Segregated Schools

Educational Apartheid in Post-Civil Rights America

Paul Street

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136080661
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

Fifty years after the US Supreme Court ruled that "separate but equal" was "inherently unequal, " Paul Street argues that little progress has been made to meaningful reform America's schools. In fact, Street considers the racial make-up of today's schools as a state of de facto apartheid. With an eye to historical development of segregated education, Street examines the current state of school funding and investigates disparities in teacher quality, teacher stability, curriculum, classroom supplies, faculties, student-teacher ratios, teacher' expectations for students and students' expectations for themselves. Books in the series offer short, polemic takes on hot topics in education, providing a basic entry point into contemporary issues for courses and general; readers.

1

---

STILL AND INCREASINGLY SEPARATE

Different races aren't getting to see what each race is about. When they go into the real world, they don't know how to interact with each other.

—Jarod Arvitt, Greenfield, Mississippi, 2003¹

Something is different about the children gazing out of the windows of the yellow school buses lumbering up Selwyn Elementary School's driveway: most of the blackfaces are gone.

—Education Week, 2004²

Affirmative action may well be the only tool left with the potential to ameliorate the negative effects of a college applicant's prior twelve years of segregated schooling. Sit in classrooms, eat in lunchrooms, romp in playgrounds and wander the hallways in randomly selected public schools: it's right here in the nation's increasingly segregated and astonishingly unequal schools where one finds the most convincing case for keeping affirmative action intact. For more and more high school students, a college campus like Michigan's would provide their first chance to interact, learn, work, even just walk around in a multiracial environment that approximates the American society they'll soon join.

—Gary Orfield and Susan Eaton, 2003³

STILL SEPARATE

Chicago 2004

On the morning of Monday, May 10, 2004, I awoke to pick up the prestigious keynote speaker for a Chicago conference I had been directed to organize on the lessons and legacy of the Brown v. Board of Education decision. The gathering's purpose was to gauge how to best understand and to act upon the lessons of Brown and its aftermath for the task of providing loday's children of color wilh equal educational opportunily. A number of leading researchers and academics and two key local policymakers were scheduled to appear.

As I rushed lo The downlown holel where my speaker was slaying, children in Chicago and that cily's broader melropoli-lan area—home lo 265 local jurisdiclions and more than 200 local school districts—were making their way to schools whose racial composition mocked the spirit of Brown and the great civil rights movement that Brown helped spark. Nearly fifty years to the day after the highest court in the land ruled that “separate” was “unequal” and thirty-eight years after Martin Luther King, Jr. led giant demonstrationsagainstschool segrcga-tion in Chicago, the black-while school “segregation index” for the Chicago metropolitan area was 84. This meanl lhal 84 percent of the black children in the six-county Chicago region would have to switch schools for African American children lo be evenly distributed throughout the area's schools.

The black school “isolation index” in the metropolitan area was 78, meaning that the average black public school student attended a school that was 78 percent black. According lo quantitative segregation analysts' “exposure index,” the average black public school student in the Chicago area attended a school that was just 6 percent white and 1.4 percent Asian. Black students were considerably more segregated within the metropolitan area's public schools than any other racial or ethnic group.

In part, these numbers reflected a stark division between predominantly white suburban schools and very predominantly black and minority central city public schools. Of the 211,999 black children enrolled in public schools in the metropolitan area in 2000,156, 536 (74 percent) attended the Chicago Public Schools (GPS). Of the city's 438,589 public school students in 2002, just 40,350 (9 percent) were white. As Brown's anniversary approached, the city's public school authorities had been arguing for some time that the CPS no longer captured enough white students to justify the federal desegregation consent decree it had been operating under for more than two decades.

Within Chicago, the black-white segregation index was 88 percent and the average black public school student attended a school that was 86 percent black. Pifty-four percent of black Chicago public school students attended schools that did not possess a single while student. Two hundred and seventy-four schools, equaling nearly half (47 percent) of the city's 579 public elementary and high schools (excluding the small number for which race data are unavailable) were 90 percent or more African American and 173 of those schools—30 percent of all public schools in the city—were 100 percent black. Just 112 or 19 percent of the city's public schools were technically “integrated” (15–70 percent white) and just 57 (1(1 percent) were a third or more white. More than half (51 percent) of the city's schools were “predominantly black” by the city's definition (set by the aforementioned desegregation decree) of 70 percenl and above.⁴

Meanwhile, [he average suburban Chicago area while student attended a school that was 86 percenl while and just 5 percenl black (compared to 15 percent in the central city). Three of every four black schoolchildren in the Chicago area suburbs would have had to switch schools to be evenly distributed throughout the suburban public schools. Only two of the area's top 20 suburban African American school districts (in terms of absolute numbers) were shared with the top 20 white school districts.

The metropolitan area's school segregation measures would have been higher if private school enrollment were included. In 2000, less than half (46.36 percenl) of Chicago's school-age while children attended the city's public schools, compared to 88 percenl of their black counterparts and 85 percent of ihe city's Latino children.⁵

Public School Segregation at the National Level

The Chicago metropolitan area is one of the most racially segregated urban regions in the United States, but its numbers arc hardly off the national school segregation charts. As Leonard Steinhorn and Barbara Diggs-Brown note in their book By the Color of Our Skin: The Illusions of Integration and the Reality of Race, “just as our neighborhoods are separated by race, so loo are our schools. Millions of black children allend schools wilh few or no whites. Millions more while children allend schools wilh few or no blacks. Whites rarely constitute more lhan 15 percenl of the students in our nation's largest urban school districts, and most of the time they allend predominantly white schools in their own corner of the city.”⁶

Of 1.1 million children attending the New York City public schools in 2004, just 15 percent were white. Thirty-two percent of the city's sludenls were black and 40 percenl were Latino. Ihe “population of many [New York Cily] schools,” noted Gail Robinson on the day of Brown's fiftieth anniversary, was “even more skewed than the student population as a whole.” Sixty percent of all black sludenls in New York Cily allended schools that were at least 90 percent black.⁷

The average U.S. white public school student in 1999–2000 attended a school that was nearly four-fifths (78 percent) white, less than one-tenth (9 percent) black, and just 8 percent Hispanic. By contrast, the average African American student's school was 57 percent black. Latino kids were heavily concentrated in majority Latino schools. The nation's public schools were 62 percenl while, but just more than a fourth (28 percenl) of the average black sludenls schoolmales were while. The national black-white school segregation index was quite high at 65.⁸

According to the Harvard Civil Rights Project in 2003, one-sixth of the United Slates' black public school sludenls attend virtually all nonwhile schools. Jusl one seventh of the while students attend “multiracial” schools, defined as those with a minority enrollment of 10 percent or higher.⁹ By the calculations of leading desegregation researcher Charles Clotfelter, more than a third (37.4 percent) of the nation's black students in 2000 attended schools that were 90 to 100 percent nonwhite in 2000 and nearly three-fourths (72 percent) attended schools that were at least 50 percenl nonwhile. In the Northeast and Midwest, the share of black sludenls in 90–100 percenl minority schools was 51 and 46 percenl, respectively.¹⁰

Throughout the nation, blacks are disproportionately concentrated and often provide the majority element in big cily school districts lhal are surrounded by predominantly while suburban communities and school districts. Nearly one-third (32 percent) of the nation's black and Hispanic public school students attend what the Department of Education designates a “large city” (a central city with a population of 400,000 or more) school district, whereas just 6 percent of all while students in the United States are enrolled in such districts. More than half (51 percent) of the nation's black public school students are concentrated in large or mid-size cities; the comparable statistic for while students is 17 percent.¹¹

By 1998, Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown report that less than 4,000 white students remained in the Atlanta public schools. In Atlanta, as throughout big-city America, there are very few white kids left to integrate with. Nationally, black students arc three times as likely as whites to attend urban school systems, which happen, contrary to the common perception, to be considerably more segregated than their rural counterparts. The lion's share of relevant racial school segregalion takes places between and not within school districts, reflecting division between the nation's “chocolate cities and vanilla suburbs” and— of rising significance during the last two decades—between black suburbs and white suburbs.¹²

Private Schools and the “Dual System of De Facto Segregation”

Meanwhile, there is considerable race segregation between disproportionately minority public schools and disproportionately white private schools. In “community after community,” Steinhorn and Diggs-Brown note, “the story is the same: blacks make up a significantly larger proportion of [public, P.S.] school children than their percentage of the school-age population.” Large numbers of whiles leave the public school system for private schools “when the black student population inches above the token.”¹³

The racialized public-privale split is sharply evident in the flatlands of the Mississippi Delta. In 2000, private schools enrolled more than half of all white students in forty-one non-metropolitan deep Southern counties concentrated in Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia; the very same areas where “Jim Crow” segregalion had been enforced with special rigidity prior to the Brown decision. In one such jurisdiction, Mississippi's Washington County, blacks made up 65 percent of total populalion but whites comprised 85 percenl of private school enrollment and just 13 percenl of the public schoolchildren. Thanks to a “dual system of de facto segregalion,” the Associated Press (AP) reported in the spring of 2003, “the era of [school] segregation never really ended” in the Delta.

A perfect example was found in Greenville, Mississippi, home to three very predominantly white private school academies. At one such academy, the AP found, “357 children ...