leading to a net reduction of the number of children living in segregated and isolated neighborhoods who go on to college–still the best way to escape the cycle–or that they are doing any harm to the children who remain in district schools. Charter and choice grant a degree of agency to people that America has turned its back on for decades.
Beautiful. Thank you Diane, for everything. For being a voice for teachers. For children. For public education. For honesty. For good practices. For decency.
Take care. Heal. Prayers and good thoughts for you, always.
At some point, America was dubbed the melting pot and as George Carlin used to crack, one day we will all become mixed race, each of us a shade ofbbeautiful brown and not sure what the other is and better yet not caring. He says it better, but I am that melting pot mutt, though I was warned to forget this by my father who was Armenian and German. My mother was creole , but because of her racial distinction and apparently some latent lesbian bent , she left us in Florida when I was 5 and headed to parts unknown, never to be heard from again. Much of the south was still segregated with blacks living in what was called “N****r Town ” and people like us on the fringes of that. I was a little girl when we were bussed to schools other than our own, which was scary and strange, but did not last long.
Still, by the time I was in HS, the only one in the town we finally settled in after years of nomadic drifting, blacks attended school with whites. A lot of kids were new because the tourist trade had attracted snow birds and transplants from up north. They were different than those rednecks because they were Yankees.
One girl had a thing for black men, which was not a very prudent choice. Of course, love and lust are rarely prudent especially when you are 16 .
She fell for a beautiful young man and they carried on shamelessly in the halls, much to my peers’ horror.
The thing that struck me were the teachers ( Yankess themselves) They didnt say much about it except ” No PDAs! ” but they said that to all the sloppy young lovers making out by the lockers. The jocks and cheerleaders, theatbredneck bunch you guys would call the status quo, simply glared. They did not say anything until the girl was on her own. They called her charcoal burner and much worse, but she just glowed in her little corner , which made her wannabe tormentors sit and fume.
I had a gay English teacher who finally told the brutes to pipe down. This took courage because this town was so backward and the most backward folks seem to have the most money and power. He was a bit fey but married to the girls’ gruff gym teacher ( Loved him, hated her) to hide their proclivities.
I could not wait to get out of the south as that teacher urged me. In L. A. i discovered a different sort of segregation, and another approach to racism. If you come down the 110 from the 5 or the 10, you see how poor people of color are crammed along the freeway . The hoods stretch from down town to San Pedro. In Watts, there are Latonos and blacks, same with Compton, South Central, Carson, Athens, Inglewood, Wilmington, and if you veer off a little there is Long Beach, a very diverse and dense city of its own that seems infinitely more progressive with the gay ghetto and teachers of all kinds livung in the old Craftsman houses that are in those hoids. It is a place where every sort of human can be found. Notably, LB has some of the finest urban schools in the country. It is appropriate that these modest old camouses are distinquished . Their success has many facets but I suspect diversity is at the very heart of what makes LBUSD work while next door the Taj Mahal schools and very public LAUSD is mired in failure.
I think this speaks to Brown and the mid 20th century testing that has provided data again and again that points us to an education among people who are different from ourselves. Economics, culture, color, values, profiency and so on should offer contrasts that areccomprehensive so students learn about more than just the standards. The best education anyone can have is probably world travel. The next best thing is to go to a school where students are diversely populated. LAUSD always saw racial tension so the fools kept creating it . When I began teaching the APs would ask if a fight was black on brown or brown on black, and most of the time it was black on black and brown on brown. The kids will tell you this . Once a student got shot over the weekend. He didn’t return until Thurday. A large black football player nick named Cheese,, he ambled in with the story , knowing I would be mad because he had begged to be John Proctor and messed up my lesson plans. He he liftedvhis shirt showed me the gauze which was stained with a littke blood. Then he told me the story. His belly fat saved his life he laughed. I only had one question: What color was the guy who shot you?
Ahhhh Miss Deed, he laughed, you kniw N****hs be shoting N****hs!
That I did.
Something about that self-hatred is far more devestatibg than thevother’s .
It seems like we keep differing that dream, though my students were not really racists. Many colleagues were, but the weird thing is they often hated their own too, especially the whites.
I am a woman who has no culture , no color, no creed beyond my humanity. In some ways it is an amazing way to live. It has taught me the folly of binary thinking, allowed me hear music in the slang and colloquialism that make other teachers wince. It has essentially spared me from that kindvof hate.mOf course, I have a hard time not hatng these haters. These plutocrats and thier bootlickers make my head spin because I lived in the hoods . I saw Rodney King’s saga unfold and taught at schools a lot of teachers will not go near as well as at colleges like CSU and LBCC where diversity is so casual and right,you forget what goes on off campus. For awhile, I even taught Chinese kids — they live in such sad isolation up on that affluent hill. Practicing SAT tests and scoring higher than I ever will , they have access to everything the happier poor kids don’t.
I recall one summer when I got to teach them literature from the school reading list. We chose a Catcher in the Rye, a book I never much liked. One student (called David as they adopted American names for our sakes) wept when he discussed Holden Caulfeild’s plight. This brilliant young man on his way to Stanford or Berkley related to that shapeless white outcast!
If Eli Broad read Native Son by Richard Wright or poetry by Lucille Clifton would he be moved the way this kid was? Can Bill Gates –who says if one is not rich one has only himself to blame –read Jimmy Santiago Baca’s words or Luis Rodriguez’ memoirAlways Running and understand that some men have no choice but to go to prison because of men like him?
There is so much more to corporate education reform than greed . I believe the pluticrats hate teachers the way my white peers hated that girl who dated blacks . They are threatened by what affirmative action gave rise too. The last thing these elitists want is a proletariate intelligensia pulling THE people up .Whatever ails them is like an sdvanced variation on OCD. EVERY one has his or her place beneath these imperialists. Thats why they torpedoed Occupy, still reject Brown, defy wage and hide the the truth with data.
When I used to read Huff Post Ed section a couple years ago , the moderators often censored my remarks about multiracial people , melting pots and the bottom line of enlightenment. Yet they allowed oeople to say “illegals” were ruining this country and porch monkeys never had an IQ above 100. I had assumed 30+ years after high school and 3000 miles from the south, this would all be a distant nightmare . I was wrong.
Good article by Denise Velez at Daily Kos today. quote from Denise: “I lived in the Jim Crow South in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, as a child, rode segregated rail cars and faced race riots in the north in New York City as blacks moved into what had been all-white neighborhoods and began attending previously all-white schools. I cannot forget the “whites only” signs, or those signs designating places for us “coloreds.” The Plessy decision ushered in the period we know of today as Jim Crow, along with sweeping anti-black violence, repression and lynchings (which are depicted at the end of this video clip: trigger warning).” The history is of Plessy V. Ferguson ; denise’s article illuminates a lot of the history that was part of the civil rights movement…. north and south.
Ms. Ravitch:
There are some good things going on over at The Root. Take a look:
http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2014/05/brown_v_board_60th_anniversary_school_closures_are_new_version_of_separate.1.html
Click to access J4JReport-final_05_12_14.pdf
http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2014/05/new_orleans_schools_plagued_by_racial_tension.html
http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2014/05/_6_lesser_known_facts_about_the_brown_v_board_of_education_supreme_court.html
http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/2014/05/african_american_boys_attire_can_it_make_them_successful.html
I think the residential piece is the critical one.
You can require schools be integrated and then abandon the enforcement of it. . .but the high rise public housing projects of the 1960s(?) will take a generation to alleviate, I would guess. And the white flight that has happened all over the US. The public housing tended to breed generational poverty, yes? And the “ghetto.” Neoliberals have their ways of busting this up, just as they have had their ways of busting up the schools that these ghetto neighborhoods fed.
Reaching across cultural norms and finding new norms is the key, I would guess. College campuses are a great place to actually integrate races; when folks are staring down the decisions, placement and domestic situations ahead of them, with more education and insight then, say, a high school student. I think even in the last twenty years, the racial lines have been blended in this realm (bi-racial marriages and children, integrated fraternities, recruitment of minorities into business, etc).
It’s slow; but it is happening. You just have to hope and be sure your own children are safe and make wise choices in the shakedown. . .but to fear it just perpetuates the separation, I think.
Joanne’s comment is poignant. She encapsulates the wonder of that time–and how taboos were being broken.
Reblogged this on Dolphin and commented:
Joanne’s comment is poignant. She encapsulates the wonder of that time–and how taboos were being broken.
I’m afraid that segregation goes back all the way to time related to subjugation of natives of their land. But in the U.S., it began with genocide of the American Indians, conquering their land, people and culture followed by the Polynesians (Cpt Cook), African Americans (slavery) and Asians (internment camps). And I would be remiss if I didn’t include women. There is no emphasis of the treatment that white men imposed on the Native American Indians, Hawaiians and Asians, with exception that African Americans have been more public in their struggles.
My point is that these cultures and gender in Am. history suffered by white men are all civil rights issues. These cultures and gender have been deemed lower class by U.S. standards. Now we have educational standards to do more damage.
There are no racial ghettos, Diane, only economic ghettos. I totally agree with your ideals, but forced cultural integration will continue to be disputed for the reasons I discussed in my comment on Rothstein.
The racism of the era in which we grew up was shameful. In effect, it meant that we white folks did not have to compete against people of color in school and in hiring. That’s the essence of white privilege. But that kind of protected situation hardly exists any more. Athletics is the model for competence based equality of opportunity, also called meritocracy.
Every institution in America is working vigorously to assure its student bodies, its work forces, and its memberships are not just meritocratic, but go beyond that to racial and religious diversity.
However, the claim that diversity below a straight percentage criterion is evidence of racism is just not true. The attorney general likes to think so and is trying to apply that false criterion in every area, but ruins his own credibility by claiming so.
We have become fundamentally a meritocratic country. The problem of attitude toward meritocracy remains essentially confined to liberals who claim that there is a better standard in ‘equity’ and ‘social justice.’
Although your Houston school board John Birchers were clearly racist, they too confused one thing with another, namely racial suppression with Americanism, and racial non-discrimination with Communism. But leaving THAT specific issue aside, they were not wrong about the extent to which socialist=communist ideology became popular among public school teachers.
You remain naive, Diane, after all these years to present the U.N. as an institution committed to universal civilized values of freedom and democracy. Even among many posters here, there is greater loyalty to communism, socialism, and tyranny (the are the same thing) than to the American ideal of freedom.
What we REALLY have in the attack on the public schools is despair at converting its teaching cadres to capitalism. The hostility to ‘business’ and capitalism is so intense that one can hardly imagine how so many good people can be ignorant of where their own paycheck comes from. Government creates nothing. It’s money comes completely from taxing private business activity.
Government’s function is to provide a framework within which capitalism and freedom can flourish, and then get out of the way. If teachers generally understood this, the way they talk and the demands they make would be reasonable rather than unrealistic. Idealism is a good thing, and we must keep striving, as you so eloquently say, but in doing so we must not deny truths of reality and then complain that those who don’t agree are immoral and corrupt.
Thumbs down. Dislike. Unfriend. Whatever.
I am so sorry to hear of your accident! I will keep you in my prayers.