Sixty years after the Brown decision, and despite federal and state anti-discrimination laws, residential segregation not only persists but is growing. Long Island, Néw York, has highly segregated communities and schools.
As this article in the Long Island Press shows, this is not accidental. Nor is it a reflection of the incomes of black and white families. Even when black families can afford to live in a middle-class or affluent district, they may be steered away by landlords or real estate agents.
Even when towns build “affordable housing,” they give preference to residents, which screens out newcomers.
As Richard Rothstein has written, school segregation is rooted in residential segregation. Society can’t reduce the former without reducing the latter.
Bob shepherd responded to the sixtieth anniversary of the Brown decision with these thoughts:
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
Arthur H. Camins, the Director of the Center for Innovation in Engineering and Science Education at the Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, NJ, sharply critiques current education and social policy. He writes in this post that we have given up efforts to reduce poverty and segregation, policies that would produce the greatest number of young people.
Instead, our nation’s leaders are prepared to divert billions into more testing and Common Core, which is unlikely to reduce inequality.
Camins writes:
“If answers on Common Core assessment questions require supporting evidence, it is only fair that evidence-based reasoning should be an expected feature of public education policy. Apparently such consistency is not required when it comes to political decisions. Sadly, too many policy makers seem more committed to enabling profiteering from the results of poverty than ending it. The testing industry is an excellent example. Education policies sanction and encourage multi-billion dollar testing and test preparation corporations that enable destructive punishment and rewards for educators, gaming the system and sorting of students for competitive access to an increasingly unaffordable post secondary system that perpetuates inequity. State and federal education policies support costly, overly stressful and time consuming high-stakes testing in order to verify and detect small differences within the very large socio-economic disparities we already know exist.”
“Well-designed large-scale assessments can contribute evidence for institutional and program level judgments about quality. However, we do not need to test every student every year for this purpose. Less costly sampling can accomplish this goal. I am not opposed to qualifying exams- if they validly and reliably measure qualities that are directly applicable to their purpose without bias. However, imagine if we shifted the balance of our assessment attention from the summative to the formative. Then we could focus more on becoming better at interpreting daily data from regular class work and use that evidence to help students move their own learning forward. Imagine what else we could accomplish if we spent a significant percentage of our current K-12 and college admission testing expenditures on actually mediating poverty instead of measuring its inevitable effect. Imagine the educational and economic benefit if we invested in putting people to work rebuilding our cities, roads, bridges, schools and parks. Imagine if we put people to work building affordable housing instead of luxury high rises. Imagine the boost to personal spending and the related savings in social service spending if a living wage and full employment prevailed. Imagine the learning benefit to children if their families did not have to worry about health, food and shelter. Imagine if our tax policies favored the common good over wealth accumulation for the 1%ers.
“Such investments are far more logical than the current over-investment in testing and compliance regimes. Education, race and poverty are inextricably intertwined. Let’s do everything we can to improve teaching and learning. More students learning to use evidence to support arguments would be terrific. But, if we want to do something about poverty we need to ensure good jobs at fair wages for the parents of our students. That is where evidence and logical thinking lead.”
Richard Rothstein deeply believes that racial integration is essential, yet recognizes that school integration has been losing ground. This was inevitable, he argues, because the federal government has failed to use the powers it has to promote housing integration.
Rothstein is hopeful that a shift in the political winds could bring to office an administration committed to integrating American society. The sixty years since Brown have taught is that we cannot achieve a just and integrated society unless we attend to housing integration and economic justice, as well as school integration.
As segregation grows worse than it has been for decades, the problems are worsened by current “reforms.” School privatization intensifies segregation, high-stakes testing creates cause for closing struggling schools instead of helping students.
As Wendy Lecker writes, there is a growing grassroots to prevent the corporate takeover of public education and to turn schools into profit centers. The victory of Ras Baraka in Newark is the latest example of a community fighting for dignity.
In many cities and states, this is a bad time for public education. Plutocrats want to take control of the schools and decide which children to educate.
Over time, history teaches us that bad things don’t last forever. This is a democracy, and when people organize and unite, the plutocrats lose.
This is the article that appeared at 9 am on Congress reviving a dual school system.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/diane-ravitch/will-congress-revive-a-dual-school-system_b_5343445.html
Donna Brazile, Democratic Party strategist, laments the nation’s retreat from school integration in recent years.
Vouchers and charters are no substitute for integrated schools with equitable resources.
She cites the example of Milwaukee, which has had vouchers and charters since 1990.
Today, Milwaukee has low performance on national tests, and neither the voucher schools nor the charter schools outperform public schools.
She writes:
“Sixty years later, “separate and unequal” is still alive.
“To fix the problem, we must recognize the problem. First, privatizing our school systems results in increased segregation, not improved opportunities. Whether in New Orleans or Philadelphia or Detroit or New York, legislative schemes perpetuate separate and unequal by privatizing large swaths of public school districts — and in some cases, entire districts.
“Second, education doesn’t take place in a vacuum. Students and their families need access to health care, decent wages and affordable housing in integrated neighborhoods. Thus, Brown’s legacy includes economic improvements for children and families.
“Third, neither high-quality public schools nor economic improvements can occur when voters are disenfranchised. Only the right to vote protects access to education and movement toward economic improvement. Yet 34 states — most under Republican control — have passed laws to make it harder for minorities, the elderly, and young people to vote, including so-called voter ID laws and regulations that limit early voting.
“The economic and racial inequities that existed 60 years ago persist in our communities today. They must be addressed. In the spirit of Brown, students, parents and educators are demanding solutions that go beyond the dysfunctional “education reforms” and address a wide range of community concerns, from stopping school privatization to providing universal early childhood education to raising the minimum wage.”
Grassroots community groups in Néw Orleans, Newark, and Chicago filed complaints of violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the Justice Department and the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. They seek an investigation of racially discriminatory school closings in their communities.
They wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary Arne Duncan:
“Journey for Justice is a coalition of grassroots organizations in twenty-two cities across the country. The coalition has come together because, across our communities, education “reformers” and privatizers are targeting neighborhood schools filled with children of color, and leaving behind devastation. By stealth, seizure, and sabotage, these corporate profiteers are closing and privatizing our schools, keeping public education for children of color, not only separate, not only unequal, but increasingly not public at all.
“Adding insult to injury, the perpetrators of this injustice have cloaked themselves in the language of the Civil Rights Movement. But too many of the charter and privately-managed schools that have multiplied as replacements for our beloved neighborhood schools are test prep mills that promote prison-like environments, and seem to be geared at keeping young people of color controlled, undereducated, and dehumanized. Children of color are not collateral damage. Our communities are not collateral damage.
“Thus, we stand in solidarity, Kenwood Oakland Community Organization in Chicago, Coalition for Community Schools and Conscious Concerned Citizens Controlling Community Changes in New Orleans, New Jersey’s Parents Unified for Local School Education in Newark, and Journey for Justice member organizations across the country, to shed light on the racial injustice of school closings.
“Neighborhood schools are the hearts of our communities, and the harm caused by just one school closure is deep and devastating. This is death by a thousand cuts.”
There is deep irony and sadness in the fact that these community groups are appealing for justice even as the nation commemorates the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 decision striking down legal segregation.
There is deep irony and sadness in the fact that these complaints are filed to the administration of the nation’s first black president.
There is deep irony and sadness in the fact that these complaints are directed at the policies not of racist governors but of the Obama administration itself.
Secretary Duncan has encouraged and funded the school closings that are at the heart of the complaints. He has applauded and funded the privatization of schools in black communities. He openly admires the “no excuses” charter schools that emphasize control over education and that teach strict conformity to arbitrary rules, not the habits of mind and dispositions of a free people.
In effect, the Obama administration is being asked to overrule its own education policies. How sad. How ironic.
Jaisal Noor and Nikole Hannah-Jones report on the alarming return of segregation in the schools of the south. Hannah-Jones describes a high school in Tuscaloosa that was successfully desegregated but then resegregated as the result of political decisions intended to attract white students by isolating black students. For many black students in Alabama, it is as though the Brown decision never happened. As they note, New York State now has the most segregated schools in the nation, and segregation is deeply entrenched in New York City, especially in its charter schools.
Has the Brown decision been completely forgotten?
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