Still Putting It All Together

AMID the  ceaseless and cacophonous debates about how to close the achievement gap, we’ve turned away from one tool that has been shown to work: school desegregation. That strategy, ushered in by the landmark 1954 Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education, has been unceremoniously ushered out, an artifact in the museum of failed social experiments. The Supreme Court’s ruling that racially segregated schools were “inherently unequal” shook up the nation like no other decision of the 20th century. Civil rights advocates, who for years had been patiently laying the constitutional groundwork, cheered to the rafters, while segregationists mourned “Black Monday” and vowed “massive resistance.” But as the anniversary was observed this past week on May 17, it was hard not to notice that desegregation is effectively dead. In fact, we have been giving up on desegregation for a long time. In 1974, the Supreme Court rejected a metropolitan integration plan, leaving the increasingly black cities to fend for themselves.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on this article.

It is happening again. Once more, promises — promises backed by law — made to New Jersey’s neediest children have been broken.

This time, it’s school choice — from charters to vouchers. Gov. Chris Christie has vowed to use it to rescue 100,000 “trapped” students in “failing schools.’’

Then he issued a report he said proved charter schools were the answer — but all it did prove was that the charter schools best able to exclude the neediest students got both the highest test scores and, as a consequence, the highest praise from a grateful governor.

Breaking promises predates Christie. And predates charters. Politicians of both parties—abetted by faint-hearted courts—have ensured that promises made remain unkept.

In 1954, the United State Supreme Court ruled separate but equal schools were “inherently unequal” — and inherently inferior. New Jersey long before banned statutory segregation, but both federal and state courts here also banned segregation based on housing patterns.

The New Jersey Supreme Court ruled the education commissioner had the power to dissolve district lines to enforce integration. In 1971, when Morris Township officials tried to withdraw their children from Morristown, the court ordered the state to create a unified—and racially integrated—district. Promise made.

The commissioner then—Carl Marburger—insisted that, if integration were to be accomplished, school district lines “would have to be challenged.’’ Plainfield school officials, chafing at an integration order they said was impossible to enforce within the district, sued, demanding regionalization of schools in Union and Middlesex counties to achieve racial balance. School board meetings throughout Central Jersey were packed with panicky parents fearful their children would be bused far from home.

But nothing happened. In cases involving Plainfield, New Brunswick and Englewood, both the state and the courts backed off. School desegregation, and whatever it might have done for school achievement among our poorest children, faded as a solution—and as a reality.

Public schools are more segregated than ever. In Essex County, East Orange schools are 99.8 black and Hispanic. Irvington, 98 percent. Newark, 92 percent. Millburn schools—a short bus ride from these cities—are 98 percent white. New Jersey tolerates racial isolation.

Guys.  Lottery numbers.  The best we can do for our neediest students is let them play a lotto for a different school environment.  Education is not a game.  It is not something to gamble with.

Let’s make schools better.  Let’s think logically.

How racial and economic segregation damage our urban and rural school districts

Kozol says that public education in 2009 is divided: Students from wealthy families live in property-tax rich suburbs and attend well-funded public schools, while urban and rural kids face very different circumstances because they are raised in less-affluent communities. 

Kozol: Contrary to a lot of propaganda from the corporate sector, the fact of the matter is that the affluent suburban schools are still every bit as good as they were when I was a kid and when I was a teacher. The top high schools in America continue to produce spectacular results. The kids assume they’re going to college and they do. The schools are very well funded because of local property wealth.

There’s a kind of mantra that you hear from the politicians that our nation’s public schools aren’t working, that they need to be fixed. They love that word “fixed,” as if we weren’t talking about human beings but auto repairs. But in fact that’s a myth. The truth is that it’s our low-income urban schools and low-income rural schools that are in calamitous trouble.

Kozol argues that urban schools are more racially segregated now than they have been at any time since 1968, because conservative Supreme Court justices, including late- Chief Justice William Rehnquist, “watered down, dismantled or prohibited” successful integration programs that had been implemented after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. He says that wealthy suburban districts are able to raise more funds for their own schools, but that promises by states to equalize funding for urban districts never materialize. The result is separate but unequal public schools.

Kozol: Basically the justices ripped the guts out of Brown v. Board of Ed. between the late-’80s and right up to the present time, so black and Latino kids are more isolated intellectually than they’ve been in decades. When you isolate students it’s much easier to cheat them in terms of school finance. So long as poor black and Latino kids are in separate schools it’s much easier to shortchange those kids in dozens of ways without hurting the children of the privileged, since they’re in different school districts. 

We haven’t just ripped the guts out of Brown v. Board of Ed., we have not even lived up to the tarnished promises of Plessy v. Ferguson [which supported the concept of “separate but equal” segregated facilities]. We’re not even up to Plessy, and that was decided in 1896.

Milwaukee has been at the forefront of the voucher school movement, but Kozol says voucher and charter schools have served to further divide students and allow religious ideas to be taught with taxpayer support.

Kozol:I believe that vouchers are the single worst, most dangerous idea to have entered education discourse in my adult life. … I don’t condemn the individual parent who makes that decision, although they don’t always get a better school. We don’t know [if the voucher schools are better than public schools]. The voucher schools are often much better at marketing than delivering the goods. 

Here’s the thing: When people think of the recipients of vouchers or charters, the general public tends to think of the familiar benign model. They say, “Why should we send our kids to a failing school?” instead of asking “What should we be doing to make sure that we don’t have a separate, unequal system which creates failing schools?” It’s a triumph of the individual self-interest over civic virtue. Americans who are drawn to the voucher idea tend to think, “What’s wrong with a nice Catholic school or a Lutheran or a Montessori school?” There’s nothing wrong inherently with that. But constitutionally, once you let this genie out of the bottle you can’t restrict it to the kind of schools that seem benign. 

(Click to read the entire article)

This article is from 2009, but I think the arguments and the logistics still stand.