Democracy and Inequality: Challenges and Possible Solutions

Introduction

How do teachers invigorate young people to believe that they can make a difference when the world tells them that they are voiceless and powerless? This interdisciplinary unit offers teachers strategies and activities to galvanize students to understand concepts of school segregation, democracy and inequality in hope to cultivate budding civic leaders in the classrooms and beyond. In particular, students will acquire basic understanding of political science and games theories such as the art of coalition building, Divide-the-Dollar majority rule, and Schelling’s model of segregation, in order to make informed decisions, arrive at collective compromises, and execute a service-learning project to benefit themselves, their school, and community.

Even though racial segregation has been illegal for close to 7 decades after the 1954 ruling of Brown v. Board of Education, public schools remain largely segregated by race and income. Students are taught that racial segregation is a thing of the past and no longer an issue. In reality, more than ever, the best schools are only accessible to students with the wealthiest zip codes. Today the debate continues among parents, educators, policy makers, philanthropists, and activists about how to close the achievement gap between White children and children of color, the economic gaps between the wealthy elites and the perpetual poor, the health disparities where Blacks have shorter life expectancies and greater rates of heart diseases, as well as the unjust mass incarceration of young Black men for minor infractions in alarming disproportional rate.

According to a report by The Century Foundation based on data from the 2017 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), low-income students who attended affluent schools were roughly 2 years ahead in academic performances in comparison with low-income students who attended high-poverty schools.¹ Students in desegregated schools are less likely to drop out and more likely to go to college than students in racially segregated high-poverty schools. However, experts like Amy Stuart Well, Professor of Sociology and Education at Columbia University in 2010 reminds us: “Our approaches to school choice over the past 20 years have been pretty unimaginative — and children are paying for our lack of imagination.”² She wrote that 11 years ago and very little has changed since. The new “Linda Brown'' of today’s segregated schools includes a majority of African American and Latinx students as well as an influx of recent immigrants from a multitude of countries in Africa and Asia. Basically, any student living in poverty regardless of race is the new victim of our segregated schools. Today the success of the a new “Brown v. Board of Education” battle to desegregate schools depends more heavily on how national, state and city legislatures will address the wealth disparity and lack of equal access to job, housing and educational opportunities for the disadvantaged, and maybe less about filing court cases based solely on race which possess the damaging effect of fracturing coalitions among people of color. Nonetheless, attacks against modern segregation are needed in all fronts in term of race and class, judicial decisions and Congressional legislature, individual bias and institutional injustice. “Modern school segregation” is real, but rarely discussed in today’s classrooms, and often not included in the curriculum. Private bigotry as well as public policies like housing and labor laws, zoning, redlining, and other systematic racial practices continue to perpetrate inequality. Philadelphia, where I reside, is a perfect example of a segregated city with Black residents as the majority race at 42.1% and White at 37%, but the student population who attends public schools is 53% Black and 14% White.³  In 84% of Philadelphia’s 381 census tracts, one race or ethnic group represents the majority resulting in White v. Black v. Brown neighborhoods; furthermore, the poverty rate is highest in North and West Philly where majority of its residents are Black.⁴

School Segregation and Reparations

People immediately think of money when they hear the word “reparations,” but it is so much more than that. To me, reparations mean admission by our government that it did injustice to a particular group of individuals, an effort to restore “stolen” economic opportunities, and make tangible the process of healing. Reparations, a method to address injustices done, are not foreign to the United States. Native Americans have received land, programs and other benefits for being forcibly exiled from their native lands. Native American children were also forced into boarding schools, cutting their ties to their families; this type of “civilizing” method had denigrated the Native American culture, language and religion. For Japanese Americans, the government issued a public apology, paid $20,000 to every living survivor of the internment camps amounting to a total of $1.6 billion paid to more than 82,250 eligible claimants.⁵ After the Civil War, our government paid reparations to White slave owners for their loss of “property.” Yes, it would be difficult to calculate the amount for eligible descendants of the enslaved, decide who gets what, and other difficult problems, but these are also good reasons to figure out the economic loss for the enslaved, and the generations of compounded negative impacts that still exist today, even if it were done as a symbolic gesture.

In his essay The Case for Reparation, Ta-Nehisi Coates wants people to stop laughing at the idea of reparations. He described today’s segregation this way: “With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin.”⁶ If you are a student of color living in poverty, you are doomed in a world of “double segregation” due to the intersectionality of your race and class. If you are a student of color living in poverty AND an English language learner (ELL), you’re trapped in a kind of “triple segregation” that confines you to “segregated and unequal schools” with nearly 100% people of color living in poverty.⁷ Since 1968, the school enrollment for Latinx students has increased by 495%, and this large immigration influx of Latinx as well as other students of color continues to contribute to an increasing number of segregated schools.⁸ Furthermore, “racialized tracking” within a school sorted Black students out of advanced classes and educational opportunities leading to another kind of segregation within a school, clearly visible, classroom by classroom and lunch table by lunch table. While Black students make up 17% of the nationwide population, only 10% are in programs for the gifted, but a shocking 53% of remedial students are Black.⁹