Hope and Despair in the American City ......

[Mike]

Public school resegregation is a "national horror hidden in plain view," writes former educator turned public education activist Kozol (Savage Inequalities, Amazing Grace).

Hope and Despair in the American City
Why There Are No Bad Schools in Raleigh
Gerald Grant

In 1972, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a 5–4 verdict in the case of Milliken v. Bradley, thereby blocking the state of Michigan from merging the Detroit public school system with those of the surrounding suburbs.

This decision effectively walled off underprivileged students in many American cities, condemning them to a system of racial and class segregation and destroying their chances of obtaining a decent education.

In Hope and Despair, Gerald Grant compares two cities—his hometown of Syracuse, New York, and Raleigh, North Carolina—in order to examine the consequences of the nation’s ongoing educational inequities.

The school system in Syracuse is a slough of despair, the one in Raleigh a beacon of hope. Grant argues that the chief reason for Raleigh’s educational success is the integration by social class that occurred when the city voluntarily merged with the surrounding suburbs in 1976 to create the Wake County Public School System.

By contrast, the primary cause of Syracuse’s decline has been the growing class and racial segregation of its metropolitan schools, which has left the city mired in poverty.

Hope and Despair is a compelling study of urban social policy that combines field research and historical narrative in lucid and engaging prose. The result is an ambitious portrait—sometimes disturbing, often inspiring—of two cities that exemplify our nation’s greatest educational challenges, as well as a passionate exploration of the potential for school reform that exists for our urban schools today.

Some background thought:
Who attends high poverty schools?

Income in our society is closely tied to race. Nationally, about 50 percent of all black and Latino students attend schools in which 75 percent or more of the students are low-income as measured by eligibility for free and reduced price lunch (FRPL). Only 5 percent of white students do. In fact, over half of all white students attend schools in which 25 percent or fewer of the students are eligible for FRPL.

1. To what extent does a school’s overall poverty rate affect student achievement?

Student achievement—on which the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools appropriately place a great deal of emphasis—has been clearly shown to fall as the poverty level of a school rises. A consistent, forty-year body of scientific studies confirms that children who attend high-poverty schools face considerably higher risks of lower academic performance, whatever their individual academic potential. In fact, middle-income students who attend high-poverty schools earn lower average test scores than do low-income students who attend middle class schools.2

Since the publication of the Coleman Report in 1966, social scientists have reported that the socioeconomic composition of a school makes a difference in the achievement levels of individual students.

In 1982, Professor Karl White evaluated 101 previous studies and concluded that overall, the socioeconomic composition of schools seems more predictive of future academic achievement than does a student's individual socioeconomic status.

Can compensatory measures overcome the effects of concentrated poverty?

Unfortunately, in most cases, compensatory measures do not appear readily able to counter these strong trends in high-poverty schools. The means adopted in Charlotte's Equity Plus II schools plainly have not yet succeeded, despite well-intended plans to provide safeguards to assist students in Charlotte’s high-poverty schools. Indeed, many of the finest experts agree that although educators know a great deal about how to reach individual students from disadvantaged backgrounds, far too little is currently known about what is needed to make high-poverty schools, full of disadvantaged students, really effective.12

more to come :)

[Mike]

WAKE COUNTY NORTH CAROLINA- INTEGRATION BASED OFF OF SOCIO-ECCONOMIC STATUS

In 1976, to expedite the racial integration of the region, the Raleigh City Schools merged with the Wake County School System, combining the city and suburbs into one district. The district operated under a court-ordered desegregation plan until it achieved unitary status in 1982.

Between 1982 and 1999, Wake County implemented a voluntary desegregation plan in which each school was required to have a minority enrollment between 15% and 45%.

Comparatively, Wake County’s plan was a success: whereas 70% of the nation’s black students attended schools that were predominately black in 1999, only 21% of Wake County’s black students attended predominantly black schools.

In 2000, Wake County adopted a new assignment policy that eliminated race from consideration in student assignments. The new policy established the goal that no more than 40% of a school’s total enrollment could be comprised of students eligible for free-and-reduced-price lunch (FRL) and no more than 25% could be comprised of students performing below grade level on state exams.

Under the SES Plan, Wake County’s diversity level, although it decreased slightly, remained comparatively high.

First, and most importantly, Wake County’s success is particular to its demographics.

Wake County is the 22nd largest school district in the nation; as of 2006-2007, it enrolled 128,072 students in 147 schools (http://www.wcpss.net/basic_facts.html). In 2005-2006, the student racial composition was: 55.4% white, 26.9% African American, 9.2% Hispanic, 4.7% Asian, 3.5% multiracial, and .3% American Indian. Id.

While a fourth of Wake County students live in poverty, African American students are about ten times as likely to be poor as white students (553 Social Scientists, Appendix 49).

According to Walt Sherlin, the Assistant Superintendent, Wake County maintained relatively high racial diversity under the SES Plan because, “its African-American and Latino students are nearly ten times more likely to be eligible for FRL than white students. . . .

Put simply, Wake County has relatively few white students who come from low-income families and relatively few African-American and Latino students who come from more affluent families ” (Sherlin, 5).

Finally, Wake County’s success is not generalizable because, over the twenty-year period preceding the plan, residents of Wake County demonstrated an unusually strong and cohesive commitment to racial diversity and equality in their schools.

This commitment was demonstrated throughout the 1990s, when well-funded anti-busing candidates consistently failed to win a seat on the school board (Silberman, 145).

Therefore, Wake County was not starting from scratch in 2000; to the contrary, many parents were accustomed to and supportive of integration in the name of educational equality (Alan Finder, As Test Scores Jump, Raleigh Credits Integration by Income, N.Y. Times, September 25, 2005).

Accordingly, in light of its distinctive and storied legacy of integration, Wake County was uniquely positioned to succeed the moment the SES Plan was initiated.


I wonder why the folks in Wake County seem so supportive of integration?

What do others think about their local communities.... would they be open to balancing their public schools around Socio-ecconomics and having not schools that have free and reduced lunch rates ....say above 35% ??

be well...mike

[Mike]

A close-up look at North Carolina....



Wake County disperses low-income students with busing;
Charlotte gives high-poverty schools extra money. ( New Jersey and many other places have been court ordered to provide more funding to high-poverty school districts)

IS MONEY THE ANSWER????

By T. Keung Hui -
Published: Sun, Feb. 08, 2009

North Carolina's two largest school systems have taken vastly different approaches to two thorny issues -- student reassignment and educating low-income students with hefty academic deficiencies.

Wake County, the state's largest district, has used buses instead of greenbacks to address the academic needs of low-income students.

To meet the demands of growth and support a diversity policy aimed at reducing the number of high-poverty schools, Wake's system moves thousands of students each year to different schools, sometimes sending kids on bus rides of more than 20 miles.


Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools, the second-largest district in North Carolina, has shifted to a system of largely neighborhood schools, resulting in a stratified mix of affluent schools in the suburbs and high-poverty schools near downtown Charlotte.

Instead of busing kids to balance out the level of low-income students at each school, the district pours millions of dollars into these high-poverty schools each year to boost the performance of academically disadvantaged students.

"Charlotte is not proving to be a good system," said Rosa Gill, chairwoman of the Wake school board. "They're still having problems. They're going back to a segregated school system. The citizens of Wake County aren't looking for that."

Despite the different approaches, the academic results among minority and at-risk students are very similar in both districts, with only a narrow gap in test scores. But Charlotte also has many more low-performing schools than Wake and has a harder time recruiting teachers to work in these tough schools.

Through the 1990s, both Wake and Charlotte-Mecklenburg based students' assignments on race to try to keep schools integrated. Wake did it by choice; Charlotte was following a federal court order.

But as federal courts raised more and more questions in the 1990s about race-based school assignments, Wake switched in 1999 to student assignments based on family income. The policy was based on research showing that academic performance drops when a school has too many low-income students.

I am not saying this is the magic answer to failing schools, however, it is something that today is hardly mentioned in the debates.

We may even think about financial incentives for school districts willing to explore this concept.

Wondering are we ready to deal with districts with extreme levels of poverty sitting right next to other well off districts and not even discuss the possibility?

be well... mike

[Connie Weber]

Hi Mike,

Thank you for opening the discussion of a great book. I read it and found it to be very thought-provoking.

You wrote, "I am not saying this is the magic answer to failing schools, however, it is something that today is hardly mentioned in the debates.

We may even think about financial incentives for school districts willing to explore this concept.

Wondering are we ready to deal with districts with extreme levels of poverty sitting right next to other well off districts and not even discuss the possibility?"

A most significant debate. Your questions get right to the essence of what we have to do think through to begin healing one of our nation's worst problems, poverty.


My naive eyes got opened particularly by the author's coverage of the history of housing policy and practices. I didn't know about redlining, blockbusting, secret Residential Security Maps..."giving government legitimacy to racism."

From the book pages 18 and 19: "HOLC (Home Owners Loan Corporation) established a pattern of underfunding mortgages for older urban houses while providing easy access to mortgages in the suburbs-a practice that exploded after World War II. HOLC's maps were adopted by the Federal Housing Agency (FHA) and later were widely used by banks and other private lenders as well as insurance agencies..."

"No other government program had more effect on the pattern of urban and suburban development than FHA. After the war, most of the nation's largest builders designed their new homes to meet the agency's standards, and banks followed its racist appraisal guidelines, modeled on the HOLC codes. In fact, FHA instructed appraisers to look first at the HOLC maps in order 'to segregate for rejection many of the applications involving locations not suitable for amortized mortgages.' Its guidelines stipulated that rigid white-black separation must be maintained: 'If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties shall continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes"

"The FHA manuals praised neighborhoods with restrictive covenants that barred sales to 'inharmonious racial or nationality groups.' In one Detroit neighborhood where whites began to buy new homes near a black settlement, neither blacks nor whites could get FHA insurance because of the proximity of 'inharmonious' racial groups. But after a clever white developer built a concrete wall between the white and black areas, the FHA appraisers returned and approved mortgages on the white properties.. Although the United States Supreme Court struck down racial property covenants in 1948, the FHA did not change its guidelines on covenants until 1950. Its updated redlining maps continued to be used for decades by banks and insurance agents. They were still in effect when we moved to Syracuse in 1978."

I love following Grant's explanation of how the cities came to be what they are, segregated, wasting out from the middle with hard-core poverty, tough lives, hopelessness. He does a great job evaluating the "ecology" as a whole, how it got that way. Eye-opening to me.

When I was in high school I'd sometimes take a trip to inner-city Detroit to check things out. It was dangerous; I didn't let my parents know I was going. I remember at one point coming across that wall, that huge, thick, drab-gray cement wall that divided sections of the city by race. It made a big impression on me. Never knew how it got there until I read Grant's book.

That whole chapter, "What happened to American Cities," opened up a new perspective for me. "A different pattern prevailed in many states that permitted annexation, especially in the South and West... (page 30) "Cities that expanded their boundaries often adopted planning and zoning policies that helped spread affordable housing across the region. They were more likely to have integrated schools where income and racial disparities were markedly reduced. On a segregation index where a score of 100 indicates complete apartheid between black and white neighborhoods, cities with frozen boundaries had the highest scores. Detroit, for example, had a score of 85, indicating almost complete separation between the races. Syracuse, with a score of 69, was also highly segregated. By contrast, cities whose boundaries had expanded to incorporate suburbs showed a considerable degree or residential integration. Raleigh, for example, scored 46, while Albuquerque came in at an impressive 32. The average degree of separation between rich and poor was also significantly lower in cities that had annexed or consolidated."

Following Grant's analysis of how housing practices and definition of districts can lead to great harm--or great healing--widened the scope for me in how I think of education. Always in my mind is healing Detroit, only an hour away from me, and the worst district in the nation for graduation rates. Arnie Duncan calls it "Education's Ground Zero." I'm still stuck in deep naivete about why, if we know what a big change it makes to integrate on the basis of SES, why we don't move forward with it.

Guess that's why you're raising the questions here. What does it take to move forward with reducing the numbers of low-income students in any particular district? It takes attitude changes, yes, and it also takes budgeting changes. I don't really know anything about it at all, but you mentioned that it's a rule for budgets to be balanced each year, so thinking about budgets on a grander scale, say five or ten years, just doesn't get worked out. And thus instead we hit an ultimate result of the failure in planning, end up with HS dropouts, and HS dropouts are way over-represented in jails. (I heard Michigan's prisoners are 70% HS dropouts.)

Starting to get how all these things weave together, and how when we think about school reform the essential starting point for that may not be within the schools at all.

Thanks for the book reference; thanks for your thoughts. You're right, it's time to start talking about what's mostly avoided in conversations about educational reform.

[Daniel Bassill]

Thanks for drawing attention to this book and this discussion. I've posted it on my blog and Facebook, so hopefully others will join.

That's the key to all of this. If it's just a few of us talking about this not much will change. If we can get millions of people looking at the same information, and thinking about ways they might personally do something to change the situation for kids in these neighborhoods, then change might occur.

However, it can't be wishful thinking that builds visibility. It needs daily efforts to reach out to other people and say "look at this". This blog offers 10 suggestions that anyone reading this can use to help increase the number of people who join this group.

[Connie Weber]

Thanks, Daniel, for recruiting people to join in on the discussion, and thanks for the link to the 10 suggestions for furthering social caring. Good stuff.

Have you read the book yet? I'd be interested in hearing your view about Grant's main points.

I'm immersed in a study of project-based and problem-based learning. These techniques (embedded within a class structure that supports a variety of methods for learning) seem to work really well with students of all backgrounds and abilities, and also seem to unite the learners in a spirit of positive collaboration. --That's just an aside, in this discussion. After rereading Mike's and my conversation about the book, I anticipate that people may be wondering how you blend learning cultures, reach all the students, help them to unite. There definitely are ways to nurture huge progresses and stunning successes within highly-integrated and diverse populations of learners. I hope others will share what they're learning about that. I should probably start on forum on the topic.

[Mike]

Hi All... hope this finds you well!

Others along with Grant are interested in this issue that is seldom brought up in America.

This site is well worth a visit!

School Resegregation and Civil Rights Challenges for the Obama Administration: A New Report from the Civil Rights Project at UCLA

For Immediate Release---http://www.civilrightsproject.ucla.edu/research.php

Contact:
Gary Orfield: [phone], [phone], [e-mail]
Erica Frankenberg: [e-mail]
Laurie Russman: [phone], [e-mail]

Los Angeles—January 14, 2009—As the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday and the Inauguration of this nation's first African American President approach, the nation is in a celebratory mood about progress on race relations. The election of Barack Obama is a breakthrough that would have been unimaginable a half century ago and a triumph of the long movement for racial justice. But a new report from the Civil Rights Project, Reviving the Goal of an Integrated Society: A 21st Century Challenge, points out that it would be wrong to assume that our nation has now realized Dr. King's dream and created a society where race no longer matters. In fact, the report concludes the opposite: the U.S. continues to move backward toward increasing minority segregation in highly unequal schools; the job situation remains especially bleak for American blacks, and Latinos have a college completion rate that is shockingly low. At the same time, very little is being done to address large scale challenges such as continuing discrimination in the housing and home finance markets, among other differences across racial lines.

The report's author, Professor Gary Orfield, commented, "It would be a tragedy if the country assumed from the Obama election that the problems of race have been solved, when many inequalities are actually deepening. The lesson to take from this is that we have elected a brilliant president, who is the product of excellent integrated schools and colleges. We should work hard to extend such opportunities to and develop the talents of the millions of blacks and Latinos who still face isolation and denial of an equal chance. The outgoing administration has left the machinery of civil rights justice and educational equity in a shambles and strong leadership will be needed to restore it."

For more than a decade, the Civil Rights Project has been issuing regular reports on the nation's progress in realizing the goal of the Brown decision and the historic 1964 Civil Rights ActÑthe aim that the nation end separate but unequal education and create schools that are integrated and successful for all children. Very large progress was made during the civil rights era but it is slipping away year by year. Since the Supreme Court reversed course in 1991 and authorized return to segregated neighborhood schools, there has been an increase in segregation every year, particularly for black and Latino students. The report shows that 40% of Latinos and 39% of blacks now attend intensely segregated schools. The average black and Latino student is now in a school that has nearly 60% of students from families who are near or below the poverty line. These doubly segregated schools by race and poverty have weaker teaching forces, much more student instability, more students who come to school not speaking English and many other characteristics related to family and neighborhood poverty and isolation that make for challenging educational environments. These are the schools where much of the nation's dropout crisis is concentrated. More than 40 years after passage of the Fair Housing Act, there continues to be almost no serious enforcement against widespread housing discrimination, which impacts the segregation in districts with neighborhood school policies, and is making it difficult to maintain integration in suburbia.

The country has experienced a large increase in students attending multiracial schools, defined here as schools with more than a tenth of students from each of three or more racial groups. These are schools that can either be integrated across racial and class lines or schools that combine three highly impoverished communities of different racial backgrounds. They offer both challenges and possibilities, but almost no attention is being paid to studying them or to developing curriculum and training to help realize their possibilities. The substantial increase of whites attending multiracial schoolsÑthe percentage of white students in such schools has doubled in less than two decadesÑ may well be one of the reasons why whites tend to believe that progress is being made on integration even as segregation deepens, on average, for black and Latino students.

The report also indicates that the frontier of racial change and school resegregation is now in the suburbs, where about a third of black and Latino students attend school. Even though there is a large white majority in suburban schools, two million black and Latino suburban students currently attend highly segregated schools. By contrast, only 2% of suburban white students attend these same segregated minority schools, while a majority attends suburban schools with at least 80% of white students. After two decades of a hostile Supreme Court and two terms of a presidency committed to reversing civil rights gains, only the nation's small towns and rural areas retain substantially integrated schools.

The report concludes that efforts to make separate schools equal, which have been the dominant approach since the federal government abandoned significant positive support for integration almost three decades ago, have failed. This failure includes No Child Left Behind, which was supposed to quickly equalize achievement across racial lines but has fallen far short. Instead, it is sanctioning scores of segregated minority schools without providing them enough help to make a difference. The report notes that too often the high hopes accompanying a racial change in leadershipÑwhen, for example, black or Latino mayors and school superintendents were first appointed--were often disappointed since the underlying racial barriers to opportunity were not addressed. Orfield, the report's author, calls on the incoming Obama Administration to "make the first serious commitment since President Johnson's Administration and build successfully integrated communities and schools wherever there are feasible opportunities." The report includes a discussion of a number of possible tools and techniques with the potential to extend past successes. Finally, the report calls on the new administration and Congress to review the evidence and provide the needed leadership, for example, to support integrated communities and to avoid the large-scale ghettoization of suburbia.

About The Civil Rights Project at UCLA
Founded in 1996 by former Harvard professors Gary Orfield and Christopher Edley Jr., the Civil Rights Project/Proyecto Derechos Civiles is now co-directed by Orfield and Patricia Gándara, professors at UCLA. Its mission is to create a new generation of research in social science and law, on the critical issues of civil rights and equal opportunity for racial and ethnic groups in the United States. It has commissioned more than 400 studies, published 14 books and issued numerous reports from authors at universities and research centers across the country. The Supreme Court, in its 2003 Grutter v. Bollinger decision upholding affirmative action, cited the Civil Rights Project's research. The CRP's Initiative on School Integration, which conducted this research, is made possible with the support of the Open Society Institute and the Ford Foundation.

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[Daniel Bassill]

I was interviewed Thursday evening on the Garrard McClendon TV show on CLTV about the $30 million that CPS is spending to provide a wide range of interventions, including mentoring, to turn around 1200 teens. You can see the interview at http://www.chicagonow.com/blogs/garrard-mcclendon-live/chicago-publ...

As school is starting in the US and other countries, I hope more people will be thinking of how we find dollars for long-term solutions that prevent more kids from needing the expensive support that Chicago school leaders are proposing. I hope we also get the business community involved to provide mentoring and job shadowing and apprentice programs for kids coming up from 6th grade through high school so that those kids who need this type of involvement to see the value of learning, and to avoid the influence of gangs and illegal commerce will do so.

You can read how I raise money to try to fund our own efforts at this blog.