Gee they are not talking about South Africa in the article below. Humm
they might even be talking about a lot of the "progressive" and/or
"liberal
groups
Jim D.
------------------------------------
Overcoming Apartheid
By Jonathan Kozol
The Nation -- [from the December 19, 2005 issue]
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051219/kozol
Apartheid education, rarely mentioned in the press or
openly confronted even among once-progressive
educators, is alive and well and rapidly increasing now
in the United States. Hypersegregated inner-city
schools--in which one finds no more than five or ten
white children, at the very most, within a student
population of as many as 3,000--are the norm, not the
exception, in most northern urban areas today.
"At the beginning of the twenty-first century,"
according to Gary Orfield and his colleagues at the
Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, "American
public schools are now 12 years into the process of
continuous resegregation. The desegregation of black
students, which increased continuously from the 1950s
to the late 1980s, has receded to levels not seen in
three decades." The proportion of black students in
majority-white schools stands at "a level lower than in
any year since 1968." The four most segregated states
for black students, according to a recent study by the
Civil Rights Project, are New York, Michigan, Illinois
and California. In New York, only one black student in
seven goes to a predominantly white school.
The fashionable reflex nowadays is to declare that
integration "failed" and to settle instead, in
Orfield's words, for better ways of "doing Plessy" in
the urban schools as they now stand. Such declarations
of futility ignore the reality that as many as 10
million black, white and Hispanic children have
attended school together in interdistrict programs in
which integrated schooling has become a fact of life
for an entire generation of black children. In large
numbers, the inner-city students in these programs have
gone on to universities and colleges and become civic
leaders in their own communities.
In the Milwaukee area, for instance, twenty-two
suburban districts currently participate in a student-
transfer program to promote school integration across
district lines, which has been in operation now for
nearly thirty years. Under the program four thousand
students transfer between Milwaukee and its suburbs. In
the middle-class suburb of Shorewood, for example, 11
percent of the student population comes into the
district from Milwaukee. Including minority children
who already live in Shorewood, says Jack Linehan, the
recently retired superintendent, "our school district
is about 19 percent black and Hispanic, and the
community has a great comfort level with that.... I
think parents got to know each other as friends.... I
think that evaporated away a lot of the psychological
resistance." Linehan also notes that starting
integration in the elementary grades made it much
easier for children "simply to be children with each
other." Stereotypes fall away, he adds. "It's more
difficult to conjure up 'the other' when you're
building sand castles together."
In St. Louis also, a suburban-urban interdistrict
transfer program has been in place for more than twenty
years. The program, initiated under a court order in
1983, today enrolls about 10,000 children from the
city, who represent nearly a quarter of the school-age
population of black children in St. Louis, while about
500 children from the suburbs make the opposite
commute. Although recent cutbacks in the funds provided
by the state to underwrite these transfers have imposed
a heavier financial burden on the sixteen districts
that participate, most of the education leaders there
have made clear their preference to continue with the
program even in the face of opposition from the state.
In the Louisville area as well, school integration,
initially carried out under court order, has now been
in place without court order for a quarter-century. The
sweep of the program, under which the city schools and
county schools have been combined into a single system
in which more than 90,000 black, Hispanic, white and
Asian children are enrolled, has had the effect of
rendering Kentucky's public schools the most
desegregated in the nation. The typical black student
in Kentucky now attends a school in which two-thirds of
the enrollment is Caucasian.
When a proposal was made in 1991 to terminate or cut
back on Kentucky's integration program, protests were
voiced by community groups, the teachers union, the
local press, the Jefferson County Human Relations
Commission and the regional branch of the National
Conference of Christians and Jews. A survey revealed
that the number of black parents who believed their
children's education had improved under the busing plan
exceeded those who took the opposite position by a
ratio of six to one. Less than 2 percent believed that
education for their children would be better in
resegregated schools. Despite occasional recurrences of
opposition from groups or individuals who represent
small pockets of resistance, support for school
desegregation in the Louisville community continues
strong and unabated to the present day.
Public policy has largely turned its back on the
aspirations embodied by these instances of school
desegregation. "Even many black leaders," notes
education analyst Richard Rothstein, are weary of the
struggle over mandatory busing programs to achieve
desegregation and "have given up on integration,"
arguing, in his words, that "a black child does not
need white classmates in order to learn." So education
policies, he says, "now aim to raise scores in [the]
schools that black children attend." "That effort," he
writes, "will be flawed even if it succeeds." The
Supreme Court's 1954 Brown decision, he reminds us,
"was not about raising scores" for children of
minorities "but about giving black children access to
majority culture, so they could negotiate it more
confidently.... For African-Americans to have equal
opportunity, higher test scores will not suffice. It is
foolhardy to think black children can be taught, no
matter how well, in isolation and then have the skills
and confidence as adults to succeed in a white world
where they have no experience."
Nonetheless, programs that promote school integration
continue to be threatened in some sections of the
nation. In Milwaukee, for example, legislation has been
introduced three times since 1999 to do away with or
substantially reduce interdistrict transfers. Much of
the pressure has come from those who argue that the
money spent for integrated education should be spent
instead to upgrade schools within the city, the
assumption being that the state cannot afford to make
both of these purposes attainable. In the first two
attempts, the legislation was defeated. When on the
third attempt, in 2003, the legislation was approved,
it was vetoed by Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle.
There will be further legislative efforts like these in
the future, says Jack Linehan, the former Shorewood
superintendent--this, he notes, despite academic
outcomes for the students in the transfer program that
are consistently far better than those of students who
remain in Milwaukee. The four-year graduation rate of
inner-city students who have been attending school in
the suburban districts is typically 95 percent or
higher, Linehan observes, while the rate for students
in Milwaukee's schools averages below 60 percent. If
the legislature should succeed in cutting funding for
the interdistrict plan, says Linehan, suburban
districts would be forced to raise their local levies
up to 25 percent to keep on with the program. "The only
other option is to send these children back, which I
believe would be immoral. We cannot say, 'We didn't
mean it, now there's no more money.'"
In perhaps the most disheartening development, the
interdistrict program in St. Louis is facing the risk
of termination in the next three years. A court-
supervised phaseout of state funding for the program,
while it does not prohibit integration, significantly
discourages suburban districts from accepting students
from St. Louis after the 2008-09 academic year. The
suburbs, for the most part, have wanted to continue;
indeed, students in the affluent community of Clayton
walked out of classes in 2004 to protest a possible
withdrawal from the program, according to the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch. The principal of Clayton High School
told the paper he was "proud to be part of a community
that values diversity in a metro area so segregated."
But the state, beginning in late 2004, cut assistance
to the district from the full per-pupil cost in excess
of $13,000 to approximately half that sum, a loss in
funding that has led the Clayton School Board, against
the wishes of its students, to vote to terminate the
program and accept no further applicants after 2008.
Other St. Louis suburbs may be driven to the same
decision. Already, as a result of the first stages of
the phaseout, the number of city students going to
suburban schools has dropped by about 3,000 from a peak
of 13,000 in the 1990s, while the number of suburban
children going to St. Louis schools has dropped to half
the number who were making this commute during the
1990s. "The state government," Orfield notes,
"beginning under former Governor John Ashcroft, has
fiercely opposed the integration program. It works, so
it will be killed, unlike charter schools, which do not
work and will be expanded." As in Milwaukee, the
success of students in the program has been documented
thoroughly. Ninety percent of transfer students
graduating from suburban high schools have pursued
postsecondary education, most attending two- or four-
year colleges, compared with only 47 percent of
graduating minority seniors in St. Louis. And the
volume of applications by minority parents to enroll
their children in the program has continued to be
strong and is, indeed, increasing. In 2004 nearly 6,000
parents submitted applications for the 1,300 openings
that were available.
Is it accurate then to say that most Americans, and
black Americans especially, as we are told so
frequently, have decided to give up on integrated
education? National surveys, Orfield notes, do not bear
this out. More than two-thirds of Americans believe
"desegregation improves education for blacks," and "a
growing population is convinced" it has a positive
effect for whites as well. In surveys among young
adults, 60 percent believe the federal government ought
to make sure that public schools are integrated. The
same percentage of black respondents do not merely
favor integrated education but believe that it is
"absolutely essential" that the population of a school
be racially diverse. (Only 8 percent of blacks and only
20 percent of whites say this is not of much
importance.) Opposition to desegregation among whites,
Orfield pointedly observes, is highest among those who
have no experience of integration. Yes, as those who
have participated in these programs rightly note, there
are the multitude of challenges that transfer students
often do confront; and these are not always minor
problems, nor are they exclusively, as some may think,
"the problems they bring with them." Many are created
by insensitivity or insufficient care in prior planning
on the part of the receiving districts, others by
resilient racist suppositions on the part of educators
or administrators even in some of the most self-
consciously progressive white communities.
Still, oral histories of students who experience
desegregation usually reveal that even when the social
adaptations may be difficult at first, the students
consider the benefits they ultimately gain to be well
worth the challenges they've faced. And despite the
social tensions students in these interdistrict
programs do sometimes encounter--and despite those
famous "separate tables" in the cafeterias to which
black students often gravitate, and in regard to which
an awful lot of lamentation is devoted in the press--
many of the white and nonwhite students get to know
each other far too well not to be drawn to one another,
finally, as friends.
Most parents of black and Hispanic students who have
asked for my advice when they were trying to decide
upon a school their children might attend have told me
they have rarely thought about the pros and cons of
trying to enroll their children in suburban schools or,
indeed, in racially desegregated schools within their
district, because they do not believe it possible that
they would have the chance to exercise this option if
they wanted to. Orfield believes that we can make it
possible on a far broader scale and that we have, in
any case, a moral obligation to devote ourselves to
heightening that possibility in any way we can.
In answer to those who say they share this goal but
point to the obstacles presented by the current makeup
of the federal courts and the lack of any apparent
interest in advancing such a purpose on the part of
national elected leaders or the leaders of state
government, Orfield, a political scientist by training,
gives a clear, unshakable response. "The notion that
apartheid in the South could be dismantled 50 years ago
seemed wildly improbable as well," he noted. "Breaking
down the barriers to interdistrict integration and
reducing residential segregation in the suburbs have at
least as good a chance of ultimate success. It will
take a major political thrust in order to achieve this.
We will certainly need some better people on the
courts. But look at what Charles Hamilton Houston and
W.E.B. Du Bois and those who worked with them during
the decades long before the Brown decision faced when
they were looking at a system of apartheid in the South
which nobody was seriously resisting and which neither
political party was opposing. And they nonetheless were
asking, 'How do you take this thing apart?' And they
did it. They started a movement. They created the
intellectual force to make it possible. This is what we
need to do as well."
And, he said, with a determination that is seldom heard
within the discourse of too many tired-sounding
liberals these days, "When we do create that force, it
will be successful also."
--
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