The Most Underreported Story

Time Magazine, in its annual “Person of the Year” issue (December 28, 2009 – January 4, 2010) called the increased re-segregation of American public primary and secondary schools the most underreported story of 2009 (page 29): “According to a January report from UCLA’s Civil Rights Project, African-American and Latino schoolchildren are more segregated than they have been since the time of Martin Luther King Jr.’s death, in 1968. In the 2006-7 school year, nearly 40% attended schools – many of them subpar ‘dropout factories’ – where students of color made up to 90% to 100% of the student body.”

In an era of extreme budgetary shortfalls and harsh economic realities for school budgets, can we even afford to address this anomaly in the current economy? If the issue were presented a bit differently, can we afford the long-term social costs (more use of the criminal justice system, more consumption of safety net social services and compensation plans, more costs to businesses and citizens for the cost of increased criminal activity) associated with failed primary and secondary education… would the answer be the same? We’re talking trillions of dollars here! We’re not even applying the pre-Brown vs. Board of Education (the big 1954 desegregation case in the US Supreme Court) “separate but equal” standard to our inner city schools.

Sociologists blame “white flight” – the move of white families to the suburbs. This phenomenon is not unique to the United States. In a July 29, 2009 article, the Guardian wrote about a similar problem in the UK: “[An Institute of Community Cohesion] study, which focused on 13 local areas including Bolton, Sunderland, Oldham, Hounslow and Bristol, concluded: ‘Many of the schools and colleges in the areas we have studied are segregated to a greater or lesser extent and the evidence available to us at a local level suggested that this was generally worsening over recent years... This reflects in part residential segregation, but it also reflects parental choice, despite the fact that most people we spoke to in focus groups wanted their children to have a mixed education. Parental choice tended to push people to what they saw as the safe option, where children with similar backgrounds went.’” Sounds British, doesn’t it?

But the issue remains; if we subject students to “dropout factories” (and public high schools in the top ten US cities have an aggregate drop-out rate of over 50%!), we are going to be paying vastly more money for the rest of those students’ lives for all the reasons listed above. There are practices that are local “separation of the races choices” that are disturbing. Take this note in the May 21^, 2009 New York Times: “Racially segregated proms have been held in Montgomery County [Georgia] — where about two-thirds of the population is white — almost every year since its schools were integrated in 1971. Such proms are, by many accounts, longstanding traditions in towns across the rural South, though in recent years a number of communities have successfully pushed for change. When the actor Morgan Freeman offered to pay for last year’s first-of-its-kind integrated prom at Charleston High School in Mississippi, his home state, the idea was quickly embraced by students — and rejected by a group of white parents, who held a competing ‘private’ prom.”

The South still has its stubborn pockets of racial segregationist holdouts, but the problem is actually worse in the North. “[As a report from the Civil Rights Project at the University of California notes:] Indeed, Brown [vs Board of Education] made a huge difference in the South -- from 1970 to 2004, black students in the South were actually less segregated than those in any other region as the result of vigorous enforcement by the federal government in the late l960s and strong requirements from the Supreme Court through the early l970s. The highest rates of total segregation actually come today in Northern cities like Chicago and Detroit, according to the report.” January 22, 2009, SouthernStudies.org

We have an African-American President, an economy in shambles, and we are supporting an educational system that not only fails to make us competitive with the rising standards in the rest of the world, it will saddle us with incalculable hard dollar social costs because of its failures. Why are we wasting so much money on failure and to create future economic hardship for us all?

I’m Peter Dekom, and I approve this message.