Cairo Association of Teachers - Newsletter

CAT Tracks for January 8, 2006 RESEGREGATION...WHATEVER THE CAUSE

From the Providence Journal...

Edwatch by Julia Steiny: Toward more just schools

However righteous and rankling his rhetoric, Amazing Grace author Jonathan Kozol is absolutely correct when he points out that schools named after civil rights leader the Rev. Martin Luther King are those most likely to be models of segregation.

Speaking recently in a Boston church, Kozol said, "Rosa Parks. Thurgood Marshall. Jackie Robinson. Most of the schools named after these people are the worst schools in the city -- with the lowest test scores, highest class sizes . . . Officials should name such schools after the people they hate. The Clarence Thomas Academy of Self-help and Self-hate."

Kozol is hard to take -- harsh, accusing, conspiracy-minded. With rumpled clothes and a dramatic, gravely voice, he looks and sounds like a modern Old Testament prophet, ranting but not without reason. While some desegregation techniques of the 1960s and 1970s were ill-considered, even brutal -- such as forced busing -- still, overall they were working. Increasingly, children of color were sharing the white kids' better schools. Magnet programs attracted middle-class kids, values and expectations into low-income neighborhoods. Choice programs gave minorities more access to desirable schools.

But around 1980, many school districts declared the segregation war won, or the battle too costly to continue fighting. Research tells us that at about that time resegregation began, and indeed now our public schools are even more segregated than they were 35 years ago.

Kozol intones, "We haven't ripped apart the legacy of Brown versus the Board of Education, we never lived up to it. I believe apartheid schooling is a cancer in the body of America that needs to be cut out.'

Kozol indicts the media for colluding with segregation. "The media loves to switch this issue from racial equality to purely economic inequality, because it is less hideous to have financial inequality than for this nation to be notorious for its racial legacy."

The history of American slavery and its ramifications is a powerfully ugly story. But I, too, believe that the real issue now is socioeconomic.

Curiously, this reviled position is also shared by Kozol's laudatory introducer of that night, Gary Orfield, director of Harvard's Civil Rights Project. He and Chungmei Lee co-authored the project's publication, (italics) "Why Segregation Matters -- Poverty and Educational Inequity.

Their report states: "Many studies over four decades have found a strong relationship between concentrated school poverty and low achievement. [One such] study found that between 2003 and 2004 the largest achievement test score gains were reported by low income students attending middle income schools."

Though the black doctor's daughter might well encounter some degree of racism in her life, her opportunities remain bright and promising.

But the opportunities are dismal for the low-income children whose vocabularies are thousands of words smaller than their middle-class peers, no matter what their skin tone. They are probably in schools that will fail them and in families too concerned with survival to support education adequately. Poverty often and strongly correlates with race, so yes, the educational divide stems at least in part from legacy racial segregation. But these days income levels determine a child's destiny much more relentlessly than skin tone.

Things have changed. Compare the faces in the media, politics and even business to those from the 1960's. Some things have changed for the better.

Others, sadly, have changed for the worse.

The wealthy parent who pays $22,000 dollars a year to send their child to a "baby Ivy," which is to say a fancy daycare, is the image of the new American competitive spirit. Ambitious Americans are definitely not in this together, united for the good of all, and Mr. Smith is not going to Washington. Cutthroat competition and even cheating -- especially among the parents -- is becoming a respected family value.

Too many middle class and wealthy American parents are going bonkers getting their children "an edge." Frantic competitors start at birth, grooming their children to win one of the limited slots in certain schools. To maintain or claw their way into the upper 10 percent of income earners, a child needs the prestigious networking gold mine of a top-20 college. Why would such competitive parents generate more competition for their child by helping low-income kids get an edge? In a fair fight, my kid might not win.

With cars, suburbs and mobility, Americans have been sorting themselves into the best neighborhood or schools they can buy. As such, the nation is more socioeconomically segregated than it ever has been. If you take the district median income in any state and sort it high to low, that sort will be almost a perfect match with sorted district test scores. Socioeconomic background is increasingly a child's destiny in this county because we are bothering less and less to mitigate the deeply unequal access to educational opportunity. No Child Left Behind shined a light on these disparities, but because of its punitive nature, the law tends to make things worse for low-income kids instead of better.

However, certain individual districts or school systems are becoming new models of offering all children access to a middle-class school culture. The admirably forward-thinking Wake County (N.C.) school board, for example, passed the rule that no school could have more than 40 percent students eligible for subsidized lunch, a poverty indicator. The district has suburban and inner city kids -- from Raleigh -- and in the course of 10 years, all of them, but most notably the black and low-income students, have made impressive strides in their testing.

Yes, of course, some parents complain of the long bus rides their children take to arrive at desirable schools. But they do not much complain about what they find at the other end of the ride. Two-way bilingual, visual and performing-arts training and high-tech, pre-engineering programs are only some of the offerings that have been luring more and more middle class families back into the system. Low-income kids are assimilated into a culture of educational high expectations where middle class parents demand quality. Substandard teachers are no longer concentrated in those schools where the parents' backgrounds limit their choices.

If NCLB had included such a 40 percent rule, the law would have been more effective, credible and plain gutsy in the service of those kids getting a seriously raw deal.

Kozol might accuse Wake County of avoiding issues of racism, but I would hope that Rev. King is looking on their citizenry with approving favor. Oh, I'm sure clever, cutthroat competitors have figured out how to get their kids an edge there too. Still, the community has signed a social contract with its children and created a school structure to support that contract in a credible way.

This is the direction the nation as a whole should be taking.

Julia Steiny is a former member of the Providence School Board; she consults and writes for a number of education, government and private enterprises. She welcomes your questions and comments on education. She can be reached by e-mail at juliasteiny@cox.net or c/o EdWatch, Education and Employment, Providence Journal, 75 Fountain St., Providence, R.I. 02902.