States
Step Up Efforts To Reduce School Segregation
In response to
a state Supreme Court ruling that children in Hartford's urban schools
were receiving an inferior and unequal education, Connecticut stepped
up efforts to improve the education of urban schools. This week, Education
World takes a look at what Connecticut is doing to combat educational
inequality. Included: A brief summary of the Harvard
University The Civil Rights Project, which looks at the resegregation
in U.S. schools.
In the United States, being a poor, urban, minority member should not
mean receiving a substandard education. But for many years, it has meant
just that, as minority urban students have made do with out-of-date textbooks,
leaking school roofs, and substandard school libraries.
Three years ago, a Connecticut Supreme Court ruling blew the whistle
on the inferior and unequal education being provided in Hartford, the
state's capital city, where fewer than 10 percent of the students met
the academic goals for their grade levels. The lawsuit, Sheff
v. O'Neill, revealed that schoolchildren had been segregated
-- although not intentionally -- by a 1909 school districting law.
The 1909 law, which is still in place, was intended to improve
education by providing increased state involvement in public schools while
still permitting considerable local control and accountability. As a result
of housing patterns, however, more poor and minority families live in
urban areas. So the law, in effect, created a system of racial and economic
isolation.
In Hartford, 97 percent of students are members of racial or ethnic
minority groups -- in a state with a total minority student population
of about 27 percent, said Thomas W. Murphy, a spokesperson for the Connecticut
Department of Education.
"The state of Connecticut has done a number of things and committed
hundreds of millions of dollars to improving the quality of schools and
education as well as providing more choices for Hartford students and
their families," Murphy said. In response to the Sheff case,
in particular, the state has increased school spending by $200 million
to $250 million above 1996-97 spending, he added.
Murphy explained that the state's goal is to improve city schools as
well as provide programs to reduce racial isolation. During the last three
years, several new programs have been initiated to help the state achieve
those goals. Those programs include early-childhood programs for the state's
16 largest and neediest cities, school library improvements, 16 urban
charter schools, and additional funding for magnet schools to attract
students from surrounding school districts. Another program, Project Choice,
gives families of urban students the opportunity to choose to have their
children bused to suburban schools.
KEEPING KIDS IN SCHOOL
A major goal of Connecticut's efforts to improve the quality of education,
increase achievement, and reduce racial segregation has been to reduce
the high school dropout rate and increase the number of minority college
students.
Studies show that poor and minority students are at greater risk for
quitting high school before earning a diploma than are wealthy students.
Students from families with incomes in the lowest 20 percent of the population
are five times more likely to quit high school than are students living
in families with incomes in the top 20 percent.
According to a national survey conducted by the National Center for
Education Statistics (NCES), 9.4 percent of Hispanic students and 5.2
percent of African American students quit school before graduation compared
with 3.9 percent of white students. And those national dropout rates have
remained stable over the past decade.
Connecticut, however, is among the top 13 states with high school completion
rates of 90 percent or better, according to the NCES. During the 1990s,
the state increased its completion rates from 90.9 percent to 96.1 percent.
Alternative high schools and better academic support for poor and minority
students have been among the methods used to help at-risk students stay
in school.
HARVARD STUDY FUELS NATIONAL DEBATE
Throughout the nation, more schools have become more segregated not
only racially but also economically, according to a report by Gary Orfield
and John T. Yun. This trend reverses the direction the nation took 46
years ago when the U.S. Supreme Court banned intentional school segregation
in the landmark case of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka.
The report, Resegregation
in American Schools, published by the Civil
Rights Project, Harvard University, found that minorities tend to
go to school with other minorities in impoverished neighborhoods and that
white students go to schools that remain overwhelmingly white and middle
class.
Orfield and Yun point out that except for Indiana and Missouri, virtually
all other states with schools that had substantial African American enrollments
have increased school segregation since 1980. The report shows that all
racial groups except white people experienced considerable diversity in
their schools; however, white students remain overwhelmingly in white
schools, even in regions with very large non-white enrollments.
In addition, the report focuses on four trends:
The U.S. South is resegregating 26 years after the U.S. Supreme Court
case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka broke a
tradition of apartheid and made it the section of the country with the
highest levels of integration in its schools.
Latino students, who are becoming our nation's largest minority group
and have been more segregated than African Americans for several years,
are experiencing increasing segregation.
Serious segregation is occurring in both metropolitan and suburban
schools that have experienced an increasing number of African American
and Latino students.
The racial composition of U.S. schools is changing rapidly, and many
schools are emerging with three or more racial groups.
CONNECTICUT HAS COME A LONG WAY!
Sometimes school atmosphere can create a subtle form of racism that
discourages students from continuing their education, said Donald F. Blake,
the executive director of the Campus Compact, a national organization
of universities and colleges that encourages students to develop civic
responsibility.
Now in his 60s, Blake remembers his experiences as an African American
student in New York. There was an attitude that black children could not
learn or accomplish much in school, he recalled. "Even as late as 1936-37,
we were ostracized," Blake said. "It was very subtle, but very real.
"We were never given the opportunity to even talk about college, because
that wasn't meant for [African-American students]," he said.
Lenzy Wallace Jr., now the assistant dean for the School of Business
at South Carolina State University, attended Connecticut schools as a
child and remembers being told in eighth grade that he would never be
able to learn a foreign language: "I was told, 'You people can't learn
a foreign language.'
"That haunted me," he recalled. "I was afraid to take a foreign language
for a long time." It wasn't until he earned an A in a foreign language
class in college that he was able to overcome the effects of that teacher's
bias.
As a high school student, Wallace was told not to take college preparation
classes because he would only end up pushing a broom. In college, the
bias continued when a college professor told him that he would never be
able to do scholarly research at the Ph.D. level.
However, according to Wallace, although there were teachers who had
low expectations for black students, there were others, many of whom were
white, who encouraged him. "There have always been people who saw value
in me, and in most cases, they were white folks who helped me," Wallace
said.
Even during this past decade, that subtle form of racism prevails in
some learning institutions, Blake said. While a professor of American
history at a Connecticut university, a librarian initially refused to
let him check out a book because she assumed a black man could not possibly
be a professor, he recalled.
"Every day of my life, I still go through this," he said, noting that
he has earned a Ph.D. and has taught at the university level. "One day,
can I get to the place when I don't have to prove I'm somebody?" he asked.
Personal anecdotes like those recounted by Wallace and Blake have helped
spark changes for African Americans and other minority students. But historically,
getting an education has often been difficult for many African American
children in this country from early colonial times to present day.
Although most colonial communities did not prohibit black children from
attending public schools, they did not always welcome them either. During
the Civil War, getting an education was no easier, even in states like
Connecticut where segregation was not enforced and the Union flag flew
throughout the war.
"Black kids were treated so badly [during the 18th and early 19th centuries],
they mostly didn't go to school," said Christopher Collier, the Connecticut
state historian and a professor of history at the University of Connecticut.
Connecticut has come a long way since colonial days, since the Civil
War, since Sheff v. O'Neill -- and it strives to go
much further as it continues to focus on improving the quality of education
for the state's poor and minority students.
ADDITIONAL ONLINE RESOURCES ABOUT SCHOOL SEGREGATION
Brown
v. Board of Education of Topeka: 40 Years Later
This is the edited and abridged version of a forum by the Woodstock
Theological Center in 1993 that addressed the progress of African American
education since the U.S. Supreme Court landmark case of Brown
v. Board of Education of Topeka that called for racial integration
in public schools.
Documents
Related to Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka
This site includes documents by the National Archives and Records Administration
of the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board
of Education of Topeka. The documents include a dissenting opinion,
the Supreme Court judgment, and a 1954 letter from President Dwight
D. Eisenhower.
Sources:Resegregation
in American Schools, by Gary Orfield and John T. Yun, The Civil Rights
Project, Harvard University; DBS Corp., 1982; 1987; 1996-97 NCES Common
Core of Data Public School Universe.
ADDITIONAL ONLINE RESOURCES
National Education Goals
This Web site contains all sorts of information about the National Education
Goals 2000. It includes access to publications and products related
to the goals.
States
Step Up Efforts To Reduce School Segregation