The Shame of the Nation

The guy who wrote this book was just on CBS Early Show. Apparently our public schools are back to 1968 levels as far as integration. The least integrated states are New York, Illinois, Michigan and California, with New York being #1. The most integrated state was Kentucky. Interesting that this is the trend with the last several decades spent trying to actively change that. Here is a long article I found about this book that I am reading at the moment: http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2005/American-Apartheid-Education1sep05.htm

and to me, it is because they stopped bussing.

Personally, I think bussing is a BAD idea in general, but now with gas prices so high it is even worse.

I have no answer for this problem, however.

make cities where all people want to live
quality housing for all incomes (less difference in incomes)
quality schools

integrated. I know a black woman who grew up in a small town in NC and she said that both of her neighbors, were white people. She was quite shocked when she moved to Chicago to see how sharply the neighborhoods were at that time (and still are with a few exceptions)segregated.
When its rush hour here, on public transportation, you don't have to look at the signs to see what way is south or north, just look at the people.

20 suburban 3 bedroom/2 bath houses in a heavily wooded subdivision there are about six black families. That is well below the community ratio, but way better than it was even ten years ago. I am absolutely certain there is no racism involved in this area as far as housing goes, but the housing prices are probably prohibitive. Most of the black families on my street are university folks.

The sad thing to me regarding lower income (meaning people who work minimum wage or just above) is that there are so few houses now, after the real estate boom, that are affordable. Our house went from 110000 to 220000 in 8 years. We're not quite in a starter house, but not that far up. How can a young family break into the real estate market? So many opt for mobile homes and that is a dead end financially. Absolutely no equity.

Our "old white" neighborhoods in Tallahassee are becoming very well integrated as the black middle class grows. However, the housing projects are not integrated at all.

How do you integrate neighborhoods? Make them decent places to live.

How do you make them decent places to live? Clean, safe, affordable housing, decent jobs with decent wages, access to health care, decent food, etc., and good schools.

As a teacher, I would suggest that the "clean, safe, affordable" housing, safe neighborhoods, clean, safe schools in good repair with abundant resources, adequate staffing, and decent salaries would be an incentive for good teachers to stick around.

If it weren't for bussing, I would not have gone to college. In my NY neighborhood, most of those who were bussed went to college; those who weren't didn't.

So what you are saying is it would have been better if we had not had those opportunities.

destroyed neighborhoods. A community rallies around its local schools. Our patrons refused to support school levies when kids were bussed. We also saw parental involvement drop drastically when the deseg plan began bussing kids all over the city to go to school.

I don't know what the answer is. I am thrilled to hear kids like you were afforded opportunities when they were bussed to school. But there were many other negative factors attached to forced segregation that essentially killed it in my community.

in neighborhoods of African Americans and Latinos. So what bussing opponents basically argue is that all that destructiveness should be confined to minority neighborhoods.

If school activists in white neighborhoods had focused on making the program work rather than fear mongering, bussing might have worked. Instead you ended up trying to salvage your schools and allow the continued destruction of our schools, but with the added "bantustaanification" of minority schools, by sealing them off in rigidly segregated areas.

How progressive of you!

I am not a voter in the school district. I have no say.

But one point the African American leaders kept bringing up that I could NOT argue with was this - the idea that segregated schools are necessary, that black children must sit by a white child in order to get a quality education is WRONG and racist. I have to agree.

After watching court ordered segregation fail to truly segregate my school district (after a 25 year effort), I now feel the answer is quality education FOR ALL, regardless of where they live. Read Kozol. This is his premise as well. It is wrong that minority kids typically attend school in older buildings which are more expensive to maintain, and thus these kids are robbed of equal opportunities. One graphic example in my community - suburban schools are air conditioned, while those in the urban core are not.

ALL schools should be equal, regardless of the community they serve. That is what we should be fighting for instead of desegregation. It is a far more realistic goal, IMO.

and add one other difference that we see in the deep south. When I first started teaching down here, it was only brief years since integration. In the old days, the African American schools were taught by teachers who did not have to have an education degree. The main requirement was high school graduation. And since black teachers taught in black schools, and remember teaching a black child to even READ was illegal not all that long ago..well, the teacher pool was dedicated but not skilled and sometimes not even fully literate. Also, in those days, in this district, there was no parity in funding. Rich neighborhood earned more money and it stayed in their neighborhood. That is absolutely NOT the case here anymore. All schools are funded equally according to the number of children they have, and ESE and low performing kids actually pull MORE funding.

About 15 years ago the State instituted a teacher exam and that has kept the quality of the teaching pool higher. Also, the older teachers who had been grandfathered in with HS diplomas have now retired. Teacher quality is pretty standard throughout the district. You might think that the higher income neighborhood schools would pull the best teachers, but that is not necessarily true, because the smaller predominantly black schools get federal aid thru Chapter I, resulting in a smaller class size. A lot of teachers will travel an hour a day for a smaller class! And then there is the issue of dedication. Many teachers feel called to a ministry of sorts and prefer the challenge of the low performing schools.

which has a >80% free lunch rate, Title I funding has nearly disappeared. It all started 9 or 10 years ago when the administrators chose to pull funding from individual schools and spend it on an 'initiative' to improve middle schools. The initiative was Sylvan Learning Centers in the middle schools. Those are gone now but we never got our Title I funding back. What we get now is a fraction of what we once got. My school's Title I funding has been reduced by 80% in about ten years.

The reason this is such a big deal is because Title I (used to be called Chapter I) is the equalizer. It is meant to bring funding to urban (low income) schools in order to equalize opportunities for low income kids. My school at one time had TWO Title I teachers who pulled kids who were struggling and gave them an extra hour or two a day of Reading and Math instruction in small groups. Our funding this year is not enough to fund one of these positions.

The result is kids who are struggling get no extra help unless they are disabled and qualify for special ed. It is heartbreaking. As the school's only special ed teacher, I am now continually trying to help general ed teachers and my principal understand that just because a child is failing does not mean he/she should be served in special ed. And as it has become more difficult to qualify kids for special ed (due to changing regs at the state and federal level) the pool of kids who are referred has increased, since there is no Title I program in place to help them. It is a friggin mess.

I promised my principal I would do some research over the holiday and find out what is going on with Title I funding. Schools in other districts in our area have also reported reduced Title I funding. We think maybe it is a statewide issue; Title I funding from the feds has INCREASED in the past ten years while our share of the pot has decreased.

The bottom line is that kids are getting no extra help. And we don't know how to fix it.

And remember, if schools don't make AYP for two years in a row, the consequence is losing federal (Title I) funding. Every time I hear this I want to scream: We have ALREADY seen our federal funding all but disappear.

...may in fact be true. But there was one thing that stood out - those teachers cared about us; They did the best with what they had; whether that be with their 'limited educational knowledge', or just sharing with us that we needed to excel for ourselves, regardless of what "society" had to say about us; What these badly educated teachers in those poorly funded schools offered on a daily basis, was that they cared about us - and conveyed that message of caring, every single segregated school day.

The purpose of bussing was not that black children can only learn when sitting next to a white child.

It is that politically, majority black schools will always be shortchanged and discriminated against in an essentially racist political system in which African Americans are usually a minority.

Integration reduces the capacity of political systems to target African American schools and school districts for inferior treatment or funding.

Because black majority schools are treated unequally, they become pools of underachievement, and create a self-reinforcing ethos of collective underachievement.

As for funding, I am sure you are aware that in most states, education funding is based on property taxes. This causes class as well as race based discrimination. Again, the only way of overcoming this systemic inequality is to mix students across the lines of funding, so that the political system cannot target them for inferior treatment.

but I don't think it is possible now because of fuel prices. Our school district has considered closing on Fridays because of gas. We are a huge, far-flung district. If we bus on racial lines, it would probably mean closing schools and heavily overcrowded classrooms, and as a teacher I don't want to see that.

I also think that there is no longer support in the African American community here, at least, for bussing kids long distances for racial equity. And I am absolutely certain there is no support in the predominantly white neighborhoods. Those kids would just end up in private schools or home schooled. You can't force bussing on the population anymore, I don't believe. Nobody wants to see their kids on a bus for an hour every day.

I think the solution is as someone mentioned here, going for the long term, which is keeping the neighborhoods more balanced.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that in this district if you are a majority race at your school and desire to attend a school where you would be a minority, you have carte blanche to do so, but have to get your own transportation. And magnet schools are also helping balance things out. Times have changed and we need to find unique solutions.

transporting them. That is the unfortunate choice we have been forced to make.

An ideal conservative world would be homogenized.

Where we celebrate diversity, they abhor it. They want to drive from coast to coast and see no variation; just the same McDonalds, Wal-Marts, Home Depots and shiny white people driving their SUVs with the fish symbols on the tailgate. No voices of dissent, no radical variations on their approved theme, everything in its place.

America was made great because it was a melting pot.

Conservatives have doused the fire and strained the pot.

The evidence seems to point to the exact opposite of what you are saying. I don't know how to explain it as I believe that Liberals are more prone to wanting integration but they fail to deliver in their own backyards...

Prosperous cities have a lot of behavioral liberals, who are all pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-liberalization of drug laws, and pro-equal rights on the job, but they're hostile or indifferent to economic and political rights.

They believe in integration in the abstract, but when it comes to putting their own children in an integrated school or running for school board to give all children an equal chance, they opt for parental selfishness ("My kid's gonna be fine and the hell with all the rest") and put their children in private schools--because they can afford to.

I swear, sometimes parents get so focused on their own kids that it makes them stupid. Don't they ever stop to think that those dark-skinned children that they're dismissing so blithely are going to be adults when their children are adults? What kind of an adulthood will their children have in a world where a huge proportion of the dark-skinned adults have been treated as expendable?

Portland and Minneapolis are two exceptions to this abandonment of the public schools by white middle-class families, but as the Republican state legislators keep cutting school budgets, public schools become less attractive to those who can afford private schools.

The Republicans know exactly what they're doing: cut school budgets, place impossible demands for rising test scores on public schools, constantly badmouth the public schools, and encourage the public to dream of using vouchers to send their kids to private schools.

...most equal opportunity employer there is for decades. I grew up in a military family, my father a staunch, John F. Kennedy Democrat and a strong supporter of civil rights when it wasn't popular, and even dangerous. In the military schools, military housing, or the neighborhoods with a large military population, there wasn't this side of town versus that side of town, we had black, asian, hispanic children all around us (me, my brother) in school, over at our houses after school, we had their families over at our house for dinner as we enjoyed the same at theirs. A good thing for me as I learned in my most formative years that diversity was a great thing and that racial hatred was bad.
Plus, nobody in the mid to late sixties would say a damn thing to my father if he walked through town with a black friend of the family. He was always a big 250lb. plus, intimidating looking fella that even the dumb-ass, klan type rednecks knew better than to mess with.

he's reliable. In Amazing Grace he follows some kids of poverty. It has one of my favorite first lines of any book I've read. I used to be able to quote it. Something about "The Line E train starts in the third richest Congression district in America and seven stops later it ends in the poorest district in America. (Manhatten to the Bronx I think.) Anyway, good read if you're interested. And not all sad...there is some hope.

But integration is a SOCIETAL concern. It is NOT up to the schools to solve it nor can they. We must truly integrate our communities if we want integrated schools.

Without reading the article you posted, I know Kozol favors equal access to education and has spoken up about funding inequities many times in the past.

**But integration is a SOCIETAL concern. It is NOT up to the schools to solve it nor can they. We must truly integrate our communities if we want integrated schools. **


I agree wholeheartedly that the real answer to desegregation lies within integrated communities.

I also think having "neighborhood schools" (all things being equal) would be the best (PS school)environment (for most kids).

And while I agree that it isn't up to schools to *solve* the problem, they sure can go a long way to help alleviating the problem.

Short of the miracle of true neighborhood desegregation, schools may be the only place "diversity" WILL occur for most kids.

I grew up during before/during desegregation in the deep south, and until it was "forced", there was NO "mixing" - and even then, it was a HUGE problem.

In Wake County, NC - they are achieving very good results - but they don't bus on "race" - they bus solely on economics. How many "free lunch" per school, etc.

The biggest problem right now is tremendous growth and overcrowding. They plan a massive shift of students next year - nearly 12000 kids will be "relocated" to new schools. The community is up in arms. But what else are they to do with too many kids in parts of the county and not enough in others. (Real estate agents are NOTORIOUS for showing neighborhoods according to school assimenment, not to mention "desireability" - read: what *kind* of people live in the neighborhood. :( )

"Church schools" abound here. So does homeschooling. And the constant reshuffling of students is ONE of the reasons. (Closet) Racism (cloaked in "religious fundamentalism") is another.

There is something deeply hypocritical about a society that holds an eight-year-old inner-city child "accountable" for her performance on a high-stakes standardized exam but does not hold the high officials of our government accountable for robbing her of what they gave their own kids six or seven years earlier.

"Can you really buy your way to better education for these children?" "Do we know enough to be quite sure that we will see an actual return on the investment that we make?" "Is it even clear that this is the right starting point to get to where we'd like to go? It doesn't always seem to work, as I am sure that you already know," or similar questions that somehow assume I will agree with those who ask them.

Some people who ask these questions, although they live in wealthy districts where the schools are funded at high levels, don't even send their children to these public schools but choose instead to send them to expensive private day schools. At some of the well-known private prep schools in the New York City area, tuition and associated costs are typically more than $20,000 a year. During their children's teenage years, they sometimes send them off to very fine New England schools like Andover or Exeter or Groton, where tuition, boarding, and additional expenses rise to more than $30,000. Often a family has two teenage children in these schools at the same time, so they may be spending more than $60,000 on their children's education every year. Yet here I am one night, a guest within their home, and dinner has been served and we are having coffee now; and this entirely likable, and generally sensible, and beautifully refined and thoughtful person looks me in the eyes and asks me whether you can really buy your way to better education for the children of the poor.

distasteful to the well-off. We have to take the education system out of the hands of the local property owners. The whole problem stems from the inequity of distribution of funds. Schools in rich neighborhoods are generally great, while those in poor neighborhoods are desperate in every category from facilities to infrastructure to supplies to good teachers. The comfortable classes refuse to see their contribution to the societal problems that are caused by this inequitable distribution. Those poor kids that get no real education will become the problems that they and their kids will have to deal with.

and the results created a mess. Wealthier suburban districts are now forced to subsidize poorer (largely rural) districts. Someone finally got the court involved and it ordered the legislature to come up with a more equitable plan.

As a resident of one of the wealthier suburbs, I don't favor subsidizing small rural districts (some with fewer than 100 kids) at the expense of the kids in my community. On the other hand, I teach in an urban district that serves mainly the working poor and I see first hand every day the results of inadequate funding.

I honestly don't know what the answer is. I would love to see the US Dept of Ed reduced and that budget redistributed to states. But beyond that, I have no ideas.

in common, unbelievably top heavy, overpaid, administrations. It is obvious that dramatic changes are desperately needed. We've seen many pilot programs around the country and then never adopted them in spite of the success. Why? We know what we need to do, it's the doing that's the problem.
Where is the requirement to fund school districts from local property taxes? How ridiculous is it that the whole ID thing is an issue? Shouldn't the textbook publishing industry be opened up? Way more money out to find its way out of the bureaucracy into the schools. I don't see any way to privatize education without really screwing it up, but maybe there is a way. Why can't small rural districts be consolidated? Why are the (generally undereducated) local politicians deciding what should, or should not, be taught? Isn't that why we have professionals that have dedicated their careers to studying this?
Anyway, I'm glad I'm not a parent, after a lifetime of experience with the educational systems in this country, I'd be rioting in the streets.

But I do understand the opposition to consolidating smaller rural school districts. Taking away a school kills a small town. And it is hard to consolidate without closing at least a few schools.

The real problem is funding. We need more money and we need it distributed more equitably.