I recently was invited to write a chapter for a book of essays on the 50th anniversary of the Kerner Commission report. The Kerner Commission was created by President Lyndon B. Johnson in response to an outbreak of civil rebellions concentrated in urban districts. Its report, published in 1968, highlighted racism, segregation, and police brutality. My chapter on education focused on the arc of desegregation that was led by a determined U.S. Office of Education and the federal judiciary, followed by the abandonment of desegregation by the federal courts.
This article traces the erosion of desegregation to the present..
I have often thought that the one big chance we had to stem the tide of resegregation in our society occurred in 2009. Congress reacted to the economic meltdown of 2008 by allocating $100 billion to the U.S. Department of Education. $95 million was allotted to states to keep their public schools functioning. $5 billion was set aside (of the $100 billion) as discretionary funding for Secretary of Education Arne Duncan to use as he saw fit to advance reform.
Duncan decided to double down on the carrot-and-stick approach of No Child Left Behind. His Race to the Top program made standardized testing even more consequential than NCLB. If scores were low, he believed that teachers must be held responsible, blamed, named, and shamed. If scores were low, he wanted schools to close. He wanted teachers and principals fired. He wanted more charter schools. He wanted everyone evaluated by test scores. We now know that NCLB and Race to the Top failed. Many children, the same children, are still left behind. We did not reach “the Top.”
What if Duncan had used that $5 billion to offer a competition for states that came up with actionable plans for desegregation. New district lines, new zoning patterns, whatever would achieve the result of more actual integration. That $5 billion might have reversed the tide of resegregation. It might have changed the face of our society. But it didn’t happen.
This is a dream deferred. But it should not die, not even in the age of Trumpism.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
One of your bests posts ever…and there have been plenty of good ones. There has never been a golden age of education, as true equality has never been present in our schools. It pains me to think that African-Americans could possibly be better off if separate but equal had prevailed, as the realities of the Critical Race Theory continue to permeate our society. Duncan and Obama removed desegregation accountability from Race to the Top because they feared it would negate the entire bill. Had they forced that discussion in the public arena, perhaps our country would have had a serious discussion on race prior to someone like Trump effectively spreading hate in our country for personal gain.
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As long as (most) school funding comes from property taxes (and other state/municipal taxes), (public) schools will reflect the character of their respective neighborhoods.
As affluent (white) areas spend more on education, and provide excellent schools, more (wealthy) families will locate themselves in areas with excellent schools (this is a form of school choice),
As less-affluent areas experience drains on their tax bases, the amount of (public) money available for education will decline. School spending will decline proportionately. Families (who can) will depart from areas with poorly-performing schools, and the downward spiral continues.
You can see what happens. A “virtuous cycle” is underway in the areas with excellent schools, and a “vicious cycle” is underway in the areas with depressed tax bases, and poorly-performing schools.
Politicians are much more likely to follow the wishes of their affluent constituents (money talks). and the same politicians are much less likely, to take money from the affluent areas, and spend it on the struggling schools in the poor areas.
The result is “educational apartheid”, where schools become more segregated, and the cycles continue.
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I agree with this, but would add that the segregation is socioeconomic as well as racial. Thus rural districts that depend on scarce property taxes are penalized like inner city neighborhoods.
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“I have often thought that the one big chance we had to stem the tide of resegregation in our society occurred in 2099.”
What year did you write this, Diane? 2117? Most impressive. Can I borrow the time machine sometime? (Heck, I’m just happy that you’re still alive then!) 😉
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This is a very interesting revealing post. We as a society have not lived up to our own social contract. We espouse equality and equal opportunity, but our society offers neither. Both the federal and state governments have willingly ignored integration and the unfair real estate taxes through which we fund schools.
When I read this post, I was reminded of Florida’s new unfair law that promotes privatization. The neighboring country has a large minority population, and several of the “failing” schools are mostly minority. Since this new law will allow for more “failing” schools to be turned over to charters, I emailed the superintendent and told him that a lot fewer of his schools would be charterized if he redrew the attendance lines, and integrated the schools. Needless to say, he never responded to my email. Actually, the current Florida law allows students to attend any school as long as parents provide transportation. Many of the poor minority students do not have access to a car, and de facto segregation is a fact of life.
Many charters are selective, and this selective process creates more de facto segregation. Developers and charter schools are the way many cities are attracting many young white professionals to housing near the CBD. Segregation is very much a modern problem of our society.
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@RT: There are many things that people on both sides of the school choice issue agree. One of them is that our current system of funding publicly-operated schools is a travesty. Please take an electronic “high-five”!
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BTW, I think you meant 2009 rather than 2099 in the second paragraph.
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@RT: Florida now has the largest school choice program in the USA. See
https://www.redefinedonline.org/2017/08/nations-largest-private-school-choice-program-tops-100000-students/
Florida’s publicly-operated schools, must not be delivering the education that these parents want for their children.
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All that choice in Florida producing mediocre education
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Mediocre is being kind, Diane.
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Changing the face of our society will not happen in the schools . I love education and everyone should be given the opportunity to pursue one as far as they want to take it. . But the answer to segregation lies in the economy and empowering workers . When living standards raise ethos change .
Yes the civil rights movement and the pressure it put on Politicians for progress was important . But would
” that farmer sitting on his tractor in Iowa been outraged ,would he say that this is just not right ”
had his standard of living not been adequate and rising . Race has always been used as a wedge to subjugate the working \ middle class . To pit worker against worker for declining opportunity especially in the South. . Whether it was the Irish ,the Chinese or the blacks demagoguery diverts economic anxiety away from the Plutocracy .
Is anyone surprised that the racist underpinning of our society are on full display at a time when the white working\middle class are under economic pressure as “all new income was diverted to the top” True that the Trump voter is economically better off than the Clinton voter because of large numbers of poor minorities in the Democratic party. But are they better off than they were 30 years ago and what are their fears for the future and their children’s future. .
I would have thought that our best opportunity to end racial segregation was also in 2009 .
It was a bill that would have reinvigorated the labor movement . EFCA . There is no difference between an auto worker in 1960 and a Walmart worker in 2017 in terms of skills .The difference in their living standards was their access to collective bargaining . Which was being crushed as early as 1947.
As Blacks were given access to formerly White occupations construction one that hits close to home for me . They gained access to the economic ability to move into the same communities that their white coworkers live in . Not by being located there by a government housing programs, which then caused white flight. But by having the economic means to do so. They worked with these people, sent their children to school, with these people , their children played sports with these people were on the SAME TEAM with these people and became friends. They sent their children on to get college educations . Almost every black worker who worked for me in a formally Lilly white construction union, but one of the earliest to integrate ,(primarily because the leader of that union was also a major labor leader who marched with King) has children who went on to get 4yr degrees. That is the way we end the legacy of slavery .
But what happened was ; that at the same time LBJ freed the slaves with the civil rights act . America de-industrialized and de-unionized . Off shored the production of goods and services leaving no place for those newly emancipated workers to go. Creating an economy that was only capable of generating enough demand to raise wages when there were bubbles in paper assets. Than an oligarchy who was gouging the wealth of the nation went to work. To assure that the anger was diverted to minorities rather than watch the pitchforks come after them. No the Walton’s do not give a hoot about black children. Neither do any of the Billionaires for education reform . Education (skills ) like automation is their cover for their criminal collusion with the political class
(Germany has rising employment in-spite of automation) . That collusion has caused the tremendous income inequality we see. Inequality that falls highest on minorities but reaches “pretty pretty” far up .
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Automation creates jobs. This may sound antithetical, but it is true. see
http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/economy-budget/318775-yes-theres-a-job-creation-argument-for-automation-and
And automation will spur more jobs and industry returning to our shores. It costs less to have a widget made by a USA robot, than it does to have the widget made by a robot in Mexico or China. Robots will cancel out the wage differential.
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Charles,
Robots don’t get a salary, a pension, or a coffee break. We get your point.
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You are missing the point. Automation increases productivity. More widgets made per worker-hour. Jobs for robot mechanics increase. Factories producing robots, hire more workers. The virtuous cycle continues. As Joel Herman states, employment in Germany is increasing in spite of automation. It would be more correct to state that employment in Germany is increasing because of automation.
I can predict with certainty, that the nations which embrace automation, will see the largest increases in employment, and standards of living.
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Charles, surely you know that robots produce robots.
A major cause of the opiod crisis is the disappearance of good jobs, the disappearance of the middle class.
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Actually Charles is right to some degree. I probably have never come to his defense before. As productivity rises caused by automation , or more skilled workers who are better at doing the job than an unskilled worker, the economy grows . That!!!! skills argument has been made by the construction trades for decades . That highly paid skilled workers produce more and at higher quality than unskilled workers, are more productive making their overall cost lower than it seems. So when productivity rises the economy as a whole increases, creating more demand which in turn requires more workers . Though not necessarily doing the same jobs. So there is dislocation. Thus in the 60s and 70’s decades that saw huge increases in automation . When American factories retooled to meet the competition from the Japanese manufacturers , also saw increases in jobs and wages . The Robots came to Detroit in those decades.. It was basically completed by the 90s . Someone in my indivisible group just challenged me about the brand new Subaru plant in Indiana with no workers only problem with the automation story is that there are 6000 workers working with the robots (True would have been far greater). But two the plant was built in 1989 with a smaller extension for a new line of production in15 , which added another 1200 workers to work with the robots. My problem is that the wages of those workers are designed to keep the auto Union . The competition is keeping the wages of Union auto workers down, which in turn makes it difficult to organize these workers . As the unions get crushed these workers will then be fed into the same meat grinder that the Meat processors have been fed into . A job only an undocumented immigrant would take at minimum wage. or less. .
Coming with the retooling of major manufacturing in the late 60s The Business Roundtable was formed in response to the cost of building those new factories. Formed to crush union construction and keep cost down. A “vampire squid ” sucking the life out of the American middle Class \working class . Diverting wealth to shareholders and CEOs, through their political influence . CEO pay sky rockets from 40 to 400 times the wages on the shop floor.
The problems of wages turning stagnant was a loss of bargaining power not a shrinking economy . We do not have fewer jobs we have far more jobs than in 1960 and a larger population . It would be a problem if we had 120 million more people and fewer jobs due to that automation.
There are no free markets . That loss is a political decision to crush workers . Someone is making the rules and it is not the workers., or for the workers . As evidenced by our trade agreements negotiated in secret with corporate lobbyists. The same goes for our labor laws . The one and only secretary of labor from labor was Peter Brennan and Nixon locked him in his closet for 2years . ….
But I was referring to German manufacturing employment in specific and I was being a little disingenuous . Employment in Germany’s manufacturing sector has increase and the Germans have invested per capita multiples in automation more than we have and far more in the recent past, than we have. Here is the catch you could say that monetary policy controlled in the EU by Germany and to some degree France has crushed the countries in the EU making German exports thrive. Keeping up German manufacturing employment . But it is not the Robots killing the American worker, it is ;(thank my Queens College visiting Political Science professor from West Africa in the early 70’s )
“Politics who Decides Who Gets What When and How “, Lasswell 1936
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Joel,
There are more jobs, but most are low-wage jobs. The good jobs that allowed a working person to support a family and aspire to buy a house and have a middle-class life have rapidly shrunk, due to technological innovation and outsourcing. The outsourced jobs will never come back because the workers in even lower-wage countries are paid far below our own inadequate minimum wage.
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keep the auto union out .
9/14 my birthday Diane .Five minute edit button for the typing impaired
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dianeravitch
What is the difference in skill between an auto worker in a factory who all day long took a windshield and put it in place and a store clerk who loads cans on a shelf all day long .
What is the difference in skills between a meat packer in 1970 who worked at a plant for the inflation adjusted equivalent of $25 an hour with healthcare and Pension benefits. And the worker at the same factory today working for $7.75 an hour with no bennifits
What is the difference in skills between a teacher who graduates Queens college certified and is teaching in the Half Hallow Hills school district for 80 thousand a year . And the teacher who graduates Queens College certified and goes to work at Success Academy for $55,000 a year.
In each case the job assignment is the same the skill level is the same
It is not that one worker was better in anyway than the other .
But why is one a good job and the other is a bad job .
In each case something has happened that made one a good job the other a bad Job . That something is the lack of collective bargaining.
That is a political decision. Someone is picking winners and losers .
It is not a natural state of things one way or the other .It was why the Walton’s and other oligarchs are attacking Americas largest unions, our teachers. They are not doing it for the children whose parents work for Walmart, while receiving food stamps and other government services.
I’ll write my first children’s book.
So I am going to organize the workers at Walmart . Well first they vote for a Union. But then Walmart decides to not negotiate with those workers and replaces them. Claiming they were unable to reach an agreement, dead locked , a very common practice. So the teamsters union turns around and tells their members not to deliver to Walmart . Or any other vendor that is doing business with Walmart . At the same time as the longshoreman refuse to unload the goods off freighters headed to Walmart.
As the produce on the ships starts to rot and the shelves in the stores start to empty and the trash piles up outside their stores, Walmart agrees to settle the contract ,with their workers. Using the template of Costco as a model. Raising wages from 9 dollars an hour to 18 dollars an hour and it provides healthcare and pension bennifits.
Look how easy that was . But wait you can not do that . Why ? Because it is against the law . What law? Taft Hartley. Has it always been against the law? . No, that is the way much of America’s unions were organized . Including those good jobs at Ford motor Company, who resisted Unions . So when did they do this ? 1947 ,it was a way of thanking millions of working class Americans for fighting in WW2 . It also banned Communists from being in Unions and created Right to Work laws that assured that the south would never be Unionized .
But isn’t that a violation of those workers Constitutional Rights ?
Harry S Truman thought so . What did he do? He vetoed it . So why is it law? Because the congress over-road his veto . How could that be in the interest of the American people , almost 40 % of them were in Unions and that was still lower than in other countries where up to 80 % are in unions.? Weren’t those Unions still raising the standard of living of all other workers, even those who were not in unions ? Yes ,Yes and Yes.
So has anybody tried to reverse this policy? Yes the largest attempts
were in 2009 when Barrack Obama and the Democrats had a super majority. It never made it out of committee and it was a small revision. But in 1977 when Jimmy Carter was President It failed . How could it fail? . They could not break the filibuster in the Senate they lost by one vote . Who made those senators vote that way . The newly formed organization the Business RoundTable , 300 CEOs of Americas largest industrial corporations . But millions of Americans wanted it passed how could it fail because of 300 un-elected men. ?
“Because economics is who gets what ” .
How goods ,services and incomes are distributed in any society from hunter gatherers to a post industrial modern societies .
And
“Politics is who decides who gets what”
There are no rules . No free markets, no good jobs and bad jobs . There are decisions being made from empowering workers to who gets healthcare . To who gets Patent protection that costs Americans 350 billion a year more for drugs than a generic drug. Even though some of these drugs were researched with tax dollars. . Or who can or can not import cheaper drugs from Canada. Most European doctors are as skilled as any American doctor. But they can not practice Medicine here . Yet we allow H1b visa workers to come here and compete with our engineers. And so and so on and so on
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“What is the difference in skill between an auto worker in a factory who all day long took a windshield and put it in place and a store clerk who loads cans on a shelf all day long . . . .
In each case the job assignment is the same the skill level is the same.”
I’m coming into this in the middle, but this seems like a strange statement. “Skill,” at least as I’m able to reasonably define the term,” means more than “how many hours someone works.” It takes an auto factory worker longer to learn how to properly assemble a car windshield than it takes a store clerk to learn how to properly load cans on a shelf. Assembling automobiles requires higher skills than stacking cans. I assume you would agree that teaching requires higher skills than stacking cans, even though it takes a teacher the same amount of time to perform his daily work that it takes the store clerk to perform his — in each case, “all day.” If not, then anyone is skilled enough to teach, as long as they’re willing to put in the hours.
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Did I forget to say that those trade agreements are also political decisions . One of the biggest parts of TPP was stronger Patent protections on life saving drugs . Yes the American people would be so happy if the people of India had to pay more for their drugs . Yeah Barrack ,Yeah Bill . The decision was made to put American workers in competition with the lowest paid workers in the world . But not put American pharmaceutical companies in competition with low price Identical copies in India or for that matter that could come here on the same ship with other Walmart products.
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Automation creates jobs. Fact. Every increase in and every new technology, has created jobs, and increased the standard of living.
Goods used to be moved by horse-drawn cart. When the Erie canal, (and other canals) were constructed, the flow of goods increased. (A horse or mule can pull 50 times more weight over water, than it can over land).
Canals destroyed the jobs of teamsters, and farriers, and blacksmiths. But it created jobs for canal operators.
The Erie Canal “made” New York City. The harbor at NYC is no better than the harbor at Boston, or Baltimore, or Charleston. But because of the Erie Canal, goods were moved from the interior of the USA, and NYC became the largest city on the East Coast.
Railroads moved more goods at lower cost than canals. When goods were being moved by rail, canal operators found themselves out of work.
Passenger air travel, ended the rail passenger service for (most) railroads. Pullman porters, and railway operators were forced out of work.
Steam shovels destroyed the jobs of ditch-diggers. And on and on.
Technological advances, create new jobs, and destroy others. Refrigerators killed the jobs of ice-delivery men.
This is the “creative destruction” of a dynamic economy.
Automation is part of this continuum. Robots are eliminating some repetitive jobs, done by low-wager workers. But robotics are creating new jobs for robotic technicians.
Output per worker-hour is increasing. There is an increase in standard of living, and more employment.
Such is has been, throughout history.
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You do realize that is an opinion piece, right? Backed by nothing other than the author’s assertions.
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Amen, Diane. Thank you!
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There is a great book called The Color Of Law by Richard Rothstein which explains how our government segregated America. So called education reformers are continuing those divisive policies.
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Christine,
I reviewed it here. https://dianeravitch.net/2017/07/01/i-recommend-this-book-richard-rothsteins-the-color-of-law/
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I was shocked to hear a This American Life episode some months back that highlighted the fact that the ONLY thing that was proven to significantly boost test scores and really fix the legacy of segregation had been busing in an almost-20-year period in the 70s and 80s. Is this true? If so, why is it not being trumpeted more loudly than it is?
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Yes, it was the piece by Nikole Hannah-Jones called “The Problem We All Live With.” It won a Peabody Award, if I recall. It’s well worth a listen. You can find it on line.
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We must get beyond “the improving test scores” notion.
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