Last time I read Kozol, I felt powerless and sad.
This time, I'm feeling angry--like I have to do something.
I've thought about the inequities in education in this country quite a bit. In the past, my response has been "we need to make all schools good schools."
Kozol has me realizing that this goal--and the goal of many other people in this nation--is actually a concession speech, a confession that integration is dead. The goal of "let's make all schools good schools" is, at its heart, a drive to live up to the promise of Plessy vs. Ferguson.
Kozol's in-your-face presentation of our still-segregated schools has me thinking that this country ought to give Brown vs. Board of Ed a try first.
I'm also convinced that this is about race, not about class. Even within cities, white parents have an alarming tendency to carve out city schools that are de facto white oases.
Honestly--go to the nearest big city school and look at the faces. Then head to the suburbs and look at the faces. Then tell me--tell the Little Rock Nine--tell Rosa Parks that we've done enough.
Of course, my school is guilty of this. It's affluent, which means it's overwhelmingly white. Just like my high school was, and my wife's, and most white people's.
And that's the point. We don't meet each other. We've abandoned the dream of integration, and I can't for the life of me figure out why.
I have to do something.
I might start with a note to my elected representatives, simply asking "Have you or any of your staff read The Shame of a Nation? What can you do to help make Brown vs. Board of Ed a reality?"
After that...
Well, what about my own kids? The description Kozol gives of inner-city schools is so bleak and sad that I don't think anyone should have to endure it. Throwing my kids into these dream-crushing factories won't aid in the cause.
We need to integrate. We can't live as "us" and "them" anymore.
Once we integrate, there is no them. Only us.
Kozol says it'll take a new movement to fix our nation's apartheid. He refers to "teachers marching in the streets."
For the first time, I really want to be there. I want every kid in this country to have as good an education as suburban kids get. I want every school to be safe, exciting, and committed to serving every student. I want kids of all races and classes to have the honest-to-God equal shot that our education is supposed to give--and I want them to have it together.
I do not believe that a five-year-old in Scarsdale is more deserving of good kindergarten than a five-year-old in the South Bronx.
But our nation believes that some of its children are more important than others, and spends its money accordingly. (Kozol's numbers are terrifying...some suburban districts spend as much as twice as much per child as some urban districts.)
And the kids we find more important tend to have skin similar to my color. The kids we find less important tend to have darker skin.
This must stop.
I've got my marching shoes on. I just need some friends and someone smarter than me with a plan of where to walk.
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16 comments:
I'm not smarter than you, and I don't have a plan. But I've heard of two things which seem like pretty good ideas to me, and I'd like to know what you think.
1) Magnet schools in poor neighborhoods. There has to be a reason to send your kid out of your neighborhood for schooling. Since the affluent parents are going to have the money to throw at their local schools, let's make a special committment to put advanced programs where they can't afford them. Then throw the doors open, and convince people from the outside that they want to come in.
2) If we go that far, why not charters? I won't go as far as the V-word, but publicly-supervised privately-run schools don't seem that far from a Magnet to me.
Or am I still insufficiently radical?
I was supposed to be bussed when I was in the 3rd grade. I was living in Southern California in "The Valley." My parents saw no good reason to bus me 60+ minutes each way just to even out the racial distribution at each school. We ended up moving to a small community that had its own school district and was 98% white.
While my school education may have been better, I don't know if my social education was complete. Granted, I've been able to make friends across racial lines due to college, traveling, living in different cities, etc. When I see some of my classmates, I can see they haven't.
I don't know what the answer is, but every child deserves a good education. That's one of the building stones of a successful life.
Joe--
Kozol, pages 277-279. In Seattle, they opened a beautiful new school called Center Academy right in the Seattle Center. It wound up being 83% White (the district is 40% White).
You're arguing "if you build it, they will come." I'm not sure this is true, first of all. The suburban/city differences are far steeper than differences within the city, and those are the inequalities that we need to fix up. I firmly believe that even if city schools start to get better, suburban parents will throw their money into continuing the quality gap. In this nation, we don't want a good education for all children--we want our kids to have a better education than "their" kids do. That's at the heart of it.
Plus, there's a mindset behind your first plan that troubles me. We shouldn't have to beg rich parents to live up to Brown. Not that I blame them--I wouldn't send my kids to the schools Kozol describes either. We simply need to honor our civil rights forefathers and foremothers by actually integrating.
As for charter schools or any form of choice, remember that it's our job to teach ALL kids at quality integrated schools. Not just the ones with parents who care. It's our job to teach them all. Therefore, I'm afraid both of your plans actually have a chance of exacerbating the problem rather than fixing it.
With true integration, we'd suddenly all be in the same boat--and when that happened, watch while all schools get better.
I think the first thing that needs to be done is bring the city schools up to the same (or at least CLOSER) level to the suburban schools. Then some integration may come more naturally or easily.
Not quite sure how to do that, though. Maybe we could win Mega Millions this weekend, and use the funds to start that process?
Like Joe, I'm not smarter than you nor do I have a plan. But I have an query (don't I always?):
Is education the best place to continue the process of integration? Perhaps the reason why Brown hasn't succeeded is because of the "better education for my kid" attitude that you mention. Don't we need to have better integrated communities first? Perhaps those communities will pave the way to better integrated schools.
Perhaps my questions are moot. Perhaps I have no idea what I am talking about. (Perhaps??)
Speaking for myself, the only thing holding me back from living in D.C. (besides the whole lack of representation thingy) is the quality of D.C. public schools. So God knows I'm no better than any other white person out there.
But I'll offer my shoeleather up for the cause. Like you, I believe that good education can do great things for many people. And I think the goals of Brown are still very much in reach. We just need a way to get there.
Greaat piece on NPR the other day (sorry, I don't remember the show) about a program that helped inner city Black families move to the 'burbs. The program not only heped with the cost of housing, but offered pre and post move counseling to the families as they dealt with the changes. Families had been carefully pre-screened to determine that they were prepared for the challenges ahead. Kids whose families made this move were disproportionately more likely to complete college and take on professional jobs, etc. The program was reasonably inexpensive and will probably be cut soon, despite its success.
I think that there's a certain amount of self-segregation on both sides. The Wall Street Journal ran a piece a few years ago on kids who had vs to go elsewhere for school. It claimed that many who did then returned to their old schools because they missed their friends and felt out of place.
TRP:
Thanks for a pretty realistic critique of magnets/charters. I still think there's ore in that vein, but I see your point.
Let me float another idea, then. With all the emphasis on measureables, what if we tie every school to one which is its demographic opposite? All your statistics are merged; if they sink, you sink. Create an incentive to worry about someone else's kid.
Swankette--
Yes, all schools should be good schools, and that might be the best we can do without major revolutionary change in the system. But I maintain that the goal of "let's make city and suburban schools equal" is fighting to live the dream of Plessy. It's polishing up the turd of segregation.
Spoon--
Ah, you've hit the heart of it. On the one hand, you say "first we need integrated communities to get integrated schools." Then, you say "I don't want to move to DC because it's schools aren't good enough." (I'm not pointing a finger at you...quality of schools will be a huge factor in where Swankette and I buy a house as well.) So that indicates that quality of schools will help integration. My take--schools will never get better while segregated. We integrate, schools get better.
Lemming--Yes, there's self-selection. And that's a bad thing. We're self-selecting our way out of Brown and into Plessy. If we're going to cite Brown, Little Rock, and Rosa Parks as important landmarks in our society, we can't let segregation continue as it is.
Also, yes, kids are understandably bummed to lose their friends. But if you integrate starting from kindergarten, they'd be upset to segregate for the same reasons...their friends would be in their integrated school.
Joe--LOVE the idea! It eliminates the us/them problem. Maybe see if there can be busing between the schools, sharing of faculty and ideas...awesome.
Have you read about the economic-based integration of schools in Raleigh? It sure seems to work. Yes, parents of both races are bummed about busing. But the increased test scores for all kids, especially minority kids, trump those concerns big time.
Link to that: http://www.detnews.com/2005/schools/0509/30/A10-332310.htm
Joe and TRP:
Even if my child's school was tied to its demographic opposite (and how, exactly, do you determine THAT?), it still doesn't give me, as an individual parent, any more reason to care about the test scores of the other kids in the class. Much as I don't care presently about the test scores about the other (white) kids in my kids' class. All that pairing does is pull every school to a undifferentiated middle.
It also doesn't remove the us/them problem -- there will always be a "them", if not a racial "them" or a demographic "them", then an achievement "them".
Hugh--
I'm troubled that you don't care about your kids' classmates' achievement level. If we care about the future at all, aren't we supposed to be providing education for everyone?
If we have one country, then we can't have a "them." Education in this country isn't just for sharp kids (like yours) with parents who care (like you). It has to be for all, and it has to be equitable.
Joe's plan is in its infancy, and I'll admit that it has kinks and may simply not work. But I refuse to defend parents' right to not care about their neighbors in a matter as essential as this one, or to simply say "this can't change."
I have a nephew who is autistic. One of his brothers is sharp but has had some reading troubles. The other is gifted--through the roof--with some issues applying himself. Their test scores are low (like, not even possible to test him), mid-high, and high. Which of these boys I love is the "achievement us"? Which is the "achievement them"? Which should we educate, and which sell down the river? It's a false choice. We must educate all. We must care about all, not just the false "us." As an educator, that's my job...but I argue it's our job as a society as well. We have to educate everyone of every color at an equally high level, not just the kids we love. Parents should look out for their kids, but not -only- their kids, and not at the expense of "other" kids. That's the status quo, and I'm ready to march to change it.
I've been fascinated by the conversation, and don't really have any answers to the problem at hand, but I would like to raise the idea that TRP's original statement that the problem is, at heart, about race and not class is wrong. I'm actually somewhat surprised that Joe didn't bring it up - we live in an area with notoriously bad schools. Wiggin Street School (elementary school) has teachers teaching in the halls. Neither of us is at all convinced that we would want a kid going to Mt. Vernon high school or East Knox because the school districts are so underfunded and ill-equipped.
The high school I would have gone to (had my folks not sent me to private school) was fairly wretched, too. It might not have been terribly bad compared to some schools now (I only remember one gun incident, for instance), but it was a high school designed for a group of kids who all assumed from birth that, best case scenario, they would go on to work in the local Ford plant as line workers. More likely nothing that fancy. When they got students who were actually considering stuff like college, the teachers and administrators didn't have the first clue what to do with them.
All the schools I have been talking about were/are almost entirely white. CHS in the early 1980s was 100% white, and according to the last census the entire non-white population of Mount Vernon comes to 2.9%. Saying that bad schools are a race issue rather than a class issue over-simplifies the problem. I think you could argue that missing that point is a large part of the reason democrats cannot win in poor rural areas like Knox County. They only focus on poverty when it is a racial issue.
I can't do a damn thing a bout my neighnors' kids' scores. I can give them books and encourage reading and try to be the "cool yet wacky" PhD role model next door. If thet don't see their parents reading to reinforce my example, what can I do? Parental responsibility plays a role, and you''re ignoring that.
Alison--
I totally agree, and your point about the Democratic party is a fair one. But Brown vs. Board of Ed is a racial decision, and it's not being enforced in this country. Fixing that would fix a good batch of the issues.
Lemming--
It's not be your job to educate others' kids, sure. But it's our job as a society to see to it that every child--even the ones whose parents don't read to them--have a legitimate shot at a good education.
Let's set aside the next-door-neighbors for a moment and talk about the people in the schools Kozol describes. When we take a group of people and give them inferior health care, no preschool, often no kindergarten, then put them in a falling-down building with no heat or air conditioning, windows that won't open, asbestos, an unhealthy neighborhood with a high asthma rate, an unqualified teacher (or series of subs), a lack of books, desks, and rooms, no quiet place to do homework, and then that kid doesn't perform, I'm not willing to say bad parenting is to blame for the kids' lower achievement levels.
It's possible that your neighbors are doing a bad job of raising their kids. But all children--not just yours--need to be educated if our democracy is to be worth anything. So while I don't think you can or should take over parenting for everyone (which I think was your point), I'm justifiably troubled by the statement "I don't care about my neighbors' kids success at school." Our democracy is at stake, and I don't think we as a society can just wash our hands of all children's education besides our own (or the narrow "us").
I realize that Brown v. Board is a racial decision. I'm just not sure it means what you are suggesting it means. If you are actually saying that each school must be racially representative of some larger chunk of society (and that's what it sounds like from here), you're going to need to explain to me how bussing a bunch of black kids from a crappy all-black school in Columbus an hour+ up to this-here crappy all-white school is going to improve the lot of anybody involved.
Moreover, someone needs to make the call as to *what* larger chunk of society we're trying to mirror in the racial makeup of the schools. The neighborhood the school is in? We have that now. The county? Wouldn't change either the quality or racial makeup of any of the schools around here. The state? The country? How far are you willing to send kids so that the racial makeup of each school is representative of our entire population?
I guess I'll go with county.
I'd like to go statewide for spending and quality of schools, however. A kid in Centerburg isn't worth less than a kid in Rocky River. Requiring equitable spending and finding a way to even out the playing field would do more to make us care about our fellow man than anything else would.
I'm so late to this conversation it's painful, but there are some really great thoughts and tensions in all of this.
First, Raleigh's right to integrate by class rather than race. Most experiments that simply factor race in end up "skimming" many of the best students out of urban schools and placing them in suburban schools. Suburban schools get the warm fuzzies, urban schools still get the shaft. Integrating by class not only brings the white middle class back into the fight for public education, but the black and Latino middle class, which is absolutely essentialy, esp. as demographics change.
Second, Allison's comments about Wiggin Street point out a basic need outlined so powerfully in Kozol's work: Nothing happens if you don't have the physical space to make it happen. Brown happened because middle class black parents (and their kids!) couldn't put up with the indignity of learning in shanties. Parents need to organize and Congress needs to pass a bill that requires school districts to meet criteria for physical space and then fully fund districts' efforts to do so.
And we absolutely have to care about the education of every single kid. For me, that's just a moral issue connected to my deep desire to eliminate poverty. Can't get a good education? You're much more likely to be poor.
But let's talk about self-interest for a moment: Ultimately, Sarah will learn as much from her peers as she will from her teachers. That's less true early on, more true as she gets to high school, and in College? Forget about it. I learned more from all of you people than most of the folks with PhD's! So we want our kids in classrooms with the best and the brightest
Even if that weren't true, what IS true is that kids that don't get a good education sometimes grow up to be adults who don't make it in an economy that doesn't work for them. There are almost no high-wage, low-skilled jobs left in the United States. There are lots of people working in the service industry also receiving massive public subsidies that cost every single tax payer. Now, until we have a better system in place, that can't change. People, in my worldview, have a right to housing, heatlh care, education, food and clothing and living wage work. But we meet everyones' economic self interests when everyone's well educated.
Okay, now my own thought: We need a really serious movement on pre-Kindergarten education. So much demonstrates that investments in kids' lives at this stage are the strongest form of economic development we can engage in. The return for $1 invested is $8. I can't make the connection to Kozol's work just now, but if we fully funded early childhood education (including day care assistance...) it'd start to reverse educational outcomes in a positive way for the very kids Brown was meant to serve.
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