Celebrating 60 Years More Of School Segregation?
Much is being written and broadcast this week about the U.S.A. celebrating 60 years of school desegregation by way of Brown v. Board of Education in 1954. This was the year I graduated from my mostly segregated high school.
I say mostly because I was one of a busload of army brats transported daily to a nearby civilian high school. The only reason there were a few black kids in my school was I guess the local school board couldn’t find a way to prohibit my fellow army brat kids who were black from attending their otherwise all white school.
But to my point. No, we no longer have de jure school segregation. But Americans have found a way to maintain this stupid practice by simply boycotting and fleeing inner city public schools mostly populated by low income black and hispanic kids. Result? De facto segregation and very much separate and unequal educations.
Further, while the separate but equal doctrine is no longer applies legally, it applies in practical application in the way many if not most public schools are funded to provide middle and upper class public schools with enrichment tools the affluent parents fork out extra money to get for their kids while less affluent parents are powerless to provide such things as gyms, computer labs, ball fields, art and music classes, band uniforms and instruments and great field trips.
So, 60 years later, little or no change? Not much really to celebrate. Post racial America? that’s a cruel joke.
With my own eyes and ears I saw stonewalling up close and personal in a Texas city. By 1970, 16 years post Brown v. Board, our huge urban school district was totally segregated, save a few scattered middle class black kids populating suburban schools. So, a highly motivated group of white liberal, black and hispanic urban residing parents banded together, got organized and in a year tossed out most of a segregationist white school school board and integrated our school district.
But, concerned about white flight, our group, of which I was privileged to be involved with my wife and kids, our board and new superintendent created the first magnet school program outside of NYC, including our own High School For Performing and Visual Arts (yes, we even put that on a very long bumpersticker !). And our integration program mostly left neighborhood elementary schools alone and concentrated the magnets in middle schools and high schools, to limit the busing of the little ones.
In a few short years, all these programs, designed to ease the angst of white families and create imaginative new opportunities for all kids, utterly failed to stem white flight. White “christian academies” sprung up, suburban Catholic schools flourished and new suburban school districts sprouted up all over the region, all touting their educational excellence. People knew what those code words meant. White. in a decade or two the integrated urban district went from 60 % anglo to 91% black and hispanic.
Ok, this was so called conservative Texas. But what of Blue and liberal areas? Well, my home of origin, marvelous Marin County in northern California doesn’t look a whole lot better, known to be a liberal elite bastion. Nor does the very Blue Delaware in which I am now residing. And from what I read, most of the liberal Blue areas, north, south, east and west look pretty much the same, school segregation wise.
Yes, I know, this is economic segregation where the people across the tracks so to speak just have to work harder to break out, the conservatives tell us. Apparently all good things just take time in America. 60 years was simply not enough time to change attitudes about “those people”.
I’m waiting. Not much time left in my opinion.
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True enough, there is no real or total integration of schools. Listened to several programs today on NPR (‘natch) that went into detail on the subject, couldn’t help but feel that much of the problem is more related to income inequality than overt racism. One of our sons was bused into Wilmington from Newark back in the 80’s, we weren’t happy with it and most people, liberal or not, agreed that busing was a poor solution. This is not a perfect world. Total and complete school integration will remain an ideal, a lofty goal, but not reality.
Involved in this – back in the early 1980’s with Glover Jones and jay street- what was thought was a progressive and equal solution has not panned out – quite sad
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/05/15/equality-matters-more-than-integration-in-schools.html
Haven’t read the full study yet, but it’s interesting, and relevant (even though it’s dated) http://www.nber.org/papers/w8741.pdf?new_window=1
McWhorter here is a really good scholar. I’ve read and listened to him quite alot, though a self described conservative. But his point is not my point. My point is my disappointment at the white flight response to school integration; ie: people running away from other people who pose no overt threat to them or their children….other than being of a different race and class than many of the runners. It said and says the wrong thing about our American sense of community and willingness to join others in the struggle and lift one another up.
McWhorter starts with a faulty premise — that integration’s goal was to ensure that American classrooms reflected the diversity of America. That’s not right. Integration was about resources — that separate but equal is never equal. And that is still the case. Brown v Board stopped forced segregation, but did not stop the rewriting of policy that continued to marginalize primary-minority schools as much as a possible.
The SC said specifically that “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” The key word being “inherently” asserting that it is the essential nature of separate educational facilities. I think what McWhorter is suggesting is that it doesn’t have to be (nor is it) true. Does a man made (not naturally occurring in the environment) construct even have an essential nature? Granted that policies established the construct, but those policies are man made and not natural.
Still, if it is inherent, then the response of parents resulting in white flight is no less inherent. Indeed even the term “forced busing” suggests that it is an attempt to overcome an inherent condition, else it would not have to be forced.
While I believe that education is sort of the great equalizer in that it can and should provide equal opportunity, it is not a panacea. I believe our primary failure is to confront segregation in housing/communities with relatively feeble attempts like affordable housing rather than the means to afford housing, which of course brings us full circle back to education and opportunity. It’s complex I guess, but someone once said “If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.” Maybe after 60 years, maybe we as a society can come up with some new ideas.
Granted that policies established the construct, but those policies are man made and not natural.
Re-writing the policies (as they exist and are moving now) gets you the de facto segregation that this post discusses. The “separate educational facilities” were those where white kids went to schools that were better than those black kids were sent to. The *inherent* here is the attribute of enforced segregated educational facilities — facilities that were of lower quality because of the enforced segregation (and its built-in devaluing of black children).
@ Cassandra: Right. So the solution is to put more resources into these “lower quality facilities” in order to eventually equalize the quality of the outcome, the graduates. Doing so takes much more resources provided to these facilities than to other facilities, an approach we have not been willing to do to date.
Michele Obama has the right idea: http://www.msnbc.com/politicsnation/michelle-obama-brown-v-board-of-ed-anniversary-speech-topeka-kansas?cid=sm_facebook
“The truth is that Brown vs. Board of Education isn’t just about our history, it’s about our future.”
The fruits of anti-white, anti-Christian politics :
America Dead LAST In Education! REAAALLY?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgIy5bjnK0Y
America is now just another third world country being exploited by the highest bidder.
“Bachelet looks to renewables and US gas to stem surge in energy prices”
http://www.techinvestornews.com/Green/Green-Energy/bachelet-looks-to-renewables-and-us-gas-to-stem-surge-in-energy-prices
This is what happens when you declare war against your own population. Our water supplies are being fracked sacrificially to produce gas for countries that can still afford energy resources, unlike more and more of America.
Uh-oh. Sounds like someone escaped from one of those FEMA camps.
When we moved to Mt Sterling, Kentucky, in the middle of the third grade for me (March of 1962), the public schools were officially segregated. A plan was being made, a few years later, to integrate the schools in accordance with Brown, one which would have phased it in in certain grades, but that plan was never put into action, because another plan was used, one which was used in a lot of segregated school systems in small towns in the South: the black school mysteriously burned to the ground during the summer of 1966.
So, we got integration all at once, and if there were any real problems, they weren’t enough to have made a lasting memory for me. But the difference between integration in Mt Sterling and what happened in places like Wilmington was that Mt Sterling is a small town: there was no forced busing of students past their old school for integration, because there was only one school. I’d guess that there was some snarling on the part of some parents, but integration didn’t place an additional burdens on the parents of white students. (Black students had to go a bit farther to school, because the old black school was closer to their neighborhoods, but that’s about it. There were no school buses; kids walked or biked or their mothers drove them to school.)
What you are seeing is an artifact of urbanization: you have integration problems in larger cities precisely because you have more schools. The Washington Post noted that the most segregated schools are in the northeast, while the west and south are the most integrated. I’d attribute that not to racism, but to the fact that the northeast has so man large cities, and those cities have such large black populations.
Here’s the money quote:
The reason ought to be obvious: the young, childless professionals like to congregate in the cities, to be close to the urban lifestyle advantages, but once they have children, they simply want and need more space, and that is what the suburbs provide. The ones who can afford to move to the suburbs, and they tend to be predominantly white, now have a more important reason to move. Restaurants and trendy bars most nights stop being as important as providing a good place to rear their children.
PP wrote:
Yes, actually, that’s exactly right. In 2013, white students were graduated from high school at an 80% rate, Asians 81%, Latinos at 68% and blacks at 62%, and those rates were actually improvements. Black and Hispanic populations, in the aggregate, have lowered their future earning potential before they even reach 18 years of age. Add that to the fact that 72% of black children are born out of wedlock, compared to 17% of Asians and 29% of non-Hispanic whites, and you have a much larger percentage of black children in single-parent families, which greatly increases the likelihood that they will grow up poor.
The aggregate actions of particular populations are the result of millions of individual actions. There are plenty of individual black families who do work harder and beak out of poverty, but their numbers are minimized by the aggregate. And the two primary things which impede economic progress, failing to be graduated from high school and having single parent families, are so much more widespread in the black community that it’s not surprising in the least that such a high percentage of blacks are trapped in poor economic circumstances.