Tuesday, March 22, 2011
The continuing segregation in our schools
The subject of Bob Herbert's column today is something that is no longer legal but continues anyway.
Educators know that it is very difficult to get consistently good results in schools characterized by high concentrations of poverty. The best teachers tend to avoid such schools. Expectations regarding student achievement are frequently much lower, and there are lower levels of parental involvement. These, of course, are the very schools in which so many black and Hispanic children are enrolled.And none of the people who can solve this problem want to be part of the solution. Perhaps the increases in economic segregation being fostered by Republican/Teabaggers will produce some trueracial integration as more and more whites sink into poverty.
Breaking up these toxic concentrations of poverty would seem to be a logical and worthy goal. Long years of evidence show that poor kids of all ethnic backgrounds do better academically when they go to school with their more affluent — that is, middle class — peers. But when the poor kids are black or Hispanic, that means racial and ethnic integration in the schools. Despite all the babble about a postracial America, that has been off the table for a long time.
More than a half-century after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education school desegregation ruling, we are still trying as a country to validate and justify the discredited concept of separate but equal schools — the very idea supposedly overturned by Brown v. Board when it declared, “Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.”
Schools are no longer legally segregated, but because of residential patterns, housing discrimination, economic disparities and long-held custom, they most emphatically are in reality.
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Must be something in the air. I wrote that one Saturday night, Bob Herbert does the same basic column today.
- Badtux the Memetic Penguin
- Badtux the Memetic Penguin
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