A School District That Was Never Desegregated (2015)

http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2015/02/a-school-district-that-was-never-desegregated/385184/?single_page=true

by Tomte • 10 years ago

22 47 10 years ago

theatlantic.com

trhway• 10 years ago

if i understand right, SF school district makes students bus across town to avoid similar issue.

wtbob2• 10 years ago

Bussing seems terribly bad for the environment when kids could walk to school instead.

rm_-rf_slash• 10 years ago

Some of us live where it snows.

Jtsummers4• 10 years ago

And along with my sibling comment, not all schools are walking distance. The county I live in (unified school district, 4 (5 since last year?) high schools with 1000+ students in each), is 30 miles or so in diameter (approximated as a circle). You would need many schools (and the necessary faculty and staff) to make them walking distance for all their students. Urban sprawl is certainly largely to blame here, but once it's set in it can't be undone by mandating everyone move to within walking distance of their children's schools.

voodootrucker• 10 years ago

"Good gravy"

JustSomeNobody• 10 years ago

That's southern for "WTH!?" for you northerners.

yread• 10 years ago

Some interesting discussion on r/AskHistorians about this

https://np.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4hd4u7/what_w...

vermontdevil3• 10 years ago

A small town of 12,000 has two high schools! That is the problem it seems. Merge them into one.

My town has over 85,000 and only one high school.

mikekchar• 10 years ago

Census data seems to indicate that about 3.5% of the US population is between 15-19 years old. For a town of 12,000 that's 420 students or 140 students per grade.

I've taught classes of 42 in high school. It sucks. 30 is doable. 20 is great and is what I would recommend to every school. You are right that you could easily get it down to 1 high school with 5 home rooms of 28 per grade. It's not optimal but not terrible either.

1 high school for 85k people is insanity. I know this is common place in North America (I think the high school I graduated from had 1250 students in my year and I knew of high schools with 3-4 times as many students). I don't have a huge amount of experience in education, but I know enough to say that you are paying for this "economy" with people's futures.

bryanlarsen2• 10 years ago

There are 917 students in the two high schools. So either the residents of Cleveland are remarkably fecund, or else they're pulling in a large number of rural students from outside town.

Ntrails• 10 years ago

I still remember the culture shock moving from a class of 19 to a class of 27 (along with many many other differences). I always wonder how many of the changes were functions of class size, and how many were pure demographics etc.

cafard• 10 years ago

A friend in her late 50s is still (rightfully, in my view) resentful of her hometown school board's decision to have one mammoth high school where two or three might have been justified. The school board apparently wanted to have a student body large enough to field a very good football team, you see. That worked, but the education not so well.

bryanlarsen2• 10 years ago

The combined school would have 917 students, which would still be considered a small high school by most people's standards.

mason240• 10 years ago

12,000 isn't a small town, it's a small city.

The school I went to had a town/surrounding farmers population of about 1200 (600 in town, guessing for the rural area). It functioned just fine with ~35 students to a grade, ~17 students to a class (each grade had a "band/not-band" schedule).

ideonexus• 10 years ago

Attempting to merge the schools is where you will see how this is not "natural" segregation. I lived in a town of 38,000 people for five years that had schools that had "naturally" segregated. It was a culture shock for me, having just bought a house for $50k that I figured I could flip and sell for twice that because one block down the street similar homes were going for that much.

After a couple of years of working on the house, I learned that it wouldn't matter how much I put into it. Friends and locals informed me that I had bought a house on the "black" street. The homes one street over were on the white street and that when I had kids, they would be going to the black school and soon "come home talking like them."

I soon learned that most of the rural south is "naturally segregated" like this... which is a political way of saying that racists have naturally let their racist inclinations dictate the school district lines. One time, the city council tried to move the school district lines to mix the schools up a bit more. Protesters, all white, came out en mass and squashed the motion. When I published a letter to my local paper advocating moving the district lines, I received numerous racist letters in response.

We are taught in history classes that the North won the Civil War, but those classes leave out the fact that the South won the insurgency that followed, which is why there are so many monuments to Confederates in Southern states and why--as a woman from Mississippi once told me when complaining about Northern culture, "Our nrs know their place." I don't know what the solution to this is except for slow, persistent cultural progress.

vermontdevil3• 10 years ago

Absolutely. My entire family is from the Deep South (Southeast Georgia) dating back to James Oglethorpe. So yeah I've seen this over the years.

The situation in Mississippi is what you said - a small city does not need two high schools. But that's how they segregate along racial lines. And yes I know the one school is mixed 50/50 with the bet that the school board is probably dominated by the whites.

Things have definitely changed over the years though. I've seen the changes myself with my extended family (I grew up in the midwest). More and more counties in Georgia now go by with one high school or even setting up one to serve more than one county. This is happening mostly due to dwindling population and financial realities.

But we still have a ways to go.

goodcanadian• 10 years ago

My town of about 5000 has two high schools . . . I am not sure what your point is.

[EDIT: Of course, there are another 5000-10000 people in the surrounding rural area]

pc86• 10 years ago

They probably don't need two schools. But let's say for the sake of argument that you want to retain the two-school structure. So they have one school with a 50-50 racial split and one school that is extremely close to 100-0.

What's wrong with that? It's one thing to have a white school and a black school. It's another thing entirely to have one school that is the most racially integrated in the region and one that is entirely black, largely due to population and demographics.

Jtsummers4• 10 years ago

The problem is that the school that's nearly 100% black has problems like:

East Side students didn't even science textbooks to bring home at night; there aren’t enough to go around. They don’t have lockers, either. Sanders and his classmates carry their books around in their backpacks all day.

While this article is focusing on racial balance, the problem with segregation is more fundamental. Thanks to the historic (especially in cities like this) difference in wealth between blacks and whites, the historically black schools tend to get shorted in the resource distribution. The white families have the money for booster clubs, they hold political sway within the community. Their kids certainly have textbooks to take home.

qb45• 10 years ago

It's worth noting that as far as resource distribution goes, East Side was said to receive more funding per student. Too bad they didn't investigate where this money goes.

roboneal• 10 years ago

After reading the article, it's quite clear the residents segregated themselves.

avs7332• 10 years ago

that is a, frankly, insane contortion of logic that ignores an enormous amount of history in the south regarding housing, education, and racial equity.

These problems started years ago with forced segregation codified in law and have never been solved. To say that they are self-segregating because the law no longer compels them to is not the same as there being no barriers. What you are reading as self-segregation (and this is partially the writer's fault) is the paragraphs about 'both sides like it this way'. What is telling is the reasons both groups give. The white/Cleveland parents give reasons like "just leave us alone. Maybe that’s because I’m a sentimental fool, but I love Cleveland High School and I don’t want it to go away" while the black/East side parents give reasons like "[he] is likely to be East Side’s valedictorian this year, [and] wouldn’t have a shot at that distinction at Cleveland High 'no matter how good his grades are.'"

white families who "don’t want to be in a small minority,"

Oh really? why not?

wtbob2• 10 years ago

> white families who "don’t want to be in a small minority,"
Oh really? why not?

Because race in America is (very, very unfortunately) a proxy for class, and people of one class do not like being a minority amongst another class. Particularly, people of a perceived-higher class do not want their children acculturated in a perceived-lower class.

Overtonwindow2• 10 years ago

We will be having this argument twenty years from now. The sad truth is that in America people don't want to live around those who are different from themselves. No matter how hard we try to integrate society, it will naturally desegregate itself, for a variety of reasons.

ams61102• 10 years ago

It's not a phenomenon unique to America.

magicbeanss• 10 years ago

It might even be... human nature.

We're in-group/out-group animals.

jawilson2• 10 years ago

This really isn't just an American thing. There are plenty of xenophobic European countries, and Japan and China are awful this way as well.

kuschku• 10 years ago

Interestingly, it’s mostly those who have never seen the people they’d have to interact with – once they have, they usually notice they’re the same as all other humans.

ams61102• 10 years ago

Nice way to pick on a small southern town. How about Chicago which has dozens and dozens of all-black public schools, in one of the most racially segregated cities in America. Or Detroit. Or pick any other failed liberal-dominated big city.

ceejayoz• 10 years ago

Chicago's at least large enough to justify having multiple schools.

ChrisNorstrom• 10 years ago

Just a few weeks ago a headline was "New York has the most segregated schools". It's like these people don't understand that "diversity" creates "division".

openasocket• 10 years ago

I think about desegregation in terms of physics. The basic idea is that, once the legal barriers of segregation where taken down, different groups would begin to mingle together, like in diffusion, and eventually the country will become more uniform. There are, however, two problems with this. First, diffusion will take a long time, I'm guessing on the order of centuries. Second, in highly segregated areas people may not want to be the first to cross those racial divides. I imagine it would be uncomfortable to be the only black person in an entirely white school, and vice versa. So there's this "surface tension" keeping some of the old barriers up. Cultural progress can only do so much: the quickest way to create mixing is by introducing energy. I'm not completely sure what the "energy" is this analogy refers to, but perhaps some sort of incentive for a black person to move to a white neighborhood, and vice versa. I'm curious to hear what other people's thoughts might be on this.

Kinnard• 10 years ago

Very interesting. I wonder if you could get readily available quantitative information that supports this sort of model.

It does strike me as descriptive.

One thing that I think can have a big impact is a third group: latinos or east asians who will have different diffusivity and break up the existing monocultures.

Settle Syrian Refugees in Cleveland, Mississippi?! They'll probably be happy to go to any school not in a war zone.

BlahBoy3• 10 years ago

I go to what could be considered a fairly diverse high school, and in my experience, your comment is pretty much right on the money- especially the second part. Sure, there may not be legal barriers per say, but take one look at the cafeteria and you'll realize that there's a clear racial divide (Hispanics only hanging out with other Hispanics, etc.). Like you, I don't really know how to change this, short of just calling everyone out (which would probably only breed more tension).

Jtsummers4• 10 years ago

You don't call anyone out. You just wait one to two generations. Once the community is mixed, physically, social mixing and diversity will occur. By keeping them physically separated you impede social integration.

throwanem• 10 years ago

The article seems to go out of its way to imply that East Side is the maleficiary of structural discrimination. But:

A mile away, students at the racially mixed Cleveland High have these basics [textbooks, lockers], even though the school receives more than $3,000 less per student each year than East Side does, according to the school district.

$3k/student seems like it should be enough to buy textbooks and lockers. I'd be interested to know first whether the school district's claim is accurate, and second, if so (and given this is the Atlantic, were there evidence of that claim being false, I would expect to see it mentioned), how it comes to be that East Side receives more funding than Cleveland High but seems to be doing less with it. I'm not sure that forcibly upheaving the existing arrangement wholesale is the most effective available solution here.

jbattle• 10 years ago

There are probably two tax districts in the town

A School District That Was Never Desegregated (2015)

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