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Kevin Welner and William Mathis: School Choice Promotes Segregation, Which is Bad for Our Society

By dianeravitch
January 6, 2018 //
29

 

In an important article, Kevin Welner and William Mathis of the National Education Policy Center argue that school choice is not “the civil rights issue of our time,” as Betsy DeVos and Trump (and before them, Arne Duncan) maintain.

School choice was devised by southern segregationists to fight the Brown decision of 1954, and school choice today is promoting racial and economic segregation.

Segregation is bad for students and for our society.

As they show, Jeanne Allen and other charter and voucher zealots attacked not only Randi Weingarten for accurately describing the history of school choice, they even attacked the NAACP for calling for a moratorium on new charters.

Choice is a consumer good but not a social good.

They write:

”When schools shift from democratically run to privately run institutions, their very purpose itself can shift toward merely serving the private interests of customer parents. In that context, success is often realized by wooing more students who are lower-cost and higher-achieving.

“Contrast this with the purposes of education memorialized in states’ constitutional provisions. To advance the common good, Massachusetts speaks to wisdom, knowledge and virtue among all groups of people. New Hampshire says that knowledge and learning must be spread throughout the various parts of the land. Vermont speaks of expanding virtue and preventing vice. The private benefits of an education received by individual children are valuable, but so are the societal benefits of a thoughtful, informed and united popu-lace.

“The genius of the American educational system is not just in what it gives to the individual. It is in what it provides to society as a whole. We face the great challenge of providing equal opportunities and common values to an increasingly fragmented society. Can we sustain and transmit this democratic covenant of rights and responsibilities to a new generation? Can we do this in a society with increasing levels of privately run choice schools?”

 

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Democracy, Education Industry, Privatization, School Choice, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration, Vouchers

Michigan: One of the Most Segregated States in the Nation: Thanks, Betsy!

By dianeravitch
January 5, 2018 //
39

 

The next time an advocate of school choice claims it is “ the civil rights issue of our time,” tell him or her about Michigan. After many years of school choice, it is now one of the most segregated states in the nation, tied with Mississippi and just behind the District of Columbia. 

Is racial segregation the new definition of civil rights?

”Jennifer Chambers and Christine MacDonald with the Detroit News report that the Associated Press analyzed data from the National Center for Education Statistics enrollment data from the 2014-2015 school year.

“The AP found that a large number of African-American students are enrolled in schools which are largely segregated, especially in Michigan, where 40% of black students are in public schools that are in “extreme racial isolation.”

“That puts Michigan in second-place nationwide, tied with Mississippi and behind only Washington, D.C., which came in at 66%.”

Racial segregation is highly correlated with low test scores.

“One major factor was charter schools, which are much more segregated than traditional public schools on average. In Michigan, 64% of black charter students are in schools in which the student bodies are more than 90% black.“

The head of Michigan’s charter association said the charter school hypersegrgatuin merely reflected residential patterns.

Truth is, charter advocates don’t really care about segregation or integration.

 

 

Categories District of Columbia, Education Reform, Michigan, Mississippi, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

At the NPE Conference, Nikole Hannah-Jones Put the Focus on Equity and Integration

By dianeravitch
October 25, 2017 //
4

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.

Categories Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

North Carolina: Students in Charter Schools Are Richer and Whiter Than Those in Public Schools

By dianeravitch
October 11, 2017 //
20

The News & Observer in North Carolina reports that charter schools have turned into havens for white flight. Twenty-nine percent of charter schools are 80% or more white, compared to only 14% of public schools.

Charter schools in North Carolina are more segregated than traditional public schools and have more affluent students.

Most charters have either a largely white population or a largely minority population, according to a News & Observer analysis. On the whole, charter schools are more white and less Latino than schools run by local districts.

In North Carolina school districts, slightly more than half the students come from low-income families. But in charter schools, one in three students are low-income.

Charters weren’t supposed to look like this. The 1996 state law that allowed charters required that, within one year of the schools opening, their populations would reflect the racial and ethnic composition of the school district.

The law defined one of the purposes of charters: increasing opportunities to learn for all students, with a special emphasis on students who are at risk of academic failure or those who are academically gifted.

The original charter law was the product of a bipartisan compromise brokered by a House Republican and a Senate Democrat. The requirements for racial and ethnic diversity were the authors’ response to worries of charter opponents that the schools would cherry-pick the best students, said former Rep. Steve Wood, the Republican who negotiated the law.

“Opponents were concerned there would be creaming across the top,” Wood said. The diversity requirement is “a laudable goal,” he said. “Some of us said it may not be a completely achievable goal.” The original law also capped charters at 100 schools.

The charter school law has been rewritten many times in the last two decades, including a major and extensively-debated change that removed the 100-school cap. Diversity is still mentioned, but it’s no longer a requirement. A 2013 law dropped the mandate and diluted the language so charters must “make efforts” to reflect the local school districts’ racial and ethnic composition.

Wib Gulley, a Democrat and former state senator who co-authored the 1996 law, said the diversity requirement was important, and charters should have lived up to it.

“It was a key provision that was meant to ensure that the charter schools didn’t segregate in some way and did not take only students from wealthy families and that kind of thing,” Gulley said. “If that’s the result even for one school, it is an undermining of the fundamental intent of the law. It perverts the premise of charter schools in a way that we never wanted and that both houses of the legislature voted to say would not happen.”

Read more here: http://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article178022436.html#storylink=cpy

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, North Carolina, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

Jennifer Berkshire Interviews Richard Rothstein on the Racial Wealth Gap and How to Fix It

By dianeravitch
October 2, 2017 //
10

In this post, Jennifer Berkshire interviews Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law.

She writes:

The gap between how much wealth Blacks and Whites have in the US is stark. If current trends continue, the median wealth of Blacks could fall to zero, even as wealthy Whites remain blissfully, even delusionally, unaware of the economic divide. But what is the source of the racial wealth gap, and how can we upend what is essentially a caste system in this country? AlterNet education editor Berkshire talks to Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law, about the federal housing policies that segregated cities, neighborhoods and schools, dividing the economic prospects of Blacks and Whites in the process.

Rothstein blows up the myth that residential segregation is the product of millions of private choices. And he has little patience for arguments that school choice is the solution to cities and neighborhoods segregated by design. “We’re not going to solve this problem by choosing schools. We’re going to solve this problem by enforcing the neighborhood school concept in integrated neighborhoods.” Listen to the interview here.

The interview begins like this:

Jennifer Berkshire: The Color of Law takes aim at what you argue is a false narrative about the origins of residential segregation. Here’s your opportunity to set the record straight.

Richard Rothstein: I wrote this book in response to a national myth that the reason we have residential segregation in every metropolitan area in this country is the result of private activity. It’s the result of rogue real estate agents steering White families to White neighborhoods and Black families to Black neighborhoods. Or it’s the result of people wanting to live among same-race neighbors. Or it’s because of income differences and African-Americans are not able to afford to buy homes in White neighborhoods. Or it’s because of private individuals discriminating. It’s very hard to figure out what to do about the residential segregation that exists in every metropolitan area in this country if it’s the result of millions of accidental private decisions. But once we understand that residential segregation is the product of very explicit and intentional public policy, then it’s easier to understand that we can do something about it. If it was created by public policy it can be reversed by public policy.

JB: You lay out the history of a handful of federal housing policies that created the segregated cities and neighborhoods that remain with us today. In many ways the legacy of those policies comes down to a single word: equity.

RR: The Federal Housing Administration, which was created 1934, subsidized builders of large subdivisions, entire suburbs, with the explicit condition that no homes be sold African-Americans. The most famous of these is Levittown just east of New York City. William Levitt, the developer, could never have acquired the capital necessary to build all those homes on his own. He went to the Federal Housing Administration, which approved his plans on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans, and further, that deeds include a clause prohibiting resale to African-Americans. There were hundreds of places like Levittown around the country; all of California, suburbs in places like Lakewood south of Los Angeles or Panorama City. was developed in this way with Federal Housing Administration requirements that no African-Americans be admitted.

At the time those homes sold for about twice the national median income; they were affordable to working class families. Today they sell for $300,000, $400,000 or $500,000. The White families who moved into those homes in the mid-twentieth century gained over the course of the next two or three generations. Half million dollars in equity. Maybe a little bit less but a lot of equity the Black families who were required to live in rented apartments either in public housing or private housing in urban areas get no equity. The result is that today nationwide African-American incomes on average are about 60 percent of White incomes. But African-American wealth is only about seven percent of White wealth and that enormous disparity 60 percent income ratio a percent wealth ratio is entirely attributable to unconstitutional federal housing policy practice in the mid 20th century.

JB: The cities that appear in your book include not just Chicago or St. Louis, metropolitan areas that we’ve come to associate with, say, segregated public housing, bt places we consider progressive bastions, like San Francisco and Cambridge.

RR: I like to talk in the book about the places like San Francisco and Cambridge, which also had government-created segregation because I think that if people can understand that this happened in places that are considered the most liberal places in the country it must have happened everywhere. Richmond, CA across the bay from San Francisco was at the center of shipbuilding. Its population was less than 20000 at the beginning of World War II, and by the end of the war was 100,000 Clearly the shipyards couldn’t keep working if the government didn’t provide housing for these workers.

So government in this neighborhood that in this community that never known segregation and didn’t even have an African-American population to speak of before the war created separate housing for African-Americans and for Whites. The housing for African-Americans was located along the railroad tracks near the shipyards in the industrial area of Richmond. The housing for Whites was located in the residential area further inland. It’s not that Whites happen to pick those those units and Blacks happened to pick the units in the industrial area. This was explicitly designated. All over the country the government created segregation where if it existed before it existed in a much less rigid form or in places like Richmond where it never existed before.

You should listen. Richard Rothstein is brilliant, as usual.

Categories School Choice, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

Kentucky: Legislators Push Charter Schools While Undermining Racial Integration

By dianeravitch
September 27, 2017 //
11

Kentucky is a Republican state with both houses in the hands of the Republican party and a Republican governor. The Republicans are doing their best to undermine public schools. They were late in passing charter legislation, and they passed it only recently. Now the legislature is intent on undoing the racial integration of public schools in Jefferson County (Louisville).

Gay Adelmann, co-founder of Save Our Schools Kentucky, attended a recent legislative session and reported back on the discussion, which had nothing to do with improving public schools and everything to do with implementing the privatization agenda of ALEC.

The Republican legislators blame busing for all the ills of public schools. They think that ending busing will bring a new day to Kentucky. Obviously, none of them has ever read any research on the benefits of racial integration to both white and black students.

After listening to them fulminate about “those children,” she offered her own suggestions:


Faulty arguments repeated the theme: “Imagine what you could do if you ended busing.”

No, imagine what we could do if you:

Fully funded our schools.

Ended high-stakes testing.

Placed students’ interests above adults.

Protected our public schools from corporate threats.

Asked us how you can help!

Categories Charter Schools, Corporate Reformers, Education Industry, Education Reform, Kentucky, Privatization, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

Arthur Camins: Want Innovation? Try Equitable, Integrated Public Schools!

By dianeravitch
September 26, 2017 //
22

Arthur Camins recently retired after a distinguished career in science, engineering, and the study of innovation.

He has an inspired idea for innovation in education: try equitable, integrated public schools.

He writes:

Secretary of Education Betsy Devos says that students in the US attend schools that are a “mundane malaise that dampens dreams, dims horizons and denies futures.” She accuses public schools of being stuck in the past. She claims to want innovation.

Miriam-Webster defines innovation as follows;

1: the introduction of something new

2: a new idea, method, or device: novelty

DeVos and her allies want to give public funds to parents to send their children to any public, charter or private schools, whether or not they are religious and whether or not they discriminate by race, religion or sexual orientation.

If enacted, her policies would mean returning to a time when schools were more segregated by race, religion, and class. That is not new or novel. In fact, it is stuck in the past. Segregation is not innovative. It is old school.

DeVos believes that individual parents are in the best position to choose a school that is best for their child, rather than democratically elected representatives. That unlimited choice would return us to a time when individual parents’ inclinations and, yes, their prejudices were prioritized over the needs of the communities in which they live and over the needs of the nation.

For several decades after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court Decision in 1954 public schools in the US became more integrated. However, that trend has reversed. Public schools are becoming more segregated, not just by race but by socioeconomic status as well. In other words, it is becoming more likely that student will attend schools with children who are more similar to one another than not. That trend may satisfy the narrow interests and proclivities of some, but it is destructive to the nation.

Segregated schools are destructive to the nation not just because the inherent inequality of separate education shortchanges particular categories of individual students, but because it deprives all students of the benefit of learning to live across differences in our unalterably diverse country. Integrated schools are not only a moral and democratic imperative but an economic one too. Research indicates that diverse groups are more productive and creative and make better decisions. Learning to participate in diverse groups should start in school not on the job….

The idea of mediating racial and socioeconomic school segregation is not new. But, doing something substantive about it would be innovative.

Here are several policies that promote the old, but still vital idea and value of diversity and equity. Isolated boutique enactments are not innovative. Widespread systemic implementation would be.

Stop funding local public schools primarily through property taxes. Since communities have significantly varied tax bases, this is inherently inequitable. Instead, shift school funding to graduated state and personal federal income, capital gains, and corporate taxes.

Incentivize more integrated neighborhoods through changes in lending and zoning practices. It was, in fact, federal policies that help to limit integrated and promote segregated neighborhoods. It is time to reverse that deplorable history.

Since addressing inequity is necessarily a long-term effort, prioritize funding to schools with the greatest percentages of children from low-incomes and traditionally underrepresented groups.

Increase federal funding, so that rather than taking from well endowed, middle-class schools, funding for the rest can be increased.

Increase federal funding for special education, so that meeting the requirements of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act does not come at the expense of other children.
Provide nutritional, social, health, and economic support to children and their families, so that all children can engage fully in learning.

Invest in infrastructure and research jobs with decent wages so that adults are employed and provide stability at home.

Promote positive social and emotional learning practices in all schools so that all students are known, valued and respected.

Fund professional learning and formative assessment practices so that teachers continue to learn how to best engage and address the learning needs of all students.

None of these ideas are new. However, as a nation, we have only tinkered at designing solutions. We are a nation of interdependent communities and states. Systemic efforts to address inequity have always been limited not by what is possible, but by the political constraints driven by economic elites. The self-proclaimed realists among the empowered condescendingly claim, “We cannot afford all that.” What they really mean is, “I don’t want to pay for it.”

It’s time to give priority to the needs of the majority of Americans. More integrated, well-funded schools would benefit everyone. That would be innovative.

Categories Equity, Funding, Innovation, School Choice, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

Vox: The Resegregation of Our Schools and What Might Have Been

By dianeravitch
August 10, 2017 //
29

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.

Categories Duncan, Arne, History, Race to the Top, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

Mississippi: The Only Majority-Black District That Earned an A

By dianeravitch
July 18, 2017 //
4

A reader who grew up in Clinton, Mississippi, shared this story, which appeared in the Hechinger Report. She was in third grade when the district integrated its schools and made the fateful decision to pursue equity for all students.

In 2016, half of all black students in Mississippi attended school in a district rated D or F; 86 percent of the students in those districts were black. In districts rated F, more than 95 percent of the student population was black.

Only one majority-black district in Mississippi earned an A on the state’s annual A–F rating scale. An apparent anomaly on a list of top school districts that is mostly white and largely affluent, including neighboring Madison County and Rankin County Public School districts, Clinton Public Schools managed to excel against the odds. It’s a sign that the Clinton district, located in a small but bustling suburb of Jackson, is on the right track to closing the black-white achievement gap and raising achievement levels for black students.

That gap is wide: Data from the state Department of Education shows the achievement gap between white and black students in Mississippi is 28 percent, larger than the gaps for other traditionally disadvantaged subgroups in the state, including those between English speakers and English-language learners and between students in special education and general education, according to Mississippi Department of Education data. The achievement gap between students who do and do not live in poverty is second highest, at 27 points.

Clinton’s ability to narrow these gaps is due, in part, to the district’s intentional integration. And though Clinton is far from being a post-racial mecca, students and administrators say that effort pays off. There are no black schools or white schools in Clinton. In a district that is about 53 percent black and 39 percent white, children share the same resources, teachers, and the same well-stocked classrooms and school buildings, regardless of their race or economic status….

Philip Burchfield, the district’s former superintendent, says the district has been purposeful about seeking equity for its students. For decades, it has placed students into schools arranged by grade level instead of by neighborhood to achieve greater diversity, a strategy born in response to a 1970 desegregation order. (The city of Clinton includes a majority-black neighborhood within its borders, and roughly 38 percent of Clinton’s residents are black.)

“Our school system doesn’t have a neighborhood school of the haves and a neighborhood school of the have-nots,” said Burchfield, who retired as superintendent in June. “We always said if we start our kids off in Clinton it makes no difference; we’re going to give them the resources they need to be successful.”

Clinton can also attribute its success to the relatively low number of students living in poverty. Although about 40 percent of students receive free and reduced-price lunch, the poverty level in the city is 15.5 percent. Statewide, the poverty level for children is nearly double that. Superintendent Martin says the district doesn’t receive a “huge amount” of Title I funding to support its low-income students, but funnels money it does get toward helping students in kindergarten through fifth grade, and on acquiring intervention teachers.

Categories Mississippi, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration

Jennifer Berkshire: How Betsy DeVos Segregated the Public Schools in Her Hometown, Holland, Michigan

By dianeravitch
May 30, 2017 //
10

A few years back, I went to Michigan to speak to a large group of superintendents, whose schools collectively enrolled half the students in the state. I learned from them about the pernicious effects of school choice. The state wiped out all district lines for purposes of enrollment. Students can enroll in any public school without regard to district lines, and schools are paid by the state based on numbers enrolled. Consequently, every district commits a portion of its budget to poaching students away from the neighboring districts. Each district spends about $100,000 each year on advertising, in hopes of getting more students and the money attached to them.

All this is background to Jennifer Berkshire’s incisive piece about how school choice promotes segregation. Jennifer recently visited Betsy DeVos’s hometown, Holland, Michigan, and was there to view the Tulip Time parade. As she watched the high school marching bands pass by, she saw a vivid portrait of segregation on display.

She writes:

“First, some background. During the endless runup to DeVos’ confirmation hearing last year, it was the Wild West-style school choice she’d pushed in Detroit that garnered most of the attention. But DeVos was also behind Michigan’s inter-district choice policies that, starting in 2000, *disrupted* neighborhood attendance zones, just as the proposed Trump/DeVos education budget seeks to do. In Michigan, school choice has become the new white flight as white families have fled their resident districts for schools and districts that are less diverse. The most dramatic example of this may be in DeVos’ own home town of Holland.

“The choice to segregate

“Since Michigan adopted the school choice policies DeVos is now pushing across the country, Holland’s white enrollment has dropped by more than 60%, as students decamped for public schools or charters in whiter communities nearby. The students who remain in the Holland Public Schools are now majority Hispanic and overwhelmingly poor—twice the schools’ poverty rate when Michigan’s school choice experiment began. Many of these students are the children of migrant farm workers who came to this part of the state to pick fruit; school choice enabled Holland’s white families to pick not to attend school with them. One in three students in Holland no longer attends school there, and since the money follows the child in the Mitten State, yet another DeVos priority, white flight has eaten the district’s finances too.

“In 2000, Holland had fifteen schools. Now it has just eight. Of nine Holland schools that once served elementary students, half have closed. By 2009, even the elementary school where DeVos’ mother once taught had been shuttered. As students flee for schools in communities like Zeeland, the future of Holland’s public schools looks increasingly dire. Already there are mutterings in this wealthy, Dutch-dominated community that the school population *doesn’t represent* Holland. And as DeVos well understands, a community that has little stake in its schools is unlikely to shell out money to pay for them…

“The Trump/DeVos education budget was made public on the 63rd anniversary of Brown vs. Board. DeVos’ vision isn’t just a retreat from Brown—it embodies the spirit that animated its opponents to set up segregation academies in Brown’s wake. The budget that bears her imprint would encourage and even incentivize white flight. We don’t have to speculate about where all this leads. The outcome of the kind of school choice policies that DeVos has pushed for decades in her home state and now wants every state to embrace has been starkly measurable segregation. And even that is an understatement. What I witnessed in DeVos’ hometown last week was extreme sorting on the basis of race and class. That the top education official in the country thinks this is a good thing is appalling.”

Folks, our Secretary of Education is encouraging racial and social segregation. She won’t stand in its way. She doesn’t care, she won’t act to stop it, she wants to subsidize it.

Were he alive, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. would denounce her actions. How dare she and Trump claim they are advancing “the civil rights issue of out time!” They are reversing the progress made since 1954 with “all deliberate speed.”

Categories Betsy DeVos, Civil Rights, Michigan, School Choice, Segregation , Racial Isolation and Integration
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