Overcoming Apartheid

[LWolf]

Jonathan Kozol

This is a long article discussing the trend of resegration in America's schools. As an educator, I prefer integrated schools. I think that kids who grow up together in a positive group atmosphere are more likely to move the evolution of racial equality and justice forward than those who grow up in homogeneous settings. Still, there were a couple of statements that gave me pause, and brought this question up for me:

What is the purpose of school integration in the 21st Century? Is the purpose appropriate, and, if so, what should we be doing to advance it?

Here is a snip:

Apartheid education, rarely mentioned in the press or openly confronted even among once-progressive educators, is alive and well and rapidly increasing now in the United States. Hypersegregated inner-city schools--in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000--are the norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today.

"At the beginning of the twenty-first century," according to Gary Orfield and his colleagues at the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, "American public schools are now 12 years into the process of continuous resegregation. The desegregation of black students, which increased continuously from the 1950s to the late 1980s, has receded to levels not seen in three decades." The proportion of black students in majority-white schools stands at "a level lower than in any year since 1968." The four most segregated states for black students, according to a recent study by the Civil Rights Project, are New York, Michigan, Illinois and California. In New York, only one black student in seven goes to a predominantly white school.

The fashionable reflex nowadays is to declare that integration "failed" and to settle instead, in Orfield's words, for better ways of "doing Plessy" in the urban schools as they now stand. Such declarations of futility ignore the reality that as many as 10 million black, white and Hispanic children have attended school together in interdistrict programs in which integrated schooling has become a fact of life for an entire generation of black children. In large numbers, the inner-city students in these programs have gone on to universities and colleges and become civic leaders in their own communities.

More:

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051219/kozol