What Really Divides High Schools?

By Alicia Rebensdorf, WireTap. Posted November 13, 2000.

It's an old American dream. Black kids and white kids eating and playing together. Sharing the same classrooms. Drinking from the same water fountains. But take a look at most public schools today, and it seems Brown v. Board never happened. Schools in the ghettos serve minorities, schools in the suburbs serve whites, and the few that are in between are segregated by academic tracks and white flight to private schools.

Of course, there are a few schools that come closer to the dream than most. One such anomaly is located in the aggressively liberal city of Berkeley, CA: Berkeley High School (BHS), the most racially diverse high school in the nation. At 38 percent African-American, 31 percent white, 14 percent Hispanic, 8 percent Asian and 8 percent multiracial, BHS has actively worked against the national trend of resegregation. They have decided to fight the cultural, economic and social divisions that mark our society, consolidating both their wealthier white students and their poorer black and Latino students into a single, 3,200 strong student body.

But though the campus shows a rich cultural diversity, its achievement statistics shine a glaring light on the spectacle of racial inequality. The average white BHS student boasts a 3.2 grade point average while his black peer posts a 2.1. White BHS kids average in the top 85 percent of students nationwide, while their black classmates average in the below 40 percent. Most of the white students go on to four-year colleges, while most black students fail or drop out.

But statistics can't tell you everything. They can't tell you what those BHS students behind the numbers feel about how race and class move them up or hold them down. For that, you have to turn to the students themselves -- to the Keiths and Autumns and Jordans of BHS. Enter their world for a school year and you'll get a hard, pointed look at the state of today's public education.

Keith, Autumn and Jordan are the central characters of Class Dismissed, the newest book by author Meredith Maran. Maran spent a year researching racial inequities in public high schools -- and putting a face to the numbers -- by following three students from Berkeley High's senior class. She attended their classes, went to their games, spent time with their families, interviewed their teachers, and tracked their challenges in their final year of high school. Through their individual lives, Maran shows how the system helps some and fails other segments of a diverse population.

Keith is an African-American football star with limited literacy. He has several supportive teachers and coaches in the school who help him through school bureaucracy that screws up most student's schedules and offer tutoring support when he teeters on failing. Unfortunately, it is not enough to defeat years of academic neglect. Like many black students with early underachievement, he was placed in special ed classes instead of getting help and since than, his dreams were driven only by the prospect of football. Keith's a popular guy in school, but that's no help when he is arrested DWB (Driving While Black). His frustration at what he sees as an unjust arrest are interpreted by the police as resistance and get his ass kicked and put in jail (on prom night, no less).

Autumn is a biracial young woman -- her mom's black and her father is white -- who cares for two younger brothers, works after school and strives to be the first in her family to go to college. Autumn works hard for what she wants, and in some respects, gets it. Despite an after-school job and a mother who cannot provide much support, Autumn gets good grades and attends AP classes where she is one of only two students of color. Still, even if she gets into her top colleges, she doubts she will be able to afford tuition, much less room or board.

"With all the other factors in their lives, why should schools rectify the economic disparity, institutionalized racism and social segregation they face? Meredith Maran's response was to flip the question on its head. If our education system is not designed to address these inequalities, she asks, what is?"

But while Autumn works so hard, Jordan makes it look like a breeze. Jordan is a Caucasian, upper-middle class student with a personal college counselor and apathetic outlook. Though he didn't skate through his teens stress-free (his father died a year before), Jordan finds schoolwork easy and should have no problem sliding into the school of his choice. When Berkeley High's bureaucracy accidentally sends colleges his and many other students' wrong set of mid-term grades, Jordan is denied his top schools and spirals into depression. Read in contrast, his frustrations seem in direct resistance to his background -- rather than a product of it, like Keith's.

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