70 years after Brown vs. Board of Education, we've lost desegregation gains | Opinion
This week marks the 70th anniversary of the Brown vs. Board of Education decision, and this country will no doubt want to pat itself on the back.
It shouldn’t. It can’t.
In a land of better intentions, this day might be one of celebration: a time to recognize strides made, goals achieved. Instead, today is a time of mourning. A time to acknowledge that we’ve quietly and insidiously resegregated our schools. A time to acknowledge that as a country, we’ve never wanted to integrate them in the first place.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, our public schools are now as segregated as they were in the time of Brown; 60% of Black and Latino students now attend schools that are composed of at least 75% students of color and 48% of white students attend schools that are at least 75% white. Schools are again separate and ferociously unequal: A report by Edbuild tells us that predominantly nonwhite schools receive a whopping $23 billion less in funding than predominantly white schools. My generation of parents has installed and perpetuated more school segregation than the generation of parents who came before us.
The end of integration
We reached peak integration in 1988, the year I graduated high school. My neighbor drove to school in a Porsche, but I had friends who lived in Section 8 housing. We had Black kids and white kids in our high school, Latinos and Asians, Future Farmers of America members who mucked stalls every morning and kids whose parents were engineers.
We broadened our perspectives alongside one another, learning far beyond academics. Most importantly, no one in my high school thought they’d achieve more or less in life simply by dint of their attending our school versus a neighboring school. When I matriculated at Harvard in the fall of ’88, I found myself prepared for the world in a way many of my college peers weren’t: I’d learned how to relate to everyone, even when they couldn’t relate to me.
The decline in school integration since 1988 has been steep.
My high school experience stands in stark contrast to my children’s school experiences. They’ve been the only Black students in their classes too many times to count, and one of them has twice been the Only Lonely in her entire school. The other, for a time, attended an urban high school that was 99% Black.
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History in reverse
As a school board member in both Ann Arbor and Bloomington, Indiana, I’ve had a front row seat for district policies that not only didn't stop the tide towards public school resegregation, but often exacerbated it.
My father lives in Louisville, a city that recently watched its school board give up on school integration after 50 years of fighting lawsuits from Nice White Parents, such as this one, which claimed that diversity “isn’t a compelling state interest.” My father’s commentary: “We are now watching history go backwards.”
Moreover, research shows that school segregation, in our two-click Zillow world, drives residential segregation, which drives everything from environmental racism to health care disparity to the perpetuation of food deserts. But if we aren’t morally concerned, then we can be selfishly concerned. When children are never called upon to broaden their cultural competency, we can be assured that they are, tragically, missing out on a wonderful expansion of the mind.
We can choose good education policy
As an academic, I’ve moved quite a bit. I've stepped down from board positions in Ann Arbor and Bloomington with great sadness, because the sacred work of building our children’s schools is never done. All over this country, in the absence of district design that produces more diverse student bodies, parents continue to make choices that increase school segregation. I’ve appreciated, over the years, the camaraderie of those who have shared my vision of making progress towards excellence through equity, particularly those who understand that desegregating our schools in the only way forward.
One model of particularly effective district design comes from the board of the Jefferson County Public Schools in Louisville, where, in the previous decade, parents received a default list of schools to choose from, pre-populated based on an algorithm that took into account school quality, diversity and travel distance. Parents could then opt into diversity or not, based on the list. Opting into diversity could, for instance, garner one’s child a spot at Chenoweth Elementary, which boasted some of the highest test scores in the district and the most diversity of any elementary school. That model depended on some parents valuing diversity as much as they valued anything else, but so many parents did, making this model effective.
School boards can also opt to reintegrating schools by voting not to accept policies such as Michigan’s schools of choice, a program which offers “school choice” as some kind of bad gravy atop the meatloaf of regular school segregation.
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Schools of choice allow parents to transfer their children from lower-performing districts to districts parents perceive as better resourced, offering those districts a chance to increase their revenue by poaching students from neighboring districts.
The program so often makes winners out of districts that were already winning, on the backs of taxpaying parents in the district of origin — as it does in the Ann Arbor Public Schools, which absorbs a not insignificant number of students from the neighboring Ypsilanti Community Schools. According to the Brookings Institute, among other research bodies, the existence of such policies directly correlates to racial imbalance in schools, and the need to end them is urgent.
Yet another tool in the box of school boards is to propose mergers that would create socioeconomic balance. The school board I served on in Bloomington has done just that, voting to create a K-2 population in one socioeconomically imbalanced school and a 3-6 population in another, building a more balanced population in both buildings.
It takes courage
What’s missing, then, in delivering resegregation, is not the way. We have examples of so many ways. But creating equity requires structural and systematic change. It requires our remaining steadfast in the face of segregationist opposition. And that requires courage, because parents who don’t support school integration aren’t short on resolve.
Ahead of the vote to merge the two Bloomington schools, the public commentary lasted hours; the comments in parent Facebook groups are ongoing, even though the groups were all made private. “Why is having all the people in poverty at the same school a bad thing?” asked one anonymous poster. Another bemoaned the decrease in his home value that would surely follow.
But Board President April Hennessey, whose decision has been driven by comprehensive data, isn't budging. “We may have a board that doesn’t agree on everything,” she told me, “but we unanimously agree this is overdue. Seeing a united front has made people accept that something will have to happen.”
It will take more boards like hers, and more parents who want to broaden their children’s lives and see all of our children educated, in order to turn the tide on the wreckage that my generation of parents has wrought.
And here’s one segment of the population who might be the most emotionally vested of all: Those of us who integrated schools in the first place. Those of us whose houses were firebombed in Boston because we dared attend a white school. Those of us who had bottles and rocks thrown at us in Arkansas, as a crowd of white parents jeered. Those of us who, with our parents, braved the murderous threats of a nation that hadn’t yet figured out how to more legally and sneakily resegregate the nation’s schools. A lot of us are still alive.
One of them is me.
As a four-year-old entering kindergarten in the late seventies, I was the only Black student in my entire k-8 school. I lived the Ruby Bridges experience, without the benefit of having Robert Coles as therapist; the years I spent at that school still haunt my adult life. I was routinely called the n-word. Told that no one could hold my hand during circle time because my color might “wear off” on their hands. Mistreated by teachers. And told, by classmates, that their parents had forbidden them from playing with me at recess.
I was just one child living that particular American nightmare, but the stakes for all of our children are so high.
The Latin E. pluribus unum was adopted as our national motto in 1776. We’ve never quite gotten to “Out of many, one.” But in choosing to exacerbate public school segregation on a grand, systemic level, the parents of my generation are trying to take us back a few steps even farther than that.
Jacinda Townsend has served as a public school board member for both the Monroe County (Indiana) Community Schools Corporation and the Ann Arbor (Michigan) Public Schools. She is a faculty member at Brown University, and author of the novels Trigger Warning, Mother Country, and Saint Monkey. You can learn more about her at jacindatownsend.com. Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters, and we may publish it online or in print.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Brown vs. Board anniversary shows America, Michigan has far to go
