Wendy Lecker, Civil Rights attorney, writes here about an important new book exploring the history of racially unequal and segregated schooling in the United States.

”For children in Baltimore classrooms, 2018 opened with buildings where temperatures never topped 40 degrees. An incensed teacher wondered why persevering in abominable conditions is something “we only ask of black and brown children.”

”A new book by Cornell professor Noliwe Rooks, “Cutting School: Privatization, Segregation and the End of Public Education,” traces the history of separate and unequal education in America.

“White America’s reaction to the prospect of educating children of color has ranged from outright and often violent opposition to promoting weak substitutes for adequately funded, integrated schools — substitutes that fail to ensure educational equity. Throughout U.S. history, these maneuvers have presented opportunities for hoarding resources for the white and affluent and even profiting at the expense of children of color — a phenomenon Rooks calls “segrenomics.”

“From the earliest days of tax-supported public education, states found ways to deny African-American communities equal educational opportunity. One method was to simply refuse to fund African-American schools.
In 1914, South Carolina spent on average $15 per pupil for white schools but fewer than $2 per pupil for black schools. Appalled at the conditions in which African-American children were forced to learn, that state’s superintendent of education remarked: “It is not a wonder that they do not learn more, but the real wonder is that they learn as much as they do.”

“As Rooks chronicles, officials in the South outlawed integration, double-taxed African-Americans, refused to build African-American schools and engaged in violence. Public money, even if raised by African-Americans, almost exclusively benefited white students.

”Rooks illustrates how officials and “reformers” have virtually ignored successful models for education, such as: adequate funding, integration, and community-initiated reforms.

“As she demonstrates, inequality, hoarding and profiting off the backs of poor children of color continue today. Schools have resegregated. States persistently underfund schools serving predominately children of color. They offer false “solutions” that hurt more than help — like charter schools.

“Charters, concentrated in poor communities of color, are no better than public schools, increase segregation and often result in or benefit from closing neighborhood schools.”

Black students comprise 13% of the youth cohort yet many are enrolled in schools that are overwhelmingly Black, or Black and Latino. Levels of segregation declined markedly in the late 1970s and early 1970s as a result of federal policies and court orders, but as enforcement declined and disappeared, segregation increased again. Arne Duncan, in charge of $5 Billion in discretionary money, had a chance to incentivize states to reduce segregation, but he opted instead to focus on test scores and privatization and came up empty.