On MLK Day, Some Thoughts on Segregated Schools, Arne Duncan, and President Obama

JANUARY 17, 2011

American schools are more segregated by race and class today than they were on the day Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed, 43 years ago. The average white child in America attends a school that is 77 percent white, and where just 32 percent of the student body lives in poverty. The average black child attends a school that is 59 percent poor but only 29 percent white. The typical Latino kid is similarly segregated; his school is 57 percent poor and 27 percent white. 

Overall, a third of all black and Latino children sit every day in classrooms that are 90 to 100 percent black and Latino. 

This is a sad state of affairs in a pluralistic society, and it is borne of two factors: 1) residential segregation and 2) purposeful drawing of school district boundaries to isolate middle class and white families from poor families of color. So it is absolutely a good thing that last Thursday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan wrote a letter chiding the Wake County, North Carolina school board--which has been taken over by Tea Partiers--for dismantling a groundbreaking school integration program.

The Wake County program located high-achieving, themed magnet schools within poor neighborhoods, and opened them up to any interested student. For each seat at the magnet school occupied by a middle class or affluent kid from across town, an inner city child was given the opportunity to bus to the neighborhood school the wealthier kid would have attended, if he hadn't chosen the magnet instead. Such schemes are known in wonk world as "voluntary intra-district transfer programs," and in many of the cities where they exist (such as Milwaukee, Hartford, and Seattle), they are popular and vastly oversubscribed. 

The problem is that Arne Duncan's words of support for the Wake County integration plan have never been backed up by Obama administration policy. Neither of the Department of Education's two big school reform grant programs--Race to the Top and Investing in Innovation--provide any funding at all for districts that wish to pursue magnet school-driven integration as a reform tool. And make no mistake--integration is one of the most powerful school reform tools in the kit. 

Here's how we know that: At the macro level, four decades of data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress--the "nation's report card"--show that the achievement gap between white and minority students shrunk fastest during the 1970s and 1980s, the era of Court-mandated school desegregation. Between 2004 and 2009, on the other hand--our NLCB, "standards and accountability" era--the achievement gap between white children and black and Latino children did not shrink at all.

Let's see how this operates at the ground level, around the key issue of teacher quality: When another North Carolina school district, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, ended its 30-year busing program in 2000 and reverted back to racially segregated schools, the highest-performing teachers fled schools that became predominantly black and poor.

Here's another local example: In Montgomery County, Maryland, a largely affluent area that has taken care to locate several pockets of public housing within high-performing school districts, those poor students who attended the lowest-poverty schools had significantly better academic outcomes than demographically similar poor students--also living in randomly-assigned Montgomery County public housing--who attended schools that served a greater percentage of poor kids.

Given this track record, it's a disappointment that the Obama administration has not created incentives aimed at encouraging school districts to experiment with magnet schools and other means of desegregation. On the upside, there is good work being done at the Department of Housing and Urban Development on attacking residential segregation; in 2009, for example, HUD told Westchester County it could no longer build affordable housing only in towns and cities that already had high concentrations of poverty. (Doing so was always illegal, but past administrations failed to enforce the law.)

Still, what we really need is a multi-pronged approach to attacking segration: First, we need to fight poverty and economic inequality broadly. But while we do that, we also need to use every tool at our disposal--meaning both housing and education law and policy--to diversify our existing neighborhoods and schools.

Advocating for such policies does not imply that high-poverty, all-minority schools cannot be excellent. We know they can be. But on the whole, such schools are failing. One way to reverse those outcomes for kids is to get them into more diverse, higher functioning schools that are not overwhelmed by the challenges of poverty.

http://www.metafilter.com/99595/little-black-boys-and-black-girls-will-be-able-to-join-hands-with-little-white-boys-and-white-girls-as-sisters-and-brothers

Even those of us who attend diverse school (I'm a white girl attending a school that is 35% white and 46% free/reduced lunch) often find that the advanced classes are far more white+east asian and the regular classes are where the diversity actually shows. I've attended two high schools, both were the same.
posted by R a c h e l at 10:43 AM on January 17 [1 favorite]

I had the same experience R a c h e l, I was placed in honors/AP courses and they were predominantly filled with whites/asians. And as a result of this our lunches were also segregated in a sense as those of us in these courses had lunch at the same time.
posted by Fizz at 10:45 AM on January 17

You know what? White people and better-off people of all races have moved out of crumbling cities. That's an economic problem, and it's not that surprising, considering almost everyone wants to pay lip-service to King's legacy on race, but would prefer to forget that he was also an anti-war radical who stood up for the poor.
posted by drjimmy11 at 10:46 AM on January 17 [6 favorites]

We could solve all of this economic segregation by increasing the price of gas to $9/gallon.
posted by The Giant Squid at 10:52 AM on January 17 [4 favorites]

We could solve all of this economic segregation by increasing the price of gas to $9/gallon.

Umm.....
posted by Fizz at 10:57 AM on January 17

We could solve all of this economic segregation by increasing the price of gas to $9/gallon.

Umm.....
posted by Fizz at 12:57 PM on January 17 [+] [!]

$9/gallon might force people who have moved far out into the suburbs to move back closer to urban centers - where diversity seems to be more prevalent.
posted by jillithd at 11:00 AM on January 17 [2 favorites]

Woe unto any politician and/or his or her party that raises gas prices to so high a level--pricing at the national level? a federal tax that high? and what would that do to the car and oil industry, other than create further unemployment.

Basically you are saying that you want to penalize those who have earned sufficient money to move to an area where the schools systems are good so that they are not able to move?

Why not create better schools so that people might not feel an urge to move? That way you do not penalize people.
posted by Postroad at 11:08 AM on January 17 [1 favorite]

Postroad: "Woe unto any politician and/or his or her party that raises gas prices to so high a level--pricing at the national level? a federal tax that high? and what would that do to the car and oil industry, other than create further unemployment"

Well, it would be a nice payback for what GM did to all teh streetcars in the 50s.
posted by notsnot at 11:17 AM on January 17 [2 favorites]

What do you mean by "create better schools," exactly, Postroad? It's not like building a factory with state-of-the-art machinery and all of the a sudden the entire culture surrounding the school changes to pro-education.
posted by griphus at 11:19 AM on January 17 [3 favorites]

I live in the Wake County school district referenced in the article. Two years ago, I was in a play about desegregation in Raleigh (I even played Jesse Helms, among other people). It took Raleigh nearly twenty years from Brown to integrate its schools, and then only because the Supreme Court stepped in and forced them to implement a busing program. One of the ways they stalled was something called the Pearsall Plan--they drew school districts along racial neighborhood lines, so that schools were segregated in reality, though not in name.

Blows my mind that in 2011, we're going back to that bullshit.
posted by EarBucket at 11:21 AM on January 17 [3 favorites]

Up here in T.O. Canada we also have the Afrocentric school. (An old article.)
posted by Fizz at 11:25 AM on January 17

My apologies, previously posted on metafilter.
posted by Fizz at 11:29 AM on January 17

We could solve all of this economic segregation by increasing the price of gas to $9/gallon.

We could also do it by raising the price of gas to $1,000,000 a gallon, but raising prices artificially is just a bad idea. It's like saying "only rich people can afford X vaccine, so let's make it so expensive that they die too!"
posted by blue_beetle at 11:33 AM on January 17 [1 favorite]

but raising prices artificially is just a bad idea.

Or we could stop artificially lowering them.
posted by thsmchnekllsfascists at 11:35 AM on January 17 [8 favorites]

I think gas already costs as much as $9/gallon in some places. In Europe it is probably about $7/gallon right now.
posted by snofoam at 11:38 AM on January 17 [1 favorite]

I am fully aware of the past: I have been to the trolley museum in Ct, where a film is shown about it (ps: the company lost and was fine one dollar!), but the population has grown since that time, and many people live in rural areas, and not in what is here thought of as "suburbs." Do they pay 9 bucks a gallon when the closest city might be 60 miles away? And how much would you then pay in tax for a gallon if the cars became electric?

What we simply don't want to think about, esp. on Martin Luther King Day:
We refer to "smart Jews" and "smart Asians" and say that it is the culture which shapes them (since all folks we are told have about the same intelligence levels), but for Blacks and Hispanics we prefer to talk not about culture but rather racism and poverty.
ps: lest anyone accuse me of racism, my daughter-in-law is Black/Indian and her daughter, my grandchild, a super achiever with straight grades in every subject, year after year.
posted by Postroad at 11:41 AM on January 17

We refer to "smart Jews" and "smart Asians" and say that it is the culture which shapes them (since all folks we are told have about the same intelligence levels), but for Blacks and Hispanics we prefer to talk not about culture but rather racism and poverty.

Who's this "we" you're referring to?
posted by EarBucket at 11:44 AM on January 17 [1 favorite]

Poor people still have to eat and buy things. These things are delivered by trucks. If gas costs 9 dollars per gallon, then suddenly it costs a lot of money to ship food to cities. Although it would be nice if more people live in better cities a sudden increase in gas taxes won't do much other than fuck over the poor (and at 9 dollars per gallon, the middle class too).
posted by codacorolla at 11:48 AM on January 17

I think gas already costs as much as $9/gallon in some places. In Europe it is probably about $7/gallon right now

Yup, in Dublin when I was there over Xmas, gas was 1.40 EUR/L, which google calculator tells me is 7.04 USD/gal.
posted by antifuse at 11:50 AM on January 17

If gas costs 9 dollars per gallon, then suddenly it costs a lot of money to ship food to cities.

By truck maybe.

The 9 dollars per gallon figure does seem a bit steep, but it's been that way in Europe for years now and their poor still manage to eat. Imagine if the money spent on subsidizing gas production was funneled into updating our infrastructure so as to not be so reliant on cars? Or on social welfare programs?
posted by thsmchnekllsfascists at 11:53 AM on January 17 [1 favorite]

Greece is 1.50-1.60 Eu/L. Roughly $7.5-8/gallon
posted by ersatz at 11:53 AM on January 17

...but for Blacks and Hispanics we prefer to talk not about culture but rather racism and poverty.

That's because Blacks and Hispanics are a whole lot more likely to suffer the effects of institutionalized (and, all-too-occasionally, straight-up) racism and be forced back down into the projects and ghettos they are trying to escape. Live in the projects long enough where no one, schooling or not, can get out, and you stop believing that school matters at all when, in fact, it's one of the few things that is a way out.

ps: lest anyone accuse me of racism, my daughter-in-law is Black/Indian and her daughter, my grandchild, a super achiever with straight grades in every subject, year after year.

Seriously? Are we still doing this "I'm not racist, I have a black friend" bullshit?
posted by griphus at 11:54 AM on January 17

I, too, believe that gas prices is what Dr. King was really talking about. How we have failed him.
posted by jabberjaw at 11:56 AM on January 17 [5 favorites]

Imagine if the money spent on subsidizing gas production was funneled into updating our infrastructure so as to not be so reliant on cars? Or on social welfare programs?

Should have read: imagine if the money spent on subsidizing gas production was funneled into updating our infrastructure or spent on social welfare programs.
posted by thsmchnekllsfascists at 11:56 AM on January 17

$9/gallon might force people who have moved far out into the suburbs to move back closer to urban centers - where diversity seems to be more prevalent.

Gentrification creates the same situation in exchanged places. Europe has slums, too.
posted by a robot made out of meat at 11:59 AM on January 17

$9/gallon might force people who have moved far out into the suburbs to move back closer to urban centers - where diversity seems to be more prevalent.

But if you're jacking up gas prices to encourage the affluent to move into the cities, you'll drive up demand for urban property, which may displace low-income people -- possibly to those now-abandoned suburbs.
posted by Gelatin at 12:04 PM on January 17