The Root of the Matter

Everyone seems to acknowledge that there's a crisis in education, but good luck finding people who can agree on what the exact cause of that crisis is and what we should do about it. This lack of unity is what's keeping a real movement for educational reform from developing. However, that doesn't keep us from trying.

Jonathan Kozol recently spoke in Baltimore. He, of course, has his own notions on the problems. To his way of thinking, the problem with schools is that they have "re-segregated" in the years since Brown v. Board of Education. Now it's white kids going to white schools and black kids going to black schools. According to Kozol, this sends the message that "you have been sequestered in this institution so you will not contaminate the education of white people."

I don't know that I'm in the position to speak to the mindset of inner city youth in Baltimore, but I find it hard to believe that this is the sole cause of the problems facing our schools. After all, if all the schools were good it wouldn't much matter. (That's not to say that segregation is good or even acceptable, only that if every school in the country was good, then even kids attending schools in the inner city would be receiving a quality education.) The main problem is not that schools are segregated, it's that those inner city schools where black kids tend to go aren't very good.

So what causes that?

The latest fad is to blame the unions for defending the status quo and resisting change and generally limiting educational progress. But as Diane Ravitch points out, union presence hasn't hurt student achievement in wealthy suburbs or in those countries that we're always being told score better than us on international tests. So that whole argument seems a little spurious.

So what causes the problems?

When we want to get to the roots of the problems in urban education, we need to look at the school itself, but also beyond the school. We have to look at what is wrong in our ghettos as a whole. The problems in our schools reflect the problems in those communities and vice versa. Until we start working on both sides of that problem and create a virtuous (rather than vicious) cycle, we aren't going to get very far no matter who we blame.

Not Done Yet

I've been saying ever since Barack Obama was elected president that just because America has elected a black man to be president doesn't mean that all racial issues have magically been solved. It's not that simple. Now, the Civil Rights Project at the University of California has issued a report saying that they agree with me. (Well, my point at least.)

According to the report, public schools are more segregated now than at any point since the civil rights movement. In some ways, that's pretty shocking. I mean, we'd like to think that we've made some progress over the last half century. On the other hand, it's not really that surprising.

I would posit here that the operative factor in play is not race, but rather poverty. The way our public schools are structured (for the most part) is in residential zones whereby kids go to the school near where they live. Given that neighborhoods tend to be economically homogenous (think the Upper East Side's median income versus that in the South Bronx) it's not surprise that the schools are likewise divided along economic lines. Given that race and poverty tend to track together, it's no surprise that the schools are racially divided.

So what are we going to do about it?

Usually, I try to have some answers, but on this one I'm a little stumped. I would say that trying to racially/economically balance schools doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me (think bussing or a totally unzoned school system) because I don't think it gets at the underlying issues. This is one of those examples of a school issue that affects and is affects by all sorts of things outside of the school. And unfortunately, I don't know what the answer is. What I do know is that until we figure it out and get the system working so that upward mobility is more than a catchphrase from another era, the problems we're talking about now are only going to get worse.