Broadening the Narrative: March 2020

Estimated Reading Time: 20 minutes

I am continuing in the systemic racism series here on the Broadening the Narrative blog. To learn more about this series, you can read the first post [“Systemic Racism Series Introduction”], the second post [“Systemic Racism Series: Whiteness”], the third post [“Systemic Racism Series: Wealth”], and the fourth post [“Systemic Racism Series: Employment”]. Today’s post addresses systemic racism in K-12 education. I will include the data and history behind the segregation and disparities in the current educational system, provide action steps, and link recommended resources for further exploration and education.

Data

Let’s look at segregation and funding in the education system.

Segregation

Tanvi Misra interviewed Nikole Hannah-Jones, “an award-winning investigative reporter who covers civil rights and racial injustice for The New York Times Magazine.” I think a good place to start is with the October 12, 2017 interview “Confronting the Myths of Segregation,” where Nikole Hannah Jones said, “Well, let me first say that in many places there has never been desegregation in the first place—New York City being one of those places. Resegregation is almost always in the South because the South was forced by court order to actually integrate schools. Most of the North was not. And even though there were some Northern cities placed under court order because of housing segregation, they often were unsuccessful.”

According to the U.S. News & World Report article “U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to Congress: Make School Funding More Equitable” from January 11, 2018, Lauren Camera cited the committee’s report findings by writing, “Segregation in schools by race and income is getting worse, the report underscores. Some school districts are still under their original desegregation consent decrees as a result of the landmark 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, having never sufficiently addressed its segregation issues. Others, meanwhile, are finding new ways to self-segregate, with some wealthier and white communities attempting to break away from their poorer and more diverse school district.”

In “The Disturbing History of the Suburbs,” Season 1 Episode 43 of Adam Ruins Everything, Nikole Hannah-Jones explained, “People tend to think of segregation as an archaic term for a Jim Crow policy that led to the Civil Rights Movement. But the truth is that Black children are more segregated in schools now than in any time since the 1970s.”

ProPublica’s Segregation Now: The Resegregation of U.S. Schools project features nationwide numbers and personal stories of those affected by resegregation. In the article, “School Segregation After Brown” by Jeff Larson, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and Mike Tigas from May 1, 2014, they reported, “From 1993 to 2011, the number of black students in schools where 90 percent or more of the student population are minorities rose from 2.3 million to over 2.9 million.” There is also a list of school districts that were or are under a desegregation order. You can scroll down to the table to check the status of school desegregation orders that are closed or still active across the nation.

In the Vox article from March 5, 2018 titled “The Data Proves that School Segregation is Getting Worse” by Alvin Chang, the author addresses a common argument against this claim while clarifying that how segregation is measured matters. Alvin Chang pointed out, “The data shows that black students in the South are less likely to attend a school that is majority white than about 50 years ago...Black children are now more likely to grow up in poor neighborhoods than they were 50 years ago. This is important because a large body of research shows that growing up in heavily segregated, poor neighborhoods affects everything from your education level, your future earnings, and your happiness to your health and, ultimately, your life span. But in many of these areas, where you live determines where you go to school. So when we see students who are racially isolated, it’s describing both underlying residential segregation and how little school districts do to ameliorate that segregation. As it turns out, things have been getting worse since the 1980s when we look at segregation using this isolation frame...So if broader segregation has increased, it might be reflected in our schools, as school attendance zones are often drawn based on where you live. This is partially what has entrenched the heavily segregated school attendance zones in virtually every American city.”

In another Vox article by Alvin Chang from July 27, 2017 titled “School Segregation Didn’t Go Away. It Just Evolved,” Alvin Chang wrote about the gerrymandering that has resulted in districts becoming more segregated by race and class. He reported that “organizers in Gardendale, Alabama, decided it was time to secede from the Jefferson County School District — because of the changing ‘dynamics.’...And it’s not just Jefferson County. Since 2000, 70 other communities have tried to secede from their district, according to the recent EdBuild report. Two-thirds of those of those secession attempts have been successful, and most of the other cases are still ongoing.”

In the “Segregation Now” story by Nikole Hannah-Jones in the May 2014 issue of the Atlantic, Nikole-Hannah Jones wrote about the Dent family in Tuscaloosa, Alabama and connected the events in Tuscaloosa to other cities in the nation. James Dent attended segregated schools, his daughter Melissa attended desegregated schools, and his granddaughter D’Leisha is attending a resegregated school. Nikole Hannah-Jones reported, “Tuscaloosa’s schools today are not as starkly segregated as they were in 1954, the year the Supreme Court declared an end to separate and unequal education in America. No all-white schools exist anymore—the city’s white students generally attend schools with significant numbers of black students. But while segregation as it is practiced today may be different than it was 60 years ago, it is no less pernicious: in Tuscaloosa and elsewhere, it involves the removal and isolation of poor black and Latino students, in particular, from everyone else. In Tuscaloosa today, nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened. Tuscaloosa’s school resegregation—among the most extensive in the country—is a story of city financial interests, secret meetings, and angry public votes. It is a story shaped by racial politics and a consuming fear of white flight. It was facilitated, to some extent, by the city’s black elites. And it was blessed by a U.S. Department of Justice no longer committed to fighting for the civil-rights aims it had once championed. Certainly what happened in Tuscaloosa was no accident. Nor was it isolated. Schools in the South, once the most segregated in the country, had by the 1970s become the most integrated, typically as a result of federal court orders. But since 2000, judges have released hundreds of school districts, from Mississippi to Virginia, from court-enforced integration, and many of these districts have followed the same path as Tuscaloosa’s—back toward segregation. Black children across the South now attend majority-black schools at levels not seen in four decades. Nationally, the achievement gap between black and white students, which greatly narrowed during the era in which schools grew more integrated, widened as they became less so. In recent years, a new term, apartheid schools—meaning schools whose white population is 1 percent or less, schools like Central—has entered the scholarly lexicon. While most of these schools are in the Northeast and Midwest, some 12 percent of black students in the South now attend such schools—a figure likely to rise as court oversight continues to wane. In 1972, due to strong federal enforcement, only about 25 percent of black students in the South attended schools in which at least nine out of 10 students were racial minorities. In districts released from desegregation orders between 1990 and 2011, 53 percent of black students now attend such schools, according to an analysis by ProPublica.”

Funding

According to “The Ultimate White Privilege Statistics and Data Post”,

- “The U.S. is one of only 3 of the 34 O.E.C.D. nations to give fewer resources and have lower teacher/student ratios in poorer communities than in more privileged communities.

- ‘[T]he vast majority of O.E.C.D. countries either invest equally into every student or disproportionately more into disadvantaged students. The U.S. is one of the few countries doing the opposite.’

- In New York, the value of the poorest 10% of school districts was $287,000 per student. In the richest districts, that number was $1.9 million per student.

- In the 2010-11 school year, the wealthiest 10% of New York school districts spent $25,505 per student. The poorest 10% of school districts spent $12,861 per student.

- The state of New York spends $19,000 per student on average. Tennessee spends $8,200, and some districts in Utah as little as $5,321.

- In Illinois, Nevada, New Hampshire, and North Carolina, school districts with a poverty rate of 30% received at least 20% less funding per student than districts with a 10% poverty rate.

- Only 17 states provide more funding to high-poverty districts than to low-poverty districts.”

In the “Confronting the Myths of Segregation” interview referenced above, Nikole Hannah-Jones stated, “What we see come immediately out of [Brown v. Board], when you can no longer explicitly use race to segregate schools, is a very adaptive strategy that white Americans have. Suddenly, you take up the banner of race-neutral language that you know will produce the same result. So it becomes about ‘local control’—saying ‘our tax dollars shouldn’t go to educate other children,’ or ‘we want a small local school system that only serves our community.’ Of course, that community is all white.”

In the Adam Ruins Everything video referenced above, Adam Conover stated, “And in the U.S., schools are largely funded by property taxes. Since property values in the white neighborhoods are so much higher, their schools get way more money to spend on things like facilities, teachers, and supplies.” Nikole Hannah-Jones followed this up by explaining, “On the other hand, predominantly Black and Latino schools are massively underfunded. They’re less likely to have AP, Science, and Math courses, and they’re the least likely to have experienced and qualified teachers.”

In the Vox article referenced above “School Segregation Didn’t Go Away. It Just Evolved,” Alvin Chang wrote, “While Milliken v. Bradley created the legal framework that allows school secession to occur, [Rebecca] Sibilia says it's the structure of school funding that creates the incentive. A huge chunk of school funding comes from local property taxes, instead of being a centralized pot of money at the state level. It creates this incentive for homeowners to band together with other better-to-do people, fence in that wealth, and use that money to improve only their schools. That, in turn, could increase their property values.”

In the U.S. News & World Report article referenced above, “U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to Congress: Make School Funding More Equitable,” Lauren Camera reported, “To be sure, state and local governments shoulder the lion’s share of spending on K-12 schools, accounting for about 90 percent of all school budgets. But how much state and local governments provide varies significantly and the formulas they use to distribute those dollars can often have unintended consequences, sometimes resulting in more money directed to already well-resourced schools and districts. In fact, 21 states, up from 14 last year, use funding formulas that provide less funding to school districts with higher concentrations of low‐income students, according to recent research from policymakers at the Education Law Center and Rutgers University's Graduate School of Education. Exacerbating funding inequity and access to resources further, local spending is dictated by property taxes, meaning property values and the wealth of a community often dictate the quality of schools. That’s why, for example, poorer schools often have less experienced and lower-paid teachers, fewer advanced placement courses, less access to school counselors and old facilities.”

There is obviously far more to discuss regarding race and education, especially how test scores and graduation rates are affected by segregation and funding, the school-to-prison pipeline, white-washed curriculum, and education beyond K-12. I will link additional resources at the end of this post.

History

Now let’s look at the past. The current segregation and education disparities exist and persist for a reason. We don’t live without our past as a nation informing and shaping our present.

It’s common knowledge that during the time of chattel slavery in the United States, slaves were not allowed to learn to read or write, anyone who attempted to teach slaves faced consequences, after the abolition of slavery the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson ruled that racial segregation for public facilities was constitutional provided the facilities were equal in quality, and the U.S. Supreme Court justices ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional in the 1954 case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. The history of redlining, however, is not a topic that is discussed as frequently in conversations about segregation in public schools. [Redlining was referenced in the “Systemic Racism Series: Wealth” post and will be covered in more detail in next month’s post on systemic racism in housing.]

On Fresh Air, a radio talk show broadcast on NPR, Terry Gross interviewed Richard Rothstein, author of The Color of Law, in the episode “A 'Forgotten History' Of How The U.S. Government Segregated America.” The writer of the summary stated, “In 1933, faced with a housing shortage, the federal government began a program explicitly designed to increase - and segregate - America's housing stock. Author Richard Rothstein says the housing programs begun under the New Deal were tantamount to a ‘state-sponsored system of segregation.’ The government's efforts were ‘primarily designed to provide housing to white, middle-class, lower-middle-class families,’ he says. African-Americans and other people of color were left out of the new suburban communities - and pushed instead into urban housing projects. Rothstein's new book, The Color of Law, examines the local, state and federal housing policies that mandated segregation. He notes that the Federal Housing Administration, which was established in 1934, furthered the segregation efforts by refusing to insure mortgages in and near African-American neighborhoods - a policy known as ‘redlining.’ At the same time, the FHA was subsidizing builders who were mass-producing entire subdivisions for whites - with the requirement that none of the homes be sold to African-Americans.”

In the Vox article “The Data Proves that School Segregation is Getting Worse” by Alvin Chang referenced above, Alvin Chang wrote, “Let’s just state this for the record: Racial segregation in schools was caused by white America’s policies that kept schools and neighborhoods white-only. For black families, this meant their country engineered for them a second-class experience — one that put them in poor, segregated ghettos and poor, segregated schools.” Or as Nikole Hannah-Jones said in the Adam Ruins Everything video referenced above, “[Segregation] is a direct result of decades of redlining policies enacted by our own government to build the suburbs.”

The origins of the Religious Right also explain the reasons for school segregation. To further illustrate this point, I turn to the book The Color of Compromise: The Truth about the American Church’s Complicity in Racism by Jemar Tisby. In Chapter 9: Organizing the Religious Right at the End of the Twentieth Century, Jemar Tisby explained:

“When most people think about the Religious Right, the matter of abortion comes to mind. Like no other issue, the rejection of legalized abortion has come to define the Religious Right. Repealing Roe v. Wade stands as a perennial high-priority issue for conservative Christian voters, so much so that today it is hard to imagine a time when that was not the case. But in the early 1970s, abortion was not the primary issue that catalyzed the Religious Right, as it would in later years. Initially, the Christian response to Roe v. Wade was mixed. Instead, conservative voters coalesced around the issue of racial integration in schools...the impetus that galvanized the Religious Right came from an unexpected source, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS). Historian Randall Balmer explains that conservative power brokers originally came together as a political force to combat what they perceived as an attack by the IRS and the federal government on Protestant Christian schools.Three black families in Mississippi sued the Treasury Department, headed by David Kennedy, to disallow tax-exempt status for three new ‘segregation academies’ in the country. In 1969, when the federal government began more aggressively enforcing desegregation, white attendance in public schools in the area plummeted from 771 to 28. The following year, exactly zero white students remained in the local public schools.

When the case of the black families went to court, the court granted a preliminary injunction and determined that any school - public or private - that discriminated on the basis of race could hold the designation of ‘charitable’ institution. In 1971, the Supreme Court upheld that decision in Green v. Connally and said that ‘racially discriminatory private schools are not entitled to Federal tax exemption provided for charitable, educational institutions.’ This ruling threatened the financial solvency of any Christian school that could not demonstrate an integrated student body or show positive efforts to desegregate. The IRS, however, did not strictly pursue penalties against racial discrimination, so very few schools felt the effects.

It only took one school, Bob Jones University, to bring the threat of government-enforced integration to the attention of Christian conservatives and to politically mobilize them...Bob Jones Sr. ostensibly started what would become Bob Jones University (BJU) not out of any racial considerations but to stand as a bulwark against what he saw as the increasing secularization and liberalism in the public schools...The IRS's guidelines about racial integration in 1978 sparked national outrage among many Christian conservatives. Department officials as well as members of Congress received tens of thousands of messages in protest. In an interview [Paul] Weyrich explained, ‘What galvanized the Christian community was not abortion, school prayer, or the [Equal Rights Amendment].... What changed their minds was Jimmy Carter's intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.’ While it would be wrong to suggest that racist resistance to integration was the single issue that held the Religious Right together in these years, it clearly provided an initial charge that electrified the movement...The growth of the Sunbelt and the white suburban ethos accompanying it meant that many politically and theologically conservative Christians strayed away from the use of explicitly race-based language and appeals. Yet those appeals did not disappear. Instead, they mobilized around the issue of taxation of private Christian schools, many of which remained racially segregated or made only token efforts at integration” (pp. 161-162, 165, 171).

As desegregation orders have ended, resegregation is often the result. Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote in the “Segregation Now” story referenced above, “In the early 1990s, an increasingly conservative Supreme Court had issued several crucial rulings that made it much easier for school systems to get out from under court supervision. The Court ruled that desegregation orders were never meant to be permanent, but rather were a ‘temporary measure to remedy past discrimination,’ and that school decisions should return to local control once a district had shown a “good faith” effort to eliminate segregation. Because of changing racial demographics and housing patterns, the Court also ruled that districts no longer had to prove that they’d eliminated segregation ‘root and branch,’ just that they’d done so to the ‘extent practicable.’ Once released, a school board could assign students however it chose, as long as no proof existed that it did so for discriminatory reasons...When President George W. Bush came into office, approximately 595 school districts nationwide - including dozens of non-southern districts - remained under court-ordered desegregation, according to a ProPublica analysis of data compiled by Stanford University researchers. By the end of Bush’s second term, that number had plummeted to 380. Nearly 60 percent of all the districts that have been released from their desegregation orders since 1967 were released under Bush, whose administration pressed the Justice Department to close those cases wherever possible. The trend has slowed under the Obama administration, but it has continued. Today, about 340 districts remain under court order. A 2012 Stanford study examined school districts with at least 2,000 students that had been released from court order since 1990, finding that, typically, these districts grew steadily more segregated after their release. A separate study found that within 10 years of being released, school districts on average unwound about 60 percent of the integration they had achieved under court order. One troubling truth is that, as witnessed in Tuscaloosa, backing away from integration doesn’t typically arrest or reverse the outflow of white students from diverse school districts. The Stanford researchers found that school systems’ white populations slightly declined after court orders ended. Many districts nonetheless continue to embrace the type of gerrymandering at play in Tuscaloosa...Few communities seem able to summon the political will to continue integration efforts. And the Obama administration, while saying integration is important, offers almost no incentives that would entice school districts to increase it. Instead, [Meredith] Richards says, districts have typically gerrymandered ‘to segregate, particularly whites from blacks,’ and that gerrymandering is ‘getting worse over time’ as federal oversight diminishes. According to an analysis by ProPublica, the number of apartheid schools nationwide has mushroomed from 2,762 in 1988—the peak of school integration—to 6,727 in 2011.”

You can also view the “Timeline: From Brown v. Board to Segregation Now” by Amanda Zamora, Christie Thompson and Nikole Hannah-Jones on ProPublica’s website to see events that center around segregation in chronological order.

Action Steps

Complete additional research on the topic of systemic racism in education. Obviously there is more to explore regarding education and systemic racism than I could possibly cover in a single blog post. I will link additional resources at the end of the post.

Study implicit bias. Read the State of the Science: Implicit Bias Review from the Kirwan Institute. Take the Implicit Association Test that was created by Project Implicit. In Lisa Sharon Harper’s book The Very Good Gospel: How Everything Wrong Can Be Made Right, she wrote, “The Kirwan study also found that implicit bias impacts the way teachers treat students, the way properties are valued - impacting school funding - and even the way health care functions” (Harper, 2016, p. 151).

Have action that follows the research and reflection.

- Support policies that improve education outcomes for people of color. In the Economic Policy Institute Report “Native Americans and Jobs: The Challenge and the Promise,” Algernon Austin explained regarding Native Americans specifically, “Educational attainment is a product of not just a child and the child’s school, but also the family and community resources available to the child. Children from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds tend to do worse in school than middle-class children precisely because they come from disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds (Lee and Burkam 2002). It is necessary to improve family and community resources to enable children to do their best in school. What follows are several ways to achieve this: Improve maternal and child health...Provide high-quality early childhood education…Maximize the number of regular high school diplomas...Increase the number and size of tribal programs supporting higher education.”

- Vote to increase funding for the schools that need additional funding. In the 2018 U.S. News & World Report article referenced above, “U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to Congress: Make School Funding More Equitable,” Lauren Camera reported, “Two years ago, lawmakers passed a bipartisan overhaul of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, known now as the Every Student Succeeds Act, which states are just beginning to implement. And despite attempts by politicians on both sides of the aisle, they couldn't muster enough support to make changes to Title I funding aimed at directing more resources to states with more poor students.” As referenced in “The Ultimate White Privilege Statistics and Data Post,” “[T]he vast majority of O.E.C.D. countries either invest equally into every student or disproportionately more into disadvantaged students. The U.S. is one of the few countries doing the opposite.” On January 5, 2020, Donald Trump tweeted, “The United States just spent Two Trillion Dollars on Military Equipment. We are the biggest and by far the BEST in the World! If Iran attacks an American Base, or any American, we will be sending some of that brand new beautiful equipment their way...and without hesitation!” Dr. Ibram X. Kendi’s response was, “Two trillion dollars that can go to feeding, educating and housing people - creating high-wage jobs, lifting folks economically, child care, slowing climate change, cultural projects, medical research and health care. Don’t ever believe the US doesn’t have the money to help you.”

- Vote for school board members who will support zoning to integrate schools. In the Vox article “The Data Proves that School Segregation is Getting Worse,” Alvin Chang wrote, “But school boards can draw school attendance boundaries to lessen that segregation - to send kids to less racially segregated schools. We don’t have to send kids to the nearest school, especially because it ends up recreating the underlying residential segregation.” Share the research that supports integration at school board meetings and with school board members. Nikole Hannah-Jones wrote in the “Segregation Now” story referenced above, “During the 1970s and ’80s, the achievement gap between black and white 13-year-olds was cut roughly in half nationwide. Some scholars argue that desegregation had a negligible effect on overall academic achievement. But the overwhelming body of research shows that once black children were given access to advanced courses, well-trained teachers, and all the other resources that tend to follow white, middle-income children, they began to catch up. A 2014 study conducted by Rucker Johnson, a public-policy professor at the University of California at Berkeley, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, found desegregation’s impact on racial equality to be deep, wide, and long-lasting. Johnson examined data on a representative sample of 8,258 American adults born between 1945 and 1968, whom he followed through 2011. He found that black Americans who attended schools integrated by court order were more likely to graduate, go on to college, and earn a degree than black Americans who attended segregated schools. They made more money: five years of integrated schooling increased the earnings of black adults by 15 percent. They were significantly less likely to spend time in jail. They were healthier. Notably, Rucker also found that black progress did not come at the expense of white Americans - white students in integrated schools did just as well academically as those in segregated schools. Other studies have found that attending integrated schools made white students more likely to later live in integrated neighborhoods and send their own children to racially diverse schools.”

Vote, show up, and engage in meaningful ways to dismantle systems of oppression. Do all of this under the leadership of people of color.

What to Expect in Future Posts

At this time, I plan to address systemic racism as seen in housing, the justice system, surveillance, foster care, healthcare, the environment, media, military, politics, and the Christian church in future posts. I will give action steps for myself and readers and provide additional resources.

As I look at the Equal Justice Initiative calendar and read it to my kids, I see that every single day conveys at least one injustice, usually based on race. These are past and present injustices, spanning hundreds of years, demonstrating that racism in this country is not simply an individual problem. Rather, racism is a systemic problem, infecting institutions and structures. Further, this problem centers around justice, therefore it's a problem God is concerned about, which means I must be concerned. In my opinion, systemic racism is not solely a political issue but also a spiritual issue. I am called to love my neighbor, and one way I can do this is by joining the fight to dismantle systems of oppression so that all people can flourish.

(Resources are linked below)

The Work of Nikole Hannah-Jones

ProPublica Work of Nikole Hannah-Jones

“The Ultimate White Privilege Statistics & Data Post”

Race Forward “What is Systemic Racism” Videos

The Witness: A Black Christian Collective

Where Change Started

Black Lives Matter

Brownicity

White Allies in Training

Videos to View

“The Fight to Desegregate New York Schools” through The Weekly or Hulu

“MacArthur Genius: Segregation in American Schools is ‘Intentional’”