The Education System
As teachers, we are programed to steer our students toward their dreams through academic success. Education has always been a way to create opportunity where there wasn’t any before. However, it is no secret that many of the schools in this nation are struggling to educate brown and black children. This is a present-day reality, yet it started many years ago. During Reconstruction, the Freedmen’s Bureau began the task of educating former slaves and their children. The Bureau, with the help of African American communities and land grants from the Federal Government, built schools for Black children. It was also responsible for the construction of some of the nation’s first Historically Black Universities. While these local schools and universities did an admirable job of starting the education process for former slaves, they weren’t granted the adequate facilities and funding of their white counterparts.
In her book White Rage, Anderson analyzes how the 1896 Supreme Court decision of Plessy vs. Ferguson was used as a vehicle to promote classism by using race to send African Americans to inferior schools. With the 7-1 case ruling, the justices issued their verdict that separate was equal.
Almost immediately, the states seized on the ‘separate’ aspect, instituting racially distinct facilities from telephone booths to cemeteries. For nearly six decades, the same states that had consistently failed to provide anything approximating to ‘equal’ for America’s black citizens. In reality white America never intended to create such a living standard as it would compete with their own. This would be was the Achilles heel that the NAACP’s legal team attacked. (10)
Surveying the nation after Plessy vs. Ferguson, the impact of the Supreme Court’s decision on African American children is apparent. For example, in Virginia’s Prince Edward County, there wasn’t a high school for Blacks until 1939. Moton High, the only school constructed for African American students, was more than double its intended capacity. (11) In terms of funding for the entire county, $330,000 was allocated for the education of 2,000 African American students, while 1,400 white students were appraised at $1.2 million. (12)
Furthermore, in 1950, South Carolina spent more per capita on school buildings for white students than it did for black students. In Clarendon County, when a preacher asked for another bus to help transport African American students, R.W. Elliot, the acting chair of the school board replied, “We ain’t got no money to buy a bus for your nigger children.” (13)
Although this was the law of the land for many years, it came to a close on a federal level with Brown vs. Board of Education, which was supposed to end the segregation of schools. However, the White House seemed passive when enforcing the laws. Richard Conley, attorney for the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, said, “integration would not be a precondition for obtaining funds unless the Southern-dominated congress decided it should be.” (14) The attorney understood that such a statement on the federal level would make it unlikely for states to act aggressively on the local level. Because of the lack of initial assertiveness by the federal government, southern states felt emboldened to delay the integration of schools by proposing state laws that were unconstitutional but would cost civil rights groups time and finances to overturn. Herein lies a huge issue: the loss of time, our most limited resource.
Students were losing time to catch up and to gain equal access to classroom resources, remedial programs or advanced programs, and quality instruction. Time was stolen from these children by a system designed to intentionally keep them at a certain social and economic class. Much like the Founding Fathers, much like the American Dream, many Southerners had no intention of sharing the promise of education with a people they felt were supposed to be subservient to them.
As the nation tried to integrate, the suburbs began to expand. Ford, General Motors and Chrysler not only helped to create jobs for Americans, but the Interstate Highway Act helped to create an avenue for those who wanted to distance themselves from the city, while still allowing them the chance to work there during the day. We have a similar situation with the schools in America because they have been re-segregated by the great migration known as White Flight. The attraction of the suburbs naturally creates a certain type of isolationism that is often safeguarded by any means necessary. According to the UCLA Civil Rights Project,
Black and Latino students were in the most impoverished schools two decades earlier but those schools had a clear majority of non-poor classmates. Now the pattern is reversed, so that black and Latino students attend schools with substantial majorities- two-thirds- of poor classmates. This double segregation means serious isolation from racial and class diversity and exposure to many problems that systematically afflict poor families and communities. (15)
This intentional setup makes sure certain children don’t interact with others, creating a separation of thought and exposure that is detrimental to both sides.
At my own school, I have seen students merged from one struggling school into another. I remember sitting at the town hall meeting where parents from Wilkinsburg demanded other options, expressing that they were unhappy with merging with a school that seemed to be academically worse than their current school. I couldn’t help but sympathize. Since the transition, my colleagues and I have tried to make those students feel as welcome as possible and I think we’ve been successful in that. We have the largest support staff in the district and we spend more per capita on our students than any other 6-12 grade school district-wide. However, with more than 80% of 8th graders scoring Below Basic in Math and more than 80% of 8th graders scoring Basic or Below Basic in ELA, I can’t help but wonder if it would have been a better decision to move the Wilkinsburg students to a school that had a track record of higher performance. If we truly had the students’ best interests at heart, why wouldn’t we do this? How did district planners think that this was the best move? I can only assume it was perhaps the only option that allowed them to protect their priorities. In a city with a dwindling population, the fear of more White residents packing up and heading to the suburbs often trumps common sense logic.
When financial and academic resources head out of the city, many people try to send their students with those resources. However, when privileged families cross that bridge, they often put up borders to prevent others from following. In the 2007 Supreme Court Case Seattle vs. Louisville, the Supreme Court decided to severely limit the number of students who could be bussed from the city to the suburbs with a 4-1 vote, claiming that race was not enough to move students from their home schools. This allocation of resources has placed the best schools outside the reach of those most in need. Such a transition of people and resources is even more dangerous now than before. According to Sean F. Reardon of Stanford University, “school and neighborhood quality are linked. Schools in communities with abundant resources can draw on those resources in ways that schools in poor communities cannot. It is not clear whether school or residential segregation patterns are most important in shaping achievement.” (16) We teach great students at our school, many of whom will overcome obstacles to get where they want to go. Yet the expectation for an entire subsection of students to overcome adversity is far from “equal.” Government officials, backed by suburban influences, continue to keep things separate, here in “the land of the free and the home of the brave.”
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