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Apartheid Education

By Jonathan Kozol, The Nation. Posted December 8, 2005.


De-segregating schools may seem a notion of the past. But it could be a weapon against gaps in achievement.
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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.

In the Milwaukee area, for instance, 22 suburban districts currently participate in a student-transfer program to promote school integration across district lines, which has been in operation now for nearly 30 years. Under the program 4,000 students transfer between Milwaukee and its suburbs. In the middle-class suburb of Shorewood, for example, 11 percent of the student population comes into the district from Milwaukee.

Including minority children who already live in Shorewood, says Jack Linehan, the recently retired superintendent, "our school district is about 19 percent black and Hispanic, and the community has a great comfort level with that… I think parents got to know each other as friends… I think that evaporated away a lot of the psychological resistance." Linehan also notes that starting integration in the elementary grades made it much easier for children "simply to be children with each other." Stereotypes fall away, he adds. "It's more difficult to conjure up 'the other' when you're building sand castles together."

In St. Louis also, a suburban-urban interdistrict transfer program has been in place for more than 20 years. The program, initiated under a court order in 1983, today enrolls about 10,000 children from the city, who represent nearly a quarter of the school-age population of black children in St. Louis, while about 500 children from the suburbs make the opposite commute.

Although recent cutbacks in the funds provided by the state to underwrite these transfers have imposed a heavier financial burden on the 16 districts that participate, most of the education leaders there have made clear their preference to continue with the program even in the face of opposition from the state.

In the Louisville area as well, school integration, initially carried out under court order, has now been in place without court order for a quarter-century. The sweep of the program, under which the city schools and county schools have been combined into a single system in which more than 90,000 black, Hispanic, white and Asian children are enrolled, has had the effect of rendering Kentucky's public schools the most desegregated in the nation. The typical black student in Kentucky now attends a school in which two-thirds of the enrollment is Caucasian.

When a proposal was made in 1991 to terminate or cut back on Kentucky's integration program, protests were voiced by community groups, the teachers union, the local press, the Jefferson County Human Relations Commission and the regional branch of the National Conference of Christians and Jews.

A survey revealed that the number of black parents who believed their children's education had improved under the busing plan exceeded those who took the opposite position by a ratio of six to one. Less than 2 percent believed that education for their children would be better in resegregated schools. Despite occasional recurrences of opposition from groups or individuals who represent small pockets of resistance, support for school desegregation in the Louisville community continues strong and unabated to the present day.


Digg!

Jonathan Kozol is an educator, and activist, known for his best-selling book Amazing Grace: The Lives of Children and the Conscience of a Nation.

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View:
Ethnogensis Is The Cure For Ethnocide
Posted by: Al-Arkam on Dec 8, 2005 2:48 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
The systematic mal-education of millions of slave descendants is something which Caucasian America has always done with malice aforethought. There can be no reversal of educational apartheid unless the U.S. government is forced to acknowledge that it has brutally imposed ethnocide and forced assimilation on our people for centuries and continues to do so today. As the Honorable Silis Muhammad has repeatedly emphasized in interventions before the U.N. Human Rights Commission, the cure for ethnocide is ethnogenesis. We the Afrodescendants throughout the western hemisphere must be restored politically, economically and culturally. We must first establish our Human Rights and then secure massive Reparations, including the power of self-determination. That includes the ability to design, build and staff our own independent educational institutions. If the liberal white media is sincere, they will start giving feature coverage to our Reparations Movement, instead of hiding it through systematic non-coverage in much the same way that the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Washington post have done.
Sincerely,
Malik Al-Arkam
www.AllForReparations.org

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» RE: defiling our religion Posted by: amatullah
Kozol Sounds The Alarm
Posted by: malcolmartin on Dec 8, 2005 10:28 AM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Warning flags are flying over America’s public schools.

The approaching storm is a creation of this nation’s wealthiest and most powerful corporate leaders. They are lead by men who first mapped out their strategy at the Business Roundtable’s education summit in Charlottesville, Virginia in 1989. They came down from the summit as the newly formed Business Coalition for Education Reform and sent out a message—evacuate the public schools!

The ensuing New Orleans-style exodus has since transformed the public schools into America’s Superdome. Huddled inside of neglected and crumbling public school buildings now are the mostly Black and Latino children of poor and working-class parents. It is these children’s broken bodies and spirits that will lie amid the wreckage after the storm has passed.

The bringers of the storm have a dream and a game plan for making it real. They are men unsated by billions in profits plying young people with X-Boxes, iPods, Big Macs, Air Jordans, cellphones, Sprite, MTV, and B.E.T. They want their cake and they fully intend to eat it too! Their vision of the future includes the transfer of billions of dollars in annual public school funding into their own pockets. Their goal is a downsized and exclusive for-profit school system to train and educate only the children created in their own image and likeness.

But the American people’s reverence for equal opportunity stands between the corporate nightriders and their mission. Our history recalls public education as a partner of the abolition of slavery in a grand post-Civil War experiment in democracy. For that reason their designs must be concealed behind the façade of education reform and the smokescreen of school choice. The corporate agents of public school destruction can be difficult to ferret out but look and listen for their rhetoric and there you will find them.

To be continued...

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Kozol Sounds The Alarm Continued
Posted by: malcolmartin on Dec 8, 2005 10:32 AM   
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Their game plan is being executed when you hear the men and women—parents, and the children they are raising—students, described as “stakeholders” along with the teachers and administrators. So completely enthralled are they with the business model of school management, the human beings involved are reduced to nothing more than isolated owners of a speck of a giant corporation. Public schools will be run like ExxonMobile, Microsoft, Wal-Mart, or Enron.

Their game plan is advanced when a crushing tedium and a spiritless boredom is inflicted on public school children under the guise of “rigor”. Testing is for public schools. Start testing the pre-teen child in the third grade. Keep testing every year until the schools become testing factories and then testing sweatshops where children labor to no useful end. The music, art, dance, theater, physical education and vocational classes are for private schools. Recess and field trips are for rich kids!

Their game plan is advanced when teachers are mired in endless, mind-numbing, irrational record keeping requirements because education must be “data driven” to be effective and efficient. They count on the weight of this mountain of meaningless paperwork to contribute to the disillusionment and physical collapse of teachers before the deathblows are struck.

Their game plan counts heavily on racism. While they fully intend to leave behind African-American, Latino, Native American and immigrant children, they will wring their hands in public over the “achievement gap” because it helps obscure other gaps in the nation’s social fabric. America’s household assets gap, the average white family owns 14 times the average Black family, is never factored into test score analysis. Nor the infant mortality gap, more than twice the rate for Black mothers, the life expectancy gap, the health care gap, nutrition gap, the employment gap…

To be continued...

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Their Brave New Education System
Posted by: malcolmartin on Dec 8, 2005 10:35 AM   
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They are forced to buy influence in the Black community. It is enemy territory and snake oil salesmen like Armstrong Williams and charlatans like Rod Paige must front their message. The US Department of Education had to pass thirty pieces of silver to Williams for his No Child Left Behind promotion. Paige put a blackface on the phrase “the soft bigotry of low expectations” and was able to call the biggest education fraud in history “the Houston Miracle” with a straight face. He was rewarded with a spot in George Bush’s cabinet.

Their game day slogan is “No Excuses” because it helps excuse away certain damning realities. Historically low levels of federal education spending and lower state funding of public schools, “No Excuses”. The perfect correlation of poverty and low standardized test scores, “No Excuses”. The re-segregation of America’s schools, “No Excuses”. Excuses are reserved for corporate downsizing, the outsourcing of jobs, escaping from pension and health care plans through bankruptcy filings, corrupt accounting practices and insider trading, offshore tax avoidance schemes, and obscene profit making.

Then there is the most potent rhetorical weapon in the CEO’s arsenal. They shout it in the faces of 9-year-old children. They bludgeon parents, teachers, administrators, elected school boards and whole school districts with it. Failed! Failure! Failing! F! When the time is right they will condemn the whole idea of educating all of America’s children—a noble but failed experiment. On the ashes they would build their Brave New World.

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astockton
Posted by: astockton on Dec 8, 2005 7:37 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Totally frivolous comment...but as a native of Louisville, I'm SO happy Kozol said simply "Louisville" and not "Louisville, Ky." Yes, there are other Louisvilles, but the home of the world-famous Kentucky Derby should not need the "Ky." modifier.

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» RE: astockton Posted by: ALANHESTER
Liberal theology has trashed the American Education System.
Posted by: wdzeller on Dec 9, 2005 12:19 PM   
Current rating: Not yet rated    [1 = poor; 5 = excellent]
Jonathon Kozol is nothing but another damned socialist who continues to spew forth both new and continuing old ideas as to how their so-called progressive propaganda can be foisted upon local schools, either by the indoctrination of students through "modern" instructional methods, or wholesale control of community schools by imperial government fiat.

For example, Mr. Kozol believes that instead of children attending their own local schools, they should be bused to schools all over a community to seek some sort of hallowed "racial integration". The fact is local schools which have either predominately "white" and predominately "black" student populations merely reflect the population demographics of the communities within they exist.

Mr. Kozol obviously sees nothing wrong with spending vast sums of precious money to send students from one school to the next, all the while these students are not being properly educated. Shouldn't this money that is used to purchase massive quantities of fuel and other transportation related items required for busing instead be spent towards the actual education of the poor children in our various communities? Shouldn't this be the issue that Mr. Kozol is discussing, rather than some feel-good approach that one can brag about to another fellow "progressive" at a cocktail party?

Mr. Kozol does not mention how our schools have generally fared under "progressive" leadership for over 70 years. Instruction, testing, and promotion have been watered down so much since the early 1930's that the concept of "education" has become a complete failure in many schools. Remember, it was the "progressives" who in 1930 ordered that children be taught how to read by the whole-word method rather than the "old-fashioned" phonics methods. As a result, nowadays between 25% to 30% of our students are functionally illiterate.
Compare these facts to statistics from 1930, when the overall illiteracy rate was only 4%. Even in the Northern U.S. Cities, 81% of the black pupils were literate, and this was in a time when African-Americans were systematically discriminated against on both a daily basis and an institutional basis as well.

Again. shouldn't the money that is spent for busing go to the programs that are necessary to prepare a high school student for entry into college? Instead, Mr. Kozol speaks of an issue which is morally and intellectually bankrupt.

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