There are two really interesting NYT articles this weekend about contemporary de facto school segregation.
One is a journalistic piece by Richard Fausset about a two-high-school district in Mississippi.
The other is an intensely personal essay by Nikole Hannah-Jones about choosing a school for her daughter in NYC.
Both grapple with the difficult issue of what it takes to keep affluent White students in public schools in districts that are heavily poor, Black, and Hispanic. It would seem that today in the Mississippi Delta, no less than in Brooklyn and Manhattan, White families are not only willing to send their children to “racially diverse” schools, but even view racial diversity as an asset.
Provided, that is, that a tipping point isn’t reached–that there are “enough” White students. NYC public schools are about 15% White; Cleveland MS’s, a bit under 30%. In both cases, the outcome is that most White students attend racially diverse schools with a markedly higher proportion of White students than the district as a whole, while really distressing numbers of poor Black and Hispanic students attend schools that are almost entirely Black, Hispanic, and poor.
I don’t necessarily agree with all of the policy assertions that are implicit or explicit in Hannah-Jones’s essay, but I think she does a great job of laying out the issues, and that her calling out of Milliken v. Bradley is particularly noteworthy. That decision effectively halted cross-district desegregation efforts, and once working across district boundaries is taken off the table, the problem becomes pretty close to intractable. A great companion piece to these is a report that the Fordham Institute issued back in 2010, called “America’s Private Public Schools”, about public schools where less than 5% of the enrolled students are from low-income families.