It’s probably not a surprise to you, but here’s some news: Americans have turned our back on school integration.
Actually, we turned our back on it a long time ago. This month’s Supreme Court decision on affirmative action policies in Michigan is just the latest evidence.
Affirmative action has helped innumerable minority students get a college education. And universities that have abandoned affirmative action have seen a decline in minority enrollment.
Universities have argued, correctly, that in addition to helping minority students, the diversity that affirmative action provides serves a broader public interest. But much of the country, including the Supreme Court’s majority, has decided that we don’t need affirmative action any more. And so colleges and universities are becoming more segregated, mimicking what has already happened in the lower grades.
And there, the situation is unconscionable. Across the nation, segregated school districts are the norm. Particularly in metropolitan areas like Rochester, most students in suburban schools are white, and children in urban schools are predominantly African-American and Hispanic. And most of them are poor.
The result: hundreds of thousands of African-American and Hispanic children are getting a very limited education, which will result in a severely limited future. That’s a clear violation of their rights. And it spells big trouble for the United States.
There is abundant evidence that it isn’t the schools or the teachers or the principals that are the problem. It’s concentrated poverty, which creates challenges that are almost impossible for schools to overcome. To accept that evidence, though, would mean integrating our schools, and we’re not about to do that. And so across the country, state governments, urban school districts, mayors, charter school operators, and business and civic leaders are cheering on a host of experiments.
Standardized tests, tougher standards, public school choice, charter schools, longer school days…. By god, we’ll prove that we can give children a good education without integrating the schools. And off we run after the latest trend.
The big education news a few weeks ago: New York State has the most segregated schools in the entire country. And who in New York has some of the most-segregated schools?
Yes, indeed: Rochester, whose habitually beleaguered school district has followed every conceivable trend. And whose graduation rates, test scores, poverty rate, and racial segregation have gotten worse and worse.
There are individual success stories, to be sure. Some Rochester children excel. Some of our multiple experiments – in traditional public schools and in charters – will succeed.
But those examples will remain in the minority. There is indisputable evidence that nothing will change on a broad scale until we break up the concentration of poverty in the schools children attend.
Right now, every child attending a traditional Rochester public school attends a school where most children are poor. Every single one.
The lowest poverty rate among the elementary schools is at School 23 in the Park Avenue area. That’s a mostly affluent, mostly white neighborhood. But School 23’s student population is 34 percent white, and 62 percent poor. The poverty rate in most Rochester elementary schools is in the 80’s or 90’s – and at School 9 on North Clinton Avenue, the rate is a pure 100 percent.
Among the high schools, the lowest-poverty schools are School of the Arts (66 percent poverty) and Wilson Magnet (79 percent). All the others are in the 80’s and 90’s, with Monroe at the top (94).
If you believe that concentrated poverty doesn’t doom a school district and its children, I guess you figure statistics like that are irrelevant. But if you believe that to give Rochester’s children the education they deserve, we have to break up the concentration of poverty, it’s hard to have any hope.
Those numbers are hard facts. Giving all Rochester children a good education can’t be done within the city alone. We’ll have to integrate city and suburban students. And almost nobody is willing to do that.
School integration, after all, was a remedy for the 1950’s.
In the South.
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 6, 2014.
Do disadvantaged families really want to see their children bused all over the county in order to assuage liberal editorial writers’ white guilt?
Abolish the government school monopoly and let the families who know and love a child decide for themselves how to educate her and where to send her to school. As the editorial says, absolutely every other conceivable option has been tried, and the results only get worse.
I do believe there is a way to return our schools buildings to healthy socioeconomic diversity. The solution must be local. The first step requires the community clearly understands how we got here. Read more at http://www.thinkingaboutmomming.com/2014/0…
This position is fundamentally flawed. The lack of integration is not the reason the system is not working. To your point, poverty (and the struggles it presents) are one of the key reasons for our school systems failure. Student success requires parental involvement, emphasis on the importance of education, and the resources to fully support their child’s participation. This problem starts at the elementary level. If you were exposed to the daily happenings at a city elementary school, you would see that the lack of parental ability (or desire) to support their child’s education is a massive hurdle to success. Perpetual poverty is certainly a large contributor to this issue. However, parents inability to support their children’s education does not improve simply because we bus the kids off to the suburbs. I am quite confident that a parent who can’t get their child on the bus to the city school will also struggle to get their child on a bus to the suburbs. The current system of school choice offers a parallel. Parents already have the option to send their children to “better, more affluent” neighborhoods to get a better education. This clearly has not helped and you only help make my point with school 23. A mostly white affluent neighborhood (i.e. think suburbs) and the system still fails. Until we enable the support system that these children need create an environment for success, we will continue to fail. This will take ground root actions to turn around. Our best chance of success is to empower parents to improve their local, neighborhood school. If parents care, schools improve and then neighborhoods improve. We can’t just bus these kids away and expect the problem to fix itself.
@b.d.g.: Sorry for making a second post but I felt the need to respond to your post. Which government school monopoly are you speaking of? Today, there are public schools (govt monopoly?), private schools (parochial and non-parochial), charter schools, and home schooling. All are acceptable options to prepare a children for success and to continue with a college education, if desired. I am not sure I see a monopoly here and parents certainly already have a choice. Unfortunately, there are many reasons it is hard, and sometimes impossible, for a parent to to take advantage of these choices. These are the issues we need to address. However, to blame a non-existent government monopoly and cry for choices that already exist seems a little underwhelming. I am a supporter of small government, individual freedom, and accountability. However to ignore the basic facts make overly simplistic arguments will not solve the real problem.
Interested readers might want to refer to the study of Montgomery County, Maryland Schools for proof that breaking up concentrated poverty does indeed work.
Select families move to an affluent district. Housing subsidies are part of the program.
The better the school the students were relocated to, the better the transplanted students did.
This solution was found superior to not moving families and just spending more money.
Make Parents responsible for their Children. The Majority of the RCSD students have no Parental Control as determined by their behavior. Manners Respect and the difference between right and wrong are not being taught or enforced by the Parents of the children we are trying to educate. We need to segregate students who are unruly and spoil the RCSD for others. Special internment facilities were intensive education can be instilled on the Students who are not Educational because of faulty Parents. Remove the Parent out of the equation orif they chose accept a role in thier childrens education. Simple huh? If you cannot speak proper English how can you prepare your child to learn? If you do not teach your child manners then how are they going to be responsible citizens? Stop coddling the Parents. Hold them responsible for their failure as Parents. Why should we tolerate a segment of Society that refuses to be apart of our collective society and doesn’t want to make any effort to improve themselves.