I decided to summarize the arguments from the two articles and the website, and then connect them all together at the end of the post.
The Problem We All Live With:
I found this radio podcast to be very interesting. I listened to it several times. Nikole Hannah Jones is speaking about the achievement gap between black and white students and integration. Her argument is that with all of the different things that schools try to close this gap, there is one thing that they don't try that is proven to work. That thing is old fashioned integration like what happened after Brown vs. The Board of Education. She says that it works because it gets black kids in the same classes with white kids which gives them quality teachers and quality instruction. This part surprised me. I know that there are some bad teachers out there, but I was very surprised at the idea that there would be so many. My opinion is why would people teach, if they don't care about it and are going to do a bad job? I mean it isn't like a high paying, easy, or low stress job, I don't think. I think most teachers want to educate kids and love kids or why would they be doing it? That's just my personal opinion though. Not only does she say that segregated schools have the least qualified teachers, She also says the students have more stress and greater educational needs due to the high concentration of poverty. This I can imagine is very true. The stresses of poverty and all that goes with it must make learning much more of a challenge.
Nikole talks about a situation that happened five or six years ago which forced the issue of integration in the Normandy school district in Missouri. The school district had horrible scores, and had been on probation for 15 years. She interviews a mother and daughter, who were desperate to get out of the school district. Then the Normandy School District lost its accreditation completely. This made a state law called a transfer law go into affect. The law was not a desegregation law but it did say that the district had to pay to send the students to an accredited school if they wanted to go to one.
They chose a school called Francis Howell which was very far away and had mostly white students. The parents at Francis Howell were not happy with the decision and said horrible things at the town meeting. This didn't surprise me that much. They made sure to say that it wasn't a race issue but they were concerned about the test scores going down and violent students coming into the school. They didn't want those people coming over to their school. The student being interviewed for this radio show was successful in the new school but then they changed the accreditation of Normandy and said all the kids had to go back. Normandy became non accredited instead of unaccredited which is really just as bad, but the transfer law no longer applied anymore. Some of the parents filed lawsuits because they wanted to stay at the better schools. The judge sided with the parents and said " every day that a child attends an unaccredited school, the child could suffer harm that could not be repaired." The argument of this radio show, is that when integration was forced, it was working. Below I attached a link to a very interesting article about The Normandy School District in January of 2018, and what the parents thought about it.
http://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/parents-still-wary-normandy-schools-despite-upgrade-academic-standing#stream/0
Brown vs Board of Education :
This website is an overview of Brown vs. The Board of Education. In May of 1954 the court declared segregation by race illegal. It made equal opportunities in education the law. A quote from the website says " Today thanks in part to the victorious struggle in the Brown case, most Americans believe that a racially integrated, ethnically diverse society and educational system is a worthy goal, though they may disagree deeply about how to achieve it." This really stood out to me as the problem which is explained so well in The Problem We All Live With. While most people feel this way, when it comes down to integrating schools or other things that effect them directly they don't want to do it. In my opinion, in order for equality in education to exist people have to make changes on the personal level. This seems to be where we are falling short.
Separate and Unequal:
Author Bob Herbert has this very same argument in his New York Times article about integration.He says " One of the most powerful tools for improving the educational achievement of poor black and Hispanic public school students is, regrettably, seldom even considered." He is talking about integration. He writes that there is a great deal of evidence to show that poor kids of all ethnic backgrounds do better academically when they attend school with peers who have more wealth in their families. He argues that even though schools are not legally segregated, they still are segregated today.
My question is, if school desegregation is proven to work how do we get the people in the affluent communities to get on board with it? What kind of incentives could there be, to make it more attractive? How would we as a society erase or minimize their fears so they would try it. I think although the parents in The Problem We All Live With are wrong it is because they are afraid. How would we counter that?
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