Beyond Black, White and (Page 8)

Thanks to the civil rights revolution, de jure segregation is dead. But vast social, economic and educational inequalities continue to plague American society. Moreover, while the black-white paradigm has never fully described American race relations, we are far more aware today than in the past of the multiracial nature of our society. With this in mind, we asked a range of scholars, writers and activists to reflect on the legacy of Brown and the prospects for future change. Should education be the primary focus of social activism? What strategies will most effectively promote educational betterment in black and other communities? Can we expect the courts to play a role at the forefront of change, as they did for much of the 1950s and '60s, and if not, what other institutions are positioned to adopt that role? Is the goal of educational desegregation irrelevant today? Their responses follow.    --The Editors

Jonathan Kozol

Although the subject is seldom talked about in public-policy debate, I believe the goal of educational desegregation is as relevant today as it has ever been. Virtual apartheid is a fact of life in almost every urban school I visit nowadays. "During the 1990s," as the Harvard Civil Rights Project has observed, "the proportion of black students in majority white schools" decreased "to a lower level than in any year since 1968." In most of the schools I visit, black and Hispanic students make up more than 95 percent of the population.

There is, moreover, little pretense any longer that these schools, while obviously separate, are somehow of equal quality to those attended by the children of the mainstream of society. Despite a number of hard-won legal victories that, in principle at least, compel a state to offer what is known as "adequate provision" to the children of a segregated district, grave inequities persist. Three times in the past seven years, Ohio's highest court has found theeducation finance system in that state unconstitutional, but the governor and legislative leaders have defied these court decisions with impunity. In Illinois, after many years of legal action, inequalities remain intractable: The children of all-black East St. Louis receive a public education worth $8,000 yearly, while the children of Lake Forest, a predominantly white suburb of Chicago, receive $18,000. In New York City, despite a victorious legal action brought by the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, per pupil spending ($10,500) remains half that of the rich Long Island suburb of Manhasset, where some $21,000 is invested yearly in each child's education.

Even in those cases where per pupil spending in an inner-city district may approach the levels of surrounding suburbs, other forms of inequality remain entrenched. The squalor of decrepit infrastructure, the assignment of the least prepared and often uncredentialed teachers to the schools in greatest need, the demoralization of intensely concentrated poverty and the visceral message given to children by the very fact of racial sequestration continue to be potent forces in perpetuating the caste divisions of American society.

The punitive testing and accountability agendas set in place in the past decade have not lessened these divisions and, indeed, have deepened them by forcing many inner-city schools to gravitate to drill-and-grill curriculums, keyed tightly to the isolated particles of knowledge to be tested by exams, which leave no room for the more wholesome and authentic forms of learning that cannot be measured by empirical assessments. Critical consciousness in schools like these has been subordinated to the goal of turning children of minorities into examination soldiers--unquestioning and docile followers of proto-military regulations. (The former head of the Chicago Public Schools, indeed, referred to "training manuals" for the National Guard as the model that inspired him to chose these methods of instruction.) The insidious acceptance of apartheid pedagogies as the favored instruments of teaching for apartheid's children thus compounds the many other inequalities these children face.

No matter what the present disposition of the federal courts, activists ought to be raising hell in the suburban districts that surround our major cities to break down the barriers to residential integration and, as a half-step in that direction, to expand the voluntary interdistrict school desegregation programs that exist already. In Boston, more than 3,000 children now participate in such a program and attend the schools of more than thirty suburbs. There are an additional 16,500 on the waiting list. Similarly long waiting lists exist in other cities. Whatever the rhetoric one sometimes hears from racial separatists, the overwhelming numbers of the parents of black children--those, at least, with whom I speak regularly--have not renounced the dream embodied in the words of Brown, and they refuse to settle for the tainted promises held out by Plessy v. Ferguson. Those waiting lists for hundreds of our very best suburban schools should represent a pressing challenge to the multitude of thoughtful liberals who live within those districts but refuse to speak out boldly on this issue.

This is only one of several areas in which young activists ought to be challenging their elders. They should be mobilizing, too, against the mania of high-stakes testing and the associated policies of nonpromotion and nongraduation that are driving an increasing number of black and Latino students to drop out of high school altogether. They ought to be demanding that the presidential candidates speak out forthrightly on these issues. Instead of pressing the candidates merely to modify the more draconian aspects of "No Child Left Behind," they ought to be asking why this simple-minded and destructive legacy of President Bush ought not to be overthrown in its entirety. Hard issues need hard questions. On all these fronts, a tough and restless grassroots activism that refuses to romanticize and justify apartheid education is as badly needed now as it was fifty years ago.

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Jonathan Kozol is the author of Savage Inequalities (Perennial) and other books on separate and unequal education.

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