James E. Ford, North Carolina’s Teacher of the Year, wrote this powerful article about his experience in an integrated school as a child and the reality of teaching in a segregated school now.
He begins:
ON THE FIRST DAY of every semester during my five years as a teacher at Garinger High School, I had a candid talk with my students about how the world perceives them. The school, sitting off of Eastway Drive in east Charlotte, is high-poverty, majority-minority, and distinctly urban. I knew, from my own experiences, exactly what “type” of school this was, and I didn’t shy away from telling the kids.
I told them that many people didn’t expect much from their population, because of where they live and what they look like. That they all fit into somebody’s stereotype. I told them that students who go to a school such as Garinger are less likely to graduate than students elsewhere. I told them it was a setup of sorts. Then I waited, reading the responses on their faces. Some pouted, sulking in a sense of internalized low self-worth. Others were visibly angry, as if I had confirmed something they never had the language to articulate.
I should say here that my teaching experience at Garinger was amazing. I enjoyed my students and labored passionately to ensure they received a great education. I even became the North Carolina Teacher of the Year. But I knew what was happening from the first day I arrived on campus.
This school, home of the Wildcats, was a symbol of our local system’s backward trend toward re-segregating along racial and socioeconomic lines—a startling shift for a system that, just a few decades ago, was the district referenced in the landmark Supreme Court case Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, a system that was once regarded as the vanguard of school desegregation.
At the end of that speech on the first day of each semester, I informed the students of the purpose of my presence: That I knew what it was like to be doubted and mistreated. That I was on a mission to make sure they broke out of this destructive system. That I needed their trust before I could teach them. Far more often than not, they gave it to me.
But the truth is, no educator should have to have that conversation with his or her students—ever.
Read his article and ask yourself: Do we care about children of color? Why are we not doing what we know is right for them? Why are we allowing our schools to be desegregated? What kind of society do we want to be?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Shouldn’t the question at the end by, “Why are we allowing our schools to be segregated?” It is a great question because desegregation is the law of the land, and integration is an evidence based way to improve outcomes for poor minority students. I understand that some communities cannot integrate due to housing patterns, but there are many diverse districts that seem to ignore the law. How are local communities allowed to get away with this? What is the point of civil rights laws if the DOJ fails to enforce them?
By the way, I notice in Ford’s class picture in his integrated school there were only eighteen students in the class. Today some public schools are forced to have classes with over thirty poor young students in them as more and more policymakers cut budgets, and, some cases, blatantly defund public education.
Try 35 in a class, 10 of whom have IEPs.
A related question, which may be applicable to some and not to others, is “Why am I sending my child to a non-integrated school?”
Integration matters because life is integrated. We need to work on getting out the message that integration benefits white people too. I know it gives certain people hives to think about it, but it’s very likely that you’ll have a person of color as a boss someday. It’s even more likely that you’ll have co-workers and/or clients who are. Or you’ll work in a foreign country or in a majority-minority neighborhood. And in any case, work aside, we all have a lot to learn from all other people. Life is simply richer the wider diversity of people that you know and that you can comfortably interact with. Hiding out in your own little bubble is self-limiting.
We have made enormous progress in teaching everyone that racism is bad. Where we seem to have dropped the ball… is in teaching people what racism actually IS. –Jon Stewart
Federal housing policies have helped to create these conditions, and those policies have included everything that supports home ownership, including banks, loan officers, insurance, real estate developers and brokers. Rather than take on all of those systems that have aided and abetted segregation, the institution of public schools became the initial means to forward desegregation (also early-on the military).
I could amplify on my experience as a teacher in the early years of desegregation in the deep South. Diane has written about the overt segregationist moves to by-pass the court-ordered methods of seeking integration within schools. Of these early initiatives, some of the magnet school programs seemed to be the most successful.
The aim of ending segregation in the larger society has many virtues, but it was not, and is not now, universally shared.
There can be little doubt that the charter industry is forwarding segregated schools in several ways. It is targeting low-income and minority communities, and stripping resources that might have gone to public schools which are unequivocally bound by law to be desegregated.
These resources are not just state and local funds for public education but also the ancillary support for public education that once was common in many communities, including, for example, some boosterism for tax levies from the chamber of commerce. Those assets for public education have been undermined by the drumbeat on behalf of charters as if these schools are a panacea, all amidst non-stop and often unwarranted criticism of public schools. (I do not accept that charters should be viewed as public schools).
The charters are thriving in part because they are making segregation look perfectly respectable and noble, of “benefit” to those who attend. That has not been established, by a long shot. But keeping children in these segregated schools may also mean a lot to white majority communities. In too many of these communities blatant and explicit racism is a taboo even if it is well-entrenched in social and economic affairs, including housing–a biggie, and hence in neighborhood schools.
I believe that billionaires who are funding charters are playing the race card. They are playing the role of being a patron and benefactor of the “underserved” (to use language from ESSA) without having to forego real assets, including moral courage that would change the social and educational landscape and make it more equitable and just.
There are many maps that show the degree to which segregated communities dominate our landscape. I live in Cincinnati, home of the Freedom Center Museum, critical link in the underground railroad, and also one of the most segregated communities in the nation.
You can see my city map and many others (ranked ordered by one methodology) at
http://247wallst.com/special-report/2015/08/19/americas-most-segregated-cities/
Laura, hate to do this to ya, but the link is to one of those sites where you have to wait forever to load because of all the ads and then you have to go through many screens, each taking too much time to load, to start to get to the information. Do you have a better link?
I don’t know if this is the same map as what Laura linked to, but it works well and is an effective visualization.
http://demographics.coopercenter.org/DotMap/index.html
Even before charters became ” a segregationist tool du jour,” the South has been known for having numerous Christian schools, many of whom enroll mostly white children. They allowed parents to avoid sending their children to an integrated public school.
Thanks, Tim!!
Thanks Tim.
I struggle with the segregation/bussing issue. We live in a suburb of Raleigh were we have very good ethnic diversity but very little economic diversity. We bus some kids in from downtown Raleigh to help with that balance but it’s a LONG bus ride and I’ve heard many parents complain about that. Even when they wanted to participate in school activities or volunteer, they are so far away it’s very difficult for them. By the time the kids are in 4th and 5th grade, the kids are starting to notice the economic disparity in things like clothing, activities and experiences and they start to feel marginalized even with the teachers and administration putting in every effort to keep them involved.
Unlike in the 50s and 60s where there were “white neighborhoods” in close proximity to “black neighborhoods” sending all the kids to the same school was a no-brainer. Today it requires a lot of juggling and re-districting to acheive that. Everyone deserves a good neighborhood school. Kids should not have to be on a bus for an hour to get to a school that isn’t “failing.”
The problem is the affluent flight to the suburbs has caused an economic segregation that also has a strong racial correlation. There has been a push to gentrify some of the downtown neighborhoods but those parents usually end up sending thier kids to private schools so that hasn’t helped the situation at all.
We have a great magnet program in this county that has helped in those few dozen instances but we can’t make every school in an economically disadvantaged neighborhood a magnet school. It takes a lot of money to sustain those programs and obviously, these are the schools with the fewest resources.
When the people with the means, not unjustly, move out of high crime, high poverty areas to give their family a better education in a “higher performing” school, it leaves that neighborhood with a population with even fewer resources. How does one convince a family to stay and fight to improve the neighborhood when it’s more expedient to just move to a better one. It’s depressing and overwhelming to fight a battle that looks so bleak. I’ve watched the neighborhood I grew up in in upstate NY fall into disrepair and blight. It’s sad but I was so happy when my parents finally sold the house and moved to a safer neighborhood. I was worried for their lives!
I don’t know what the solution is but I’m not convinced that bussing is it.
Diane, I never had the chance to say thank you for featuring this piece on your blog.
James E. Ford