Racial integration is a distraction

A nation grows more diverse as many of its schools grow less | Get Schooled
I have written a lot about the resurgence of segregated schools in the South, not by court order, but by housing choices.
Despite the hopes of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, court-ordered school desegregation never led to full community integration.
...When the Harvard Civil Rights Project looked at race and education 10 years ago, it concluded that metro Atlanta’s suburban residential segregation was the cause of its school resegregation.

Suburban residential segregation? Oh, I get it. This is code for "white flight". It's all those white folks who are leaving town and taking their school-age children with them. They're the problem. If they had stayed, no way would APS have let these schools get this bad.

We aren't able to build and administer schools of equal quality in black and white neighborhoods. Clearly integration is the only fix. But we can't have an integrated school system if we still have segregated neighborhoods.

So, what's the answer?

We tried busing students around town, artificially creating the racial mix we wanted regardless of where the children actually live. That worked so poorly and generated such ill will on every side that to this day, in many neighborhoods, "busing" is a four-letter word.

It's not possible to gerrymander a school's attendance zone to achieve that mix: Atlanta is a majority-black city, and has been since the 70s.

And we can't force people to live where there presence will satisfy some misguided notion of racial balance.

And we certainly can't fudge the test figures so that the students in the Schools That Suck appear to be learning just as much as the students in the Schools That Excel. We're seeing where that road leads.

The fix, if there is to be one, lies in refuting the assumption I breezed by without challenge: We aren't able to build and administer schools of equal quality in black and white neighborhoods.

I don't believe that for a minute. This attitude cannot be tolerated. We don't have that luxury. The basics of language, mathematics, science and social studies are color blind. Shuffling students around to achieve someone's idea of a pleasing racial mix is not only unpleasant and ineffective, but irrelevant to the school's mission. Forced integration is a distraction.

We can, if we have the determination and courage to do so, create schools that all have the same standards no matter what color the surrounding neighborhood is. But in order to do this, we also have to have parents who expect--demand!-- that their children meet those standards and master the academic content even if the parents haven't. Because that's the biggest difference between the Schools That Suck and the Schools That Excel: The presence, or absence, of a home and neighborhood environment in which scholastic achievement is viewed as a good thing.

It can be done, but the odds don't favor it.