The Shame of The Nation

By Marian Wright EdelmanNNPA Columnist It’s September, and in many parts of the country, that means the beginning of a new school year. Children sometimes begin the new year worrying whether they’ll make new friends. Parents sometimes worry about their children’s classmates too, usually hoping they’ll make “nice” friends and meet children who are “good kids.” But how much do parents think about those classmates’ color? As it turns out, race is the defining factor in many American schools. Many parents may take it for granted simply because so many children are already overwhelmingly likely to go to school with children who are mostly the same race as they are. In a new book being released this month, The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, gifted writer and educator Jonathan Kozol says this is America’s shame: the persistence – and the latest spread – of school segregation and the inequality that has always come with it. Last year we celebrated the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, the historic decision that ended legal school segregation. Many Americans see Brown v. Board as the happy ending to the story and think school segregation, like “colored” restrooms, is now ancient history. But school segregation never completely went away. And in a report examining Brown’s anniversary, “Brown at 50: King’s Dream or Plessy’s Nightmare?,” the Harvard Civil Rights Project pointed out that as a result of policy changes over the last decade, American schools are actually re-segregating. The proportion of Black students in majority White schools is lower now than at any time since 1968. Almost three-quarters of Black and Latino students attend schools that are predominantly minority, and more than two million, including more than a quarter of Black students in the Northeast and Midwest, attend schools the researchers call ‘apartheid schools,’ in which 99 to 100 percent of children are nonwhite. The most shameful part about the persistence and resurgence of school segregation is that “apartheid schools” and other schools with predominantly minority students remain unequal. This is what makes them “Plessy’s nightmare.” The 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson Supreme Court decision said facilities for Blacks could be “separate but equal,” but in reality segregated facilities rarely came anywhere close to “equal,” as anyone who grew up in the segregated South clearly remembers. More than a hundred years later, many of the segregated schools millions of our children still attend still don’t. Kozol notes studies show 35 states spend less on students in school districts with the highest numbers of minority children than on students in the districts with the fewest minority children-on average, $1,100 less per child. Similar gaps are also true when the comparison is done between districts with poor and nonpoor children, and these gaps are especially stark when you magnify them across an entire class or school. For example, Kozol points out that in New York, a state where gaps are especially large, a high-poverty elementary school with about 400 students would receive over $1 million less per year than comparable schools in districts with the fewest number of poor children. What does this inequality look like on the ground? Kozol has spent a lifetime working with children in “apartheid schools” and writing about what he sees, and he has seen a lot: Moldy walls and cracked windows. Leaky ceilings patched with garbage bags. Cafeterias with rat infestations. Classrooms without enough desks for their crowded enrollments, or with elementary school-sized desks for older students. Schools without any safe place for children to play-although in many urban schools this may not matter anyway, since recess might now be taken away as a disciplinary tool, or has already been replaced by extra time spent drilling students for their standardized tests. The physical differences in these segregated schools are immediately glaring, but gaps exist in everything from test scores to teacher preparation to the curriculums used and courses offered. Kozol has also met with hundreds of children over the years who have told him in their own words what school segregation means to them. He received this letter from an 8-year-old student: “Dear Mr. Kozol, we do not have the things you have. You have Clean things. We do not have. You have a clean bathroom. We do not have that. You have Parks and we do not have Parks. You have all the thing and we do not have all the thing…Can you help us?” Her classmates sent letters with their concerns too: “We have a gym but it is for lining up. I think it is not fair.” “We don’t have no gardens…no Music or Art…no fun places to play. Is there a way to fix this Problem?” During a conversation he had with a group of high school students, one fifteen-year-old girl from Harlem told him, “It’s like we’re being hidden. It’s as if you have been put in a garage where, if they don’t have room for something but aren’t sure if they should throw it out, they put it there where they don’t need to think of it again.” Fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, should millions of Black and Brown children still be attending schools where even 8-year-olds can see they don’t have the “things” White children do, and where our children feel like America’s discarded, forgotten trash? This was certainly never Dr. King’s or anyone’s dream. But it is, as Jonathan Kozol says, our nation’s shame. Marian Wright Edelman is CEO and Founder of the Children’s Defense Fund and its Action Council whose mission is to Leave No Child Behind and to ensure every child a Healthy Start, a Head Start, a Fair Start, a Safe Start, and a Moral Start in life and successful passage to adulthood with the help of caring families and communities.