In the past few days, the Harvard Civil Rights Project released a report entitled A Multiracial Society with Segregated Schools: Are We Losing the Dream?. This report identifies a trend towards “resegregation,” and defines this as (my paraphrase) “an increase in the number of schools where minorities make up most of the students, and a corresponding decrease in the number of schools where minority students attend majority white schools.” The effects of this, the author suggests, are that policies
Now, I’m not saying that racism is over. I’m not saying that integrated and communities and schools aren’t a good thing.
But I seriously doubt that today there is the kind of active discrimination guiding policy like the U.S. saw in the 1960s and earlier. That is, I don’t think school administrators are generally thinking, “Hey, let’s keep the colored kids in their own schools, and cut funding to them so we can beef up the majority white schools.” If we accept that this is true, then we must find another reason for racial segregation.
But more importantly, should we be this worried about it? I think that all students should be able to attend well-funded schools, but as long as school funding is based on property tax (as it is in most states), the poorer parts of town will get shafted, regardless of their ethnic makeup–in other words, bad shools are a bigger issue than just the race issue.
Quality of schools aside, the report says that white students suffer by not being in integrated communities. Heaven forbid kids’ parents could teach them to respect other people. :rolleyes: Of course they have to learn it in schools! Hate to say it, but in my experience, just putting different types of people in a building doesn’t guarantee that they’ll hang out, become friends, or teach each other. Quite possibly the contrary: they may hang out in groups composed of people like themselves, and self-segregate.
So: is U.S. school racial segregation so terrible a thing if it results from socioeconomic factors and not from racism/discrimination? Is integration for its own sake a big deal?
I think the re-segregation is bad thing. It’s unhealthy for all of us. Hopefully, the high degree of segregation of Hispanics may be self-correcting over time. It may be a temporary result of the high rate of immigration. But, the separation of blacks and non-blacks is a sign that something is going off the rails.
I believe the main cause is “white flight.” I.e., flight to the suburbs, to private schools, to home schools, etc. I think we have now seen the limits of what can be accomplished by forced integration. The next step, IMHO, must be to focus on effective education for everybody. Then, there will be less reason for whites to flee. I do not see this as a matter of money. I see it as a matter of insisting that all schools be effective.
The reason may be found in “white flight.” White families tend to be more upwardly mobile when it comes to financial matters, and some move out of neighborhoods which are seen as becoming “bad” due to a greater population of minorities. White families move to the suburbs, whcih, because of economic reasons, tend to be predominantly white. Black familes, for various reasons, are sometimes “stuck” in their neighborhoods.
In some respects, yes.
True. As neighborhoods decline because wealthier families leave, funding for schools declines as well. Kids who feel hopeless in their prospects of finding a good job (when many jobs have also moved out to the suburbs) may lash out and become discipline problems.
Learning tolerance and living it are two different things entirely. Whereas a child may know that discriminating against blacks is wrong, if there are no blacks in his environment, he sometimes doesn’t learn just how much the same we all are beneath our different skin colors. Having black friends teaches a child so much more about race and tolerance than any lecture or book ever could. Living in an all-white neighborhood, and attending all-white schools lessen children’s opprounities to interact in a positive way.
This is a problem. Because both groups tend to be afraid to reach out to one another, divisions arise that need not be there. But how to reach across to one another is somethin that’s very difficult to teach. However, I would say that having fully integrated schools is still better than the alternative, in that some contact with kids of another race is better than none at all.
This is completely anecdotal, but I grew up in very very divese schools (67 languages were spoken at my high school) and it really was the best thing possible.
People at my high school had a lot easier a time with people who were different than they are at more homogenous high schools. Interracial relationships didn’t warrent a second glance. The gay kids could come out. The kid with blue hair could have blue hair. The outcasts did not get nearly as much flak as they did in other schools. There was such a huge variety of kids, and everyone was so used to it, that it became kind of pointless to harras people for being different.
This lesson has helped me in life. I was much better prepared for the big wide world of college- where you are bound to have to deal with a lot of people- than many of the kids comming from a homogenous world. I truely believe that being in a multi-cultural skill made me better prepared for life, and a better person to boot.
People often wrongly assume that all-black schools are inferior or that in order for black children to recieve quality education, they have to be taught with white children. This isn’t true. Prior to forced integration, education within black instititutions was pretty good, especially considering the inferior infrastructure they had to work with. I think people often wrongly assume that black people don’t know how to educate themselves.
That said, I was bussed to schools across town because the schools in my neighborhood weren’t really good. Perhaps they were good, but the perception was that they weren’t. Sometimes though I wonder if this was a self-fufilling prophesy. Schools in all-black neighborhoods are considered bad, so all the kids who can get bussed out. Because all the kids (most whom have parents with political know-how) are bussed out of the community, the neighborhood schools become bad. And the cycle is repeated.
In the suburbs where I live, anyway, the schools function as de facto private academies. The “towns” here are tiny; the one I live in is 4 or 5 square miles and doesn’t have a high school. We share one with a few other towns, and the high school district is made up of two high schools fed into from seven or eight of these faux towns.
The result is that the tax deductible property tax we pay is functionally equivalent to the tuition for a private school, given the tiny base of the elementary and middle schools, and the extreme homogeneity of the families here. I’m certain that you can count the number of blacks in any of these schools on the fingers of one hand, assuming you need any at all. For the high schools you might need to use your toes. Maybe.
There’s one town nearby that’s reasonably well integrated, and another a few miles to the south that’s almost all black and Hispanic even though the town itself isn’t; the whites there send their kids to private schools.
Bottom line being that most of the whites around here have done whatever it takes to segregate. The game of course is that no one says anything in public about this situation. Not that doing anything would do any good; given how much money there is around here, if any real effort were made to integrate, private schools would suddenly sprout like weeds in a vacant lot, and the existing Catholic and Hebrew schools would find themselves swamped.
IMHO resegregation of schools is a symptom. The root question is, why are people resegregating? Is it self-segregation or is the real estate companies being discriminatory or is it some other reason? And whatever the problem is, how do we solve it? If it’s a problem with the real estate people, the government needs to step in. If it’s self-segregation, the government probably needs to keep its nose out of it, but the people doing the self-segregating need to examine their attitudes and assumptions.
I think in many areas the percentage of minority children is much higher than the overall population. For instance, where I teach over 90% of the students are Hispanic. Yet the area has many older retired non-Hispanic residents who have no school age children. I think overall in my state (Texas), minorities are roughly 40% of the total population but closer to 60% of school age children.
This doesn’t explain all cases of segregation, but it does indicate why there is a trend toward imbalances, especially in many urban areas.
I, too, agree with Libertarian and TaxGuy. I was really interested by what even sven had to say, though–I’m really glad to hear that integration has had some tangible benefits for folks.
As Lib suggested, though, I don’t think anyone’s taking an active hand in integrating or segregating schools to the extent that the report is worried about. even sven, I’m guessing you’re from a place like California, where some neighborhoods are so diverse that you couldn’t segregate their public schools if you tried. This is fine, but it didn’t result from any policy measures, right?
According to a book I recently read, real estate agents sometimes actively steer minority home-buyers into minority neighborhoods, and discourage minorities from buying into white communities. The book claimed that agents will sometimes lie, and say that a home has been sold, or that there is something wrong with the house, and then take them to another home in a minority neighborhood. The book suggested that this was due to the self-preservation instincts of some realators, in that they’re afraid that if minorities move into an area, the property vaules will drop, and commissions along with them.
The book went on to say that real-estate agents sometimes try to get the homeowners to de-ethnicize a home they’re trying to sell, such as telling the homeowners to hide the African art, or other “obviously minority” items before showing the house. The book quoted one buyer as saying “I don’t want my children sleeping in a bedroom in which black people have slept.” The agents in the book said that it was harder to sell a home that was obviously black-owned.
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I agree in that I don’t think it’s a government-led initiative. Unfortunately, I think it has a lot to do with latent racism in the citizens themselves. The problem lies with the people who want to move from a neighborhood because “the blacks” have moved in, or want to pull their children from a school because of its high minority population. I think that the assumption that minorities=crime is still prevalent, which is especially sad, given that their kids will never be given the chance to discover otherwise if they’re put into an all-white environment.
I’m sure that a lot of minority parents would like to put their kids into “better” schools. (Whether or not the schools are really better, the perception of minority schools is that they’re “bad.”) However, due to economic restraints, social barriers, or the need to stay close to employment, they often can’t leave their neighborhood.