Wake County adopted class-based integration with the hard-nosed goal of raising test scores. The strategy was simple: no poor schools, no bad schools. And indeed, the district has posted striking improvements in the test scores of black and low-income students: in 1995, only 40 percent of the black students in Wake County in the third through eighth grades scored at grade level in state reading tests; by last year, the rate had almost doubled, to 82.5 percent. Statewide scores for black students also got better over the same time period, but not by as much. Wake County’s numbers improve as students get older: 92 percent of all eighth graders read at or above grade level, including about 85 percent of black students and about 80 percent of low-income students. (Math scores are lower, following a statewide trend that reflects a change in the grading scale.) The district has achieved these results even as the share of low-income students over all has increased from about 30 percent a decade ago to about 40 percent today.
Matt, Kevin and Richard Kahlenberg are debating over whether a solution like this could be applied nationally. The consensus being basically, no, because we aren't going to blow up the system of school districts in this country. But to my mind, the piece helps us get out from under the cloud of pessimism that follows any conversation about the gap in test-scores.
But there is something else at work here. Her research on class and achievement is helpful because it really shows (to me) that the problem of America's racist past is that it basically affected a massive wealth-transfer out of black communities. More than that, I like Emily's piece because it exposes the lie that racial inequality is completely intractable. But that's never really been true. There are two questions here--how are we going to fix the race chasm, and how far are we really willing to go to do it? People like to focus on the former, because the truly frightening one is the latter. We're forever trying to achieve equality by not negatively impacting white people. You can look back at the War on Poverty and see how desperate folks were to make it look color-blind. How'd that work out? I think one of the reasons Affirmative Action was extended to basically everyone but white males, was likely, so it wouldn't be reparations. Ironically, class-based integration uses the same logic. I'm a fan because I believe in it on principle. But the politics of it seem to be captive to ancient formulations: Despite the fact that slavery and Jim Crow crippled black folks, we want to heal those wounds by inconviencing white people as little as possible. It's been this way since Reconstruction. If I'm pessimistic about anything it isn't not knowing the right thing to do, it's having the will to get it done.
]]>I think the archetype here which exists in the minds of many upper middle class white (and asian) people is the "affirmative action student." These are kids who grew up in similar, upper middle class, environs as their own, but who because of their race get into college and jobs ahead of themselves/their children. Obviously this is a caricature, but that caricature exists in many minds, and ends up playing into the debate.
On the other side, there are some (admittedly farther out of mainstream thought) persons who think that growing up black anywhere in America puts you at a massive disadvantage and it is unfair to hold you to similarly high standards as we might ask of white students or job seekers.
Neither picture is accurate in my opinion, but both play somewhat into the picture. "Colour-blind" systems allow the people holding the first picture to not feel that their peers who happen to be minorities are getting an unneeded boost, and allow the other people who think that black people are necessarily poor and in crumbling schools to think that they're still getting the same result.
]]>Bottom line: empower poor parents with transparency and choice. I don't understand why so many so-called progressives are knee-jerk against this. Doubly ironic when those progressives attended a school where one year of kindergarten costs almost as much as a degree from the University of Texas.
]]>This is one of the things that has always surprised me most about nearly every black person I know. Its a kind of forgiveness that's hard to imagine. And while much of the younger generation is able to accept it, my parents refuse to believe it.
One of the most interesting things I've heard said about race was when my mom said she didn't trust Obama because, "When he's in office, he'll only take care of black people." When I ask her why, she said, "Did you see what my parent's generation did to them?"
]]>Any advantage that is made available to the poor will be met and excelled by the wealthy. Everyone will give their child every advantage they believe they can, and it is a race that the wealthy will, by and large, win. There are two separate issues:
1. given that there will always be service-class and working-class jobs, and that the children of the poor will fill them far more than the children of the wealthy, can it become less miserable and stressful and unstable to be in those positions and have families?
2. given that some races and ethnicities (including racial-ethnicities, like African Americans, by which the historical experiences and cultural developments of some becomes mapped on everyone identified as being of the same race) are over-represented among the poor, and the result is a racial/cultural polarization that maps onto the aforementioned inevitable gap between working-class and middle-class families, is it appropriate to look for policies that un-map that mapping, that make race and ethnicity orthogonal to socioeconomic performance?
]]>Anyway, one school is in one of the richest, whitest neighborhoods in town, while the other is in a historically black neighborhood that is a mix of lower middle-class and working-class families, as well as some black professional families and an influx of recent gentrification. The rich neighborhood high school is fairly well-integrated in terms of race and income, I'd guess because many of the neighborhood students are in private schools. The black neighborhood school has a poorer student body and is almost entirely black. But is that a bad thing? Does it mean the poor black students there get a worse education than the poor black students in the rich neighborhood school? I don't think we can say without more info. I'm not even sure that if given a choice, many of the parents at that particular mostly black high school would move their children, just given the history of the school in that neighborhood. The link in my name clicks to the numbers and related commentary.
]]>I don't see why we should reject policies that promote poor people just because they might also promote wealthy people. But in any case, I don't think school choice falls in that category. Wealthy people already have at least three basic school choices: neighborhood public school, private school, or move to another school district. I don't begrudge them these options, but I think that at least some concerned poor parents want to be able to consider more options than the neighborhood school, especially if the neighborhood school is failing. Certainly open registration in large districts seems like a no-brainer, along with regular reporting of some type of measurable results, even if they are only partial reflections of quality. I also believe we should experiment with charter schools and vouchers more broadly; they may not be the answer, but we just don't know yet. Certainly they strike me as part of a broad-based attack on the failing status quo.
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