School Integration is dead; School Equityis the key

In our schools, Equity more than Integration

Published 7/23/07 Daily Hampshire Gazette

In 1903 W.E.B. Dubois foretold that the question of the 20th century was the question of the color bar. He was right, as it took until 1956 for the U.S. Supreme Court to proclaim segregation in public schools unconstitutional. And it took America until 1965 to declare all Americans equal by passing the voting rights act and other civil rights legislation.
A few weeks ago the Supreme Court begged the question as to whether color is still the question of the new century when it declared school integration plans unconstitutional – including the temerity of citing the 1956 landmark Brown vs. the Board of Education case to uphold the majority’s reactionary, activist agenda.
And while we perhaps could expect no more from such a conservative court, the damage done by that ruling is perhaps worse than at first look. Other than setting back well-intentioned integration plans, the ruling could deplete even more vital energy from citizens who believe it of paramount importance to turn back such a ruling-- which seems to want to turn back the political clock to a darker day.
And yet integration itself – as a policy goal requiring enormous political resources -- has not been of paramount importance for almost thirty years. We often forget that Brown vs. Board of Education was not necessarily meant to enforce integration, as to halt legal segregation..
What is of paramount importance – in our schools – is the horrific decline in education quality for a generation. Since the right-wing led “tax revolts” of the 70’s (Prop 13 in California, Prop 2 ½ here) reduced or capped the property taxes which govern a school’s basic funding, and therefore excellence, the quality of our national public school system has declined woefully. The white flight which followed busing and integration plans made it that much easier for the “tax revoltistas” to earn a sympathetic ear from the whites who fled.
As such, whether liberals want to acknowledge it or not, Integration has long been supplanted by Equity – the iron clad assurance that all schools in all districts have precisely the same resources according to their needs – as the most fundamental issue “segregating” today’s public school students. To put it bluntly – it is not as important if children learn in an integrated classroom. It is important only that they receive a quality education. And as America remains an overwhelmingly segregated nation – in terms of housing and neighborhoods – the truth of the matter is that black and Latino students do attend mostly segregated schools, which also provide an inferior education. But then so do most school districts outside our affluent communities. We must ask which is most important: diversity or excellence in education? As in most of our public schools we have neither, it may very well be we need to choose one to focus our limited energy and resources on.
When I taught at an over-crowded, under-funded high school in South Central L.A. my journalism class did a study of all the standardized test rankings published in the Los Angeles Times, and to no one’s surprise those rankings – with exceptions that proved the rule – followed zip codes from wealthiest to poorest neighborhoods all over the city.
Closer to home in Holyoke, where I teach now, $25 million has been cut from the school budget in just the past six years in a racially mixed district which is on the verge of being declared incompetent because of low standardized test scores. Of what use is it to spend enormous resources and energy integrating a school district when enormous budget cuts are the rule, rather than the exception, in cities and towns all over America?
My students in L.A. did not suffer from the lack of white classmates, their neighborhood was 90 percent Latino and 10 percent Black, as was their school. They suffered from the poverty of their education: from the lack of highly qualified teachers, the lack of books, the lack of music and art classes, the lack of clean bathrooms and enough support staff, the lack of commitment by their city, state and nation to secure them a quality education not based on their parents income, but their need.
This is why Equity is a far more radical issue than Integration has been for a generation, or maybe ever was. Equity would require a re-ordering of national priorities not seen since the New Deal. Equity as the law of the land, would require a new permanent method for funding schools other than property taxes which assure poor schools in poor neighborhoods. Equity would require a significantly greater expenditure of human and financial resources in low-income communities from South Boston to South Central because – as we often forget -- ignorance is to poverty what knowledge is to power.
And in America we often confuse poverty with race. We overlook that there are far more poor whites than blacks or Hispanics.
The supreme court ruling pushes back both integration and equity, because the primal response of many liberals will be to fight on for integration if only because a reactionary majority on the court has overturned it. But to say “Yes!” to integration merely because the court said “No!”, is only to play into the Right’s continuing domination of the American political agenda.
It is in our public schools where we give the truth (or more often the lie) to our founding proposition that all people are created equal. If you believe in that Equality, then School Equity is the question of the 21st century.