The Atlantic has a piece about a new wave of desegregation efforts by local public school districts, trying to reverse de facto re-segregation. Excerpts:
[US Secretary of Education John] King is pushing cities and districts to make deliberate choices that yield better outcomes. Districts looking to integrate could, he posited, instead take two segregated elementary schools (say, one serving affluent white families and another serving low-income families of color) and instead create two integrated campuses, one for kindergarten through second grade, and another for the third through fifth grades.
King’s desire to “incentivize and accelerate” such deliberate attempts at integration might be laudable, but they’ve often been met with fierce opposition in places like Brooklyn and Charlotte, North Carolina. Pushback comes both from families at high-performing schools who are happy with the status quo, and from families at struggling neighborhood schools who want them improved instead of turned into a citywide series of magnet programs that might result in their kids trekking across town each morning. “We have not made as much progress on this front as we could have and should have in this country,” he said. And King is aware that housing policy will need to better align with education policy to make significant headway.
So, neither poor nor rich parents want this, though for different reasons, yet the government wants it to happen, and is willing to bus kids across town for the sake of social engineering? It’s like the Seventies never happened. And what does he mean by “housing policy will need to better align with education policy”? Building Section 8 housing in well-off neighborhoods? Seriously, what could this possibly mean other than that?
More:
Drawing on anecdotes from a recent visit to a Las Vegas magnet school, his own upbringing, and his experience as a father of children in Maryland public schools, [King] pointed out that all children benefit from diverse schools. Across the board, academic outcomes are higher, students learn empathy, and they are better prepared to succeed at college and in the workforce. In other words, demanding diverse schools doesn’t just sound nice, it has real benefits for everyone involved.
Can this be proven? I’m asking seriously. I’ve been through too much diversity training in the workplace, in which extravagant but groundless claims were made for the benefits of diversity, to buy this stuff uncritically.
The problem few education business professionals talk about in these conversations is the role of culture in educational success. It’s the factor that gets set aside in these deliberations. If you talk to teachers who teach in schools where most of the kids are poor, especially poor minorities, you will hear stories of radical communal dysfunction. A couple of weeks ago, I met an African-American who works at a Louisiana public school, who told me that the children of the poor at her school come from such dysfunctional homes that the school struggles to cope with them. “They think we’re their mamas,” she said. “It breaks your heart. They have no one else.”
Which yes, is heartbreaking. But looked at from an educational policy point of view, students who come from homes that are stable, and in which the parent or parents support the educational mission, are undoubtedly going to be at a disadvantage by having to share the classroom with a number of kids who, through no fault of their own, have none of those once-common factors in their lives. You could make a moral argument that being part of the same community means those who have more, in the sense that I mean, ought to be willing to share the same school with those who have much less. But let’s be honest about what we’re asking.
We have a good public school system in my parish, but I’ve talked to parents who have pulled their kids out of public schools in other parts of Louisiana because of discipline problems within the school. They either didn’t feel that their kids were safe, or they got tired of their kids’ education being disrupted by other kids who would not behave, and who took up so much of the teachers’ instructional time on basic discipline. If there is chaos in the individual student’s home and community, they will bring that into the school. I have friends — all of them idealists — who left teaching because they couldn’t deal with this kind of thing, nor with an educational bureaucracy that could not or would not bring itself to face reality.
There seems to be an unstated liberal premise in these discussions: that the only reason that middle class people want to avoid the poor in the public schools is because of racism or snobbery. Sure, that probably has something to do with it. But it seems to me more likely that what the middle class people want to avoid is putting their children into a situation in which a significant number of the students do not carry within their heads a culture amenable to learning — and that the culture these unfortunate kids do carry in their heads is going to make it much harder for their own children to get an education in a safe, stable environment. If I had to choose, I would much rather my kid go to a school in which she was a racial minority, but the ethos of the school was disciplined and geared towards real learning, than a school in which everybody looked like her, but there was no discipline and little concern for education among the students.
Again, you could make an argument from social solidarity and charity for engineering this kind of diversity. But that’s not the argument being made. Rather, the people advancing this position make the claim that diversity creates better outcomes for everybody. Really? Can we prove that? By what measure?
Besides, why can’t people have their neighborhood schools, as long as the funding is more or less equal? What’s wrong with that? Why should any parent, black, white, or brown, have to bus their kid halfway across the city to fit some social planner’s ideal? Haven’t we been down this road before? Are we really going to break up organic neighborhoods and settlement patterns to force them to fit the fantasies of social planners?
What we’re dealing with now, I think, is the loss of a common culture, with a common set of expectations, and with a shared respect for authority. There’s no amount of abstract social engineering that’s going to get that back.
I could be wrong, and I welcome evidence to the contrary.