Jim Crow moves north

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A new U.S. Department of Education study shows that the map of racial performance disparity is changing across the country. Seems the south no longer holds the crown when it comes to the black-white achievement gap.

[B]lack students have made important gains in several Southern states over two decades, while in some Northern states, black achievement has improved more slowly than white achievement, or has even declined, according to a study of the black-white achievement gap released by the Department of Education this morning.

As a result, the nation’s most dramatic black-white gaps are no longer seen in Southern states like Alabama or Mississippi, but rather in Northern and Midwestern states like Wisconsin, Nebraska, Connecticut and Illinois, according to the federal data.

via Regional Shift Seen in Education Gap – NYTimes.com.

Nationwide, the worst disparity is found in Wisconsin, of all places. But as surprising as this may appear, it shouldn’t. Things have been moving in this direction for some time.  The country’s two-tiered education system — and its persistent and deepening segregation along racial lines — is largely to blame.

The facts regarding the de facto segregation in our schools leave little room for interpretation: America’s children are educated within two distinct education systems. One is healthy, and one is struggling. And although class is probably the greatest factor driving the inequalities between the two systems today, the correlation between one’s racial identity and the system to which one has access is strikingly rigid in many places throughout the country.

Put another way: America’s children are educated within two distinct education systems. One is mostly white. The other is mostly not. The achievement gap arises because, overall, one does much better than the other.

Guess which one?

Jonathan Kozol, writing in the September 2005 issue of Harper’s, pointed out just how stark the racial segregation of our schools is today in his article, “Still Separate, Still Unequal: America’s Educational Apartheid”:

In Chicago, by the academic year 2002-2003, 87 percent of public-school enrollment was black or Hispanic; less than 10 percent of children in the schools were white. In Washington, D.C., 94 percent of children were black or Hispanic; less than 5 percent were white. In St. Louis, 82 percent of the student population were black or Hispanic; in Philadelphia and Cleveland, 79 percent; in Los Angeles, 84 percent, in Detroit, 96 percent; in Baltimore, 89 percent. In New York City, nearly three quarters of the students were black or Hispanic.

Legal segregation was, of course, struck down n 1954 with Brown v. Board of Education. But despite that early potential, the promise of the civil rights movement was, in this case, entirely reneged. Early desegregation successes in America’s public schools gave way over time to the reality of a new, de facto segregation: though not legally mandated, it is every bit as divided. Ironically, segregation has moved north since the days of Jim Crow. Just look at how many of the cities mentioned above are in states that never abided by Plessy v. Ferguson.

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that the mostly-minority public schools command far fewer of our tax dollars per student than their mostly white counterparts. And it isn’t necessarily a public v. private school thing. Public schools in wealthier (traditionally whiter) suburban areas likewise take in significantly more per student their minority-heavy counterparts. If you’re looking for a reason behind the growing achievement gap in so many of our cities, the truth of it lies in that simple fact.

Clearly much of the divergence — of races and resources — is due to self-segregation. Well-to-do or upwardly mobile parents (again, most often white) move away from rough streets and struggling school districts in favor of leafy enclaves with well-funded schools. This kind of self-segregation has been going on in my hometown of Indianapolis for quite some time. A Brookings Institute study of the 2000 Census data confirms what thumbnail impressions of “white flight” have long conveyed:  that white population dropped over the previous decade in the city, while it exploded in the suburbs.

Meanwhile, minority growth was confined mostly to the neighborhoods around downtown Indy — filling in the vacuum left behind by whites, essentially, taking advantage of the cheap housing and retail. Still, population has been declining more generally in central Indianapolis (and with it, the much needed tax dollars) since at least the 1950s. With the exception of a few recently gentrified neighborhoods close to downtown, I’ve seen nothing to indicate that this trend has reversed in any significant way since the 2000 Census.

Of course, no one wants to forfeit the right to choose his/her surroundings based on quality of education. But there’s more to it than white flight. As Kozol’s article and recent personal and professional experience attest, even in racially mixed neighborhoods, the schools often tend toward the disproportionately segregated. The school district where I grew up provides the perfect example.

My best friend’s mother, who still teaches where I went to high school, told me a few days ago that the school comprised a roughly 85% minority population now — up from roughly half when I graduated, some 12 years ago. The township that feeds into it — not long ago about as white bread an environment as you could find — is certainly more ethnically diverse than it used to be, as are many suburban enclaves across middle America. But it isn’t 85% minority-populated. Not even close. Recent data suggest whites still constitute over half of Pike township’s population. Which means a lot of white kids, though they live in evenly mixed neighborhoods, are clearly being sent to school elsewhere.

As Kozol acerbically notes:

Perhaps most damaging to any serious effort to address racial segregation openly is the refusal of most of the major arbiters of culture in our northern cities to confront or even clearly name an obvious reality they would have castigated with a passionate determination in another section of the nation fifty years before-and which, moreover, they still castigate today in retrospective writings that assign it to a comfortably distant and allegedly concluded era of the past. There is, indeed, a seemingly agreed-upon convention in much of the media today not even to use an accurate descriptor like “racial segregation” in a narrative description of a segregated school. Linguistic sweeteners, semantic somersaults, and surrogate vocabularies are repeatedly employed. Schools in which as few as 3 or 4 percent of students may be white or Southeast Asian or of Middle Eastern origin, for instance-and where every other child in the building is black or Hispanicare referred to as “diverse.”

That certainly sounds like a lot of educators, business-speakers, wonks, academics and would-be do-gooders I know. Until we’re ready to start having better, more honest conversations about modern day segregation, we may as well give up trying to figure out the racial achievement gap.