Schools are segregated again

by By Jennifer D. Jordan
Journal Staff Writer

The Providence Journal
http://www.projo.com/news/content/kozol_27_02-27-07_M84JIMP.10dcd8a.html

07:50 PM EST on Monday, February 26, 2007

NEWPORT - American schools across the country are more racially isolated than at any time before 1954, when federal courts demanded schools be desegregated, said Jonathan Kozol, an award-winning author and educator. The result, he said, is an inherently unequal and unjust education system.

Over the past five years, Kozol visited 60 public schools in 11 states. He paints a picture of overcrowded, poorly financed, chaotic urban schools where 98 percent of students are minority, usually black and Hispanic. Kozol contrasts these schools with those in middle-class suburbs, where schools are pleasant and clean and staffed by experienced teachers and where the majority of students are white. His latest book, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in
America, calls for communities and the federal government to integrate schools.

“In terms of elemental class and racial justice, we stand at one of the most perilous and reactionary moments in our nation’s history,” Kozol told an audience of about 300 last night at Salve Regina University. “In public schools, the physical isolation and racial segregation of black and Latino children has come back with a vengeance in the 15 years since the Rehnquist court has begun to dismantle Brown vs. Board of Education,” he said, referring to U.S. Supreme Court rulings that have weakened the 1954 decision to desegregate schools.

Kozol - a Harvard graduate and Rhodes Scholar who has written about children, poverty, race and education - began working in Boston public schools in the 1960s during the height of the civil-rights movement. Since then, he has written best-selling books and won several prizes, including the National Book Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Book Award, among others.

For Shame of the Nation, Kozol visited schools in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles and several other cities. “If you look at a picture taken in any of these schools, they are indistinguishable from photographs of typical classrooms in Mississippi in the 1930s or 1940s,” Kozol said. “I simply never see white children in these schools.”

Instead of legally enforced apartheid, which existed before the 1954 decision, the United States now has socially and economically enforced apartheid in many Northern cities, he said.

In Rhode Island, students in most suburban schools are mostly white - 90 to 98 percent in some districts. In contrast, 87 percent of the 25,000 students attending Providence public schools were minorities in 2005. In Central Falls schools, 83 percent of students are Hispanic and black. Pawtucket represents one of the most integrated districts - about half the students are white and about half are black and Hispanic.

Racial inequity is rarely discussed today by political and education leaders, Kozol argues. Instead, public attention has turned to No Child Left Behind, a complex system of federal laws that requires tougher standards, yearly testing and more accountability from schools.

“One of the worst forms of intellectual decapitation in a deeply segregated school is that kids never know what opportunities are
available to children in mainstream society,” Kozol said in an interview before the lecture. “No one wants to talk about this anymore.”

Kozol criticized the recent focus on standardized test scores, saying the pressure compels teachers in urban schools to narrow the curriculum and dedicate vast amounts of times to rote drills, rather than to genuine learning. The achievement gap between white and minority students is not narrowing and high school dropout rates in urban districts have risen in the five years since No Child Left Behind became law, Kozol said.

“No matter what standards we proclaim, no matter how high we set the tests, you won’t solve the problem within an apartheid schooling system,” Kozol said. “The Brown decision was right. The Warren court was right. Dr. Martin Luther King was right. Segregated schools are inherently unequal, even if you pump the money in, even if you get money from private foundations, even if you have mentors.”

Kozol said that five decades of working in and visiting urban schools have convinced him that most black and Hispanic parents would jump at the chance to send their children to top-notch schools in the suburbs.

He points to Boston’s integration program, Metco, which buses 3,000 inner-city students a year into high-performing school districts in the suburbs. About 90 percent of Metco students graduate in four years and continue on to college. The program currently has 16,000 students on itswait list, which Kozol says represents a third of Boston’s minority students.

Kozol wants leaders to strengthen and expand the school-choice provision of the federal education law, which permits students to transfer to another school if their home school gets low test scores for several consecutive years. Currently, students can only request transfers within their district, and few students avail themselves of this option.

“They ought to amend the transfer provision to compel districts surrounding our urban centers to open their doors to transfers for minority kids or underserved inner city kids,” he said.

Ultimately, school integration would require deeper changes, such as requiring suburban communities to offer more affordable housing and changing education-funding formulas. But the first step would be widespread busing, Kozol said.

“You’ve got to break the apartheid first and the only practical way it will happen in the next 10 to 15 years is allowing massive transfers to the suburban districts,” Kozol said. “Once you do that, you will have a generation of well-educated minority grown-ups who will have the clout to start the transformation of urban schools.”

Integration programs throughout the country have been successful and need to be expanded, Kozol said.

“Look at the thousands of Metco kids who went on to college and are successful in their careers,” he said. “I know integration works. It shouldn’t be a big surprise to anyone that Dr. King was right. The irony is that we celebrate Martin Luther King Day every year and recite his ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. But no one wants to talk about what his dream was. His dream was not to have segregated and unequal schools with high test scores. His dream was that little black children and little white children will sit together at the table of brotherhood,” Kozol said. “It almost never happens anymore.”