Desegregation and Degeneration

Abstract

THIS is a month to celebrate courage. Above all, Brown v. Board of Education reminds us that U.S. Supreme Court justices, innocent black children, young people of all races, parents with an enduring faith in education, lawyers, church leaders and inspired laity, and ordinary people with a sense of righteousness once stood together and said to a legalized wrong. They changed our country. But this is a column about the lack of courage. The May 1954 Brown decision came in the midst of a national preoccupation with taking care of very young baby boomers. We threw up stencil-cut school buildings; hired, as often described, warm bodies to staff the classrooms; and underwrote a lucrative textbook industry as the cheapest way to get resources to students and teachers. Not much focus on quality in any of these undertakings. The desegregation of schools proceeded with about the same level of thoughtfulness. There was massive resistance in some places, and policies were put in place throughout the country that stamped out the strengths of the minority school system, replacing them with tracking, low standards, and unequal resources. Multicultural education rarely rose above tokenism. The deep implications of desegregation for the nation's public schools - and how the process should have changed our attitudes and policies - never received enough attention. We rushed through it, just like the challenges desegregation unlocked, one by one - equity for girls, for bilingual students, and for children with disabilities. Only the last group has maintained an advocacy stance that crosscuts class as well as ethnicity. Because American society never fully faced or addressed the underlying challenge of desegregation - that of supporting the transformation of public education into a universal system with all its diversity - we are enmeshed still in a battle over what counts the most. That is money. As our school population grew more diverse, the white power structure that controls the resources became less interested in public schooling. Business leaders, for example, once the backbone of community policy making for schools, retreated to the less public, more anonymous role of joining state and national commissions calling for reforms. In the South, rural and urban white children still keep private academies thriving, while public schools struggle to keep their roofs from leaking. At least 37 states have faced legal challenges to their school finance systems in recent decades. Some cases, such as Abbott in New Jersey, drag on for decades without ever winning the appropriate level of support for public education written into many state constitutions. In this period when no less than postsecondary education is being advised for all young people, one New York appeals court recently had the audacity to say that appropriate, for the impoverished children suing the state over unequal funding, meant no more than an eighth-grade education. To its credit, Vermont approved a reform of school financing in 1997 that was considered progressive and bold in a state where local citizen meetings annually approved every line item in school budgets. Act 60 shifted most of the financing from local taxes to a state tax pool, forcing school districts in well-off resort areas to help out low- wealth districts. In a very un-Vermont-like move, tourist-rich Killington voted to secede from Vermont and annex itself to New Hampshire, which has a reputation for having the lowest state support for schools in the country. …