I spent two years teaching in the Bronx, zooming in on the four train to stand before a room full of dark faces, returning home to the Upper Eastside, a world where white children—in tutus, soccer cleats and private school uniforms—were escorted home by dark faces. I found myself startled by this contrast.
There are countless schools today named for Martin Luther King Jr. Almost all of the students in these schools are minority children.
This is not a shocking revelation. I have read Kozol. And his books are national best sellers so we can presume that young, idealistic college grads are not the only ones aware of this depressing truth. But it is so rarely addressed. Charter schools, merit pay, improving teacher quality and extending learning time dominate the education policy debate. Today, it is fashionable to advocate for segregated charter schools as the only alternative for low-income parents and children. Fifty-six years since Brown vs. the Board of Education, and it seems clear that separate, not equal reigns supreme. In fact, in Stepping over the Color Lines, Amy Stuart Wells and Robert L. Crain proclaim: “racial segregation and inequality have become as much a part of our culture as the fourth of July.” As a student of history, I understand part of how we got here. The Miliken v. Bradley decision orchestrated by a court packed by Nixon, helped to seal the fate of urban desegregation efforts nationwide. I just don’t understand why so few people are doing anything to change the status quo.
This past summer I found myself reconsidering my graduate school choices and my life path. What can a person with law and public policy degrees do in the space of education reform? How is any of this relevant to reforming the system?
I spent the summer composing my own syllabus. Reading about urban poverty, educational psychology, the history of education. One of my goals was to try to understand what actually constituted education law. I read about desegregation, education finance reform, and legal challenges to state law constitutions which guarantee children education.
Why is desegregation so rarely part of the education reform conversation? It is a known fact that one of the largest affects on student achievement is peer effects—low income students benefit from being in a classroom with students of a higher socio-economic status and the higher income children are not hurt. Why is this so often ignored when we know so little about what else affects student achievement?
I found social scientists who could provide me with answers. Stuart-Wells and Crain write: “As a more aggressive policy, school desegregation represents exactly what whites dislike about particularism and affirmative action: the infringement on their long-term freedoms and liberties to control their personal lives.”
But after paging through a discouraging number of books and studies that seemed to paint integration as a Don Quixote like delusion, I found an antidote to the national lapse on civil rights. Gerald Grant’s Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There are No Bad Schools in Raleigh tells the story of Wake County’s inventive income-based integration policy. Grant compares Raleigh to the segregated schools of Syracuse, his hometown, and illustrates his belief that programs like the one in Raleigh are part of the antidote this country needs.
In 2007, the Supreme Court struck down two voluntary desegregation plans that relied heavily on race, holding that race could not be used to determine school placement. Adopted in 2000 and implemented for the last decade, Wake County’s policy stands as an alternative, integrating students of disparate socio-economic status and ensuring that no more than 40% of students at any given school are low-income. By 2005-2006, the school district had achieved this goal in 85 of its 116 elementary schools and middle schools. This in itself is something to celebrate. I have taught in three schools where at least 90% of the students qualified for free lunch (which is a proxy for socio-economic status), and I understand the heavy burdens of a school with so many low-income students. But the effects of this program are more than simply lowering the burdens of schools. In fact, Wake County, Grant writes: “reduced the gap between rich and poor, black and white, more than any other large urban system in America.”
At the end of his book Grant concludes:
“…this tale of two American cities is not just about test scores. It’s about the kind of nation we hope to become. We should not want, nor shall we ever achieve, a nation of equal test scores or equal incomes. But we need to decide whether we want schools segregated by race and class, or schools that provide equal opportunity for all children—schools where students are enriched by relationships and ways of thinking that help them break out of the boxes of race and class that our flawed history has constructed. Do we believe in a nation that welcomes all comers, provides a level playing field in all its public schools, relishes the clash of ideas, and, as a consequence, enjoys one of the highest rates of upward mobility in the world? Raleigh’s reinvention of the ideals of the American common school made it an exemplar of those dreams and hopes (p. 191).”
A month ago the School Board in Wake County voted to end this inventive program.
I am often struck with the thought that while upper middle class parents blame the achievement gap on others’ bad parenting, those upper middle class parents’ own “good parenting” (read helicopter parenting to the point of only thinking of their precious offspring) acts to prohibit low-income students’ access to opportunities. I understand that parents do not like having their children bussed across town. I just don’t understand how anyone can think the experiences of his/her own children are more important than an entire county full of children.
What will happen to the schools in Raleigh? Will we still be able to proclaim there are no bad schools in Raleigh? Time will tell. But even if there are no “bad schools” something vital will be lost.
