Just a few days before the Network for Public Education Conference in Oakland, the MacArthur Foundation announced its annual “genius” awards. One of the 24 winners was the keynote speaker at the NPE Conference. Nikole Hannah-Jones is an investigative journalist and staff writer at the New York Times Magazine. Previously she worked at ProPublica. She is noted for her work on segregation, integration, and social justice. She documented the resegregation of America’s public schools and explains why this trend hurts children and the future of American society and must be challenged.
Watch her outstanding presentation here. You will learn a lot.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Thank you for posting Ms. Jones’ keynote address. I did learn something new. I had no idea that the Brown decision was based on equal citizenship. I do know from the study of anthropology that every society that marginalizes a segment of their population has social problems. The marginalized group is less likely to be employed, and they are more likely to have substance abuse problems.
Our country has never really embraced integration. In fact, we have created systems like real estate red lining to promote segregation. I was fortunate that I taught in a New York public school district with integrated neighborhoods. I grew up in Philadelphia so I never realized how special my school district in New York was. From reading this blog, I learned that New York is the most segregated state for black students. My district also had a very active local NAACP chapter that luckily watched us like hawks. Since I worked with mostly Haitian and Hispanic ELLs, I often advocated for my students, and I found the district to be receptive to change. Integration did wonders for my students! We had many poor minority students attend college and have middle class careers. Like Ms. Jones these young people were able to move into the middle class in a single generation.
I hope Charles watches this presentation so that perhaps he can understand that separate is never equal. Integration is a powerful tool for social justice.
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What struck me most forcefully about Nikole Hannah-Jones’ speech is that only 13% of the population is African American, yet our society has managed to segregate a very large proportion into all or almost all non-integrated schools.
Richard Rothstein’s book “The Color of Law” is a forceful argument that this segregation was imposed by state, local, and federal governments, not by choice or happenstance.
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Sadder still, our government has fallen hook, line and sinker for privatization of our schools. Both the federal and many state governments have jumped on the charter or even the voucher bandwagons. These schools not only create winners and losers; they are vehicles of enhanced segregation!
As Ms. Jones points out,I don’t blame desperate parents for trying look for a better options for their children, but privatization is a ruse so that government can abrogate its responsibility to all our young people. Government passes the buck to corporations, and they are absolved from the responsibility to ALL our children while a few favored friends can profit as well. Then, the government does not have to confront inequity, unfair funding or integration.
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Our nation’s obscene method of financing publicly-operated schools through property taxes, is exacerbating efforts to have fully integrated schools. Wealthy people move to good neighborhoods, with a solid tax base, and excellent schools. Lower-income people are left in areas with no tax base to fund decent schools. The result is “educational apartheid”.
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