Yesterday I heard an episode of the radio program, “This American Life”, devoted to a topic you probably haven’t thought about in a while, if ever: school desegregation. I’ll link to the program when it becomes available online. I defy you to listen to the remarks by parents in the Francis Howell school district in St. Charles County, a county just to the north of St. Louis and St. Louis County, without deciding that racism is still a problem in the United States. It’s called something different and more polite, e.g. getting away from crime and drugs, looking for better schools, but it’s still racism.
The antecedent article to the radio program appears to be here. There’s also an academic article on school desegregation here.
The gist of the story is that after the Normandy school district in St. Louis County lost its state accreditation under state law the students whose local school district it was had the right to go to other districts. The district selected for the 1,000 kids who elected to do so was the Francis Howell district about 30 miles north. If you’re thinking that there were probably other candidate districts nearer by, you’re right. Normandy was making things as difficult for its students as it possibly could.
Just to put things in perspective over a half century ago I lived just south and east of the Normandy school district, Normandy was majority white, blue collar or lower middle class, and wasn’t anything to write home about. It has apparently deteriorated since then, is majority black, and has joined with the Wellston district which even back then was horrible. Ferguson immediately adjoins these districts.
Parents in the Francis Howell district were clearly horrified at the development and when the school district organized a meeting in which they might air their thoughts, quite a few of them said some pretty awful things, as recorded in the program.
The author of the article and the program has a clear point of view: the solution for poor, mostly black school districts is a return to court-ordered desegregation. That’s a view a I held for many years but I’m sad to say I think it has passed its moment. While that solution might have worked 40 years ago, we chose a different path. We imported a substantial, largely impoverished and unskilled working population to replace the shortfall in young white workers coming into the job market and today just over half of students nationwide are white and today desegregation would take more than bussing—it would take forced resettlement of the population.
Let’s consider the problem a little more critically. As this article should convince you the problem with schools isn’t strictly one of spending. There’s a wide variation in per-student spending in Illinois high school districts all the way from around $29,000 per student (in Rondout, a northern Chicago suburb) to Paris-Union at $6,400 (Paris-Union is in downstate Illinois near the Indiana border). Per pupil spending in Chicago’s high school district is around $17,000 per student.
Differences in achievement can’t be satisfactorily explained based on spending per student, poverty, racial makeup, or geography. We don’t have enough money to spend $29,000 on every student. There aren’t enough white kids in Illinois or California or New York to create schools in which a majority of kids aren’t black and/or Hispanic and it’s hard for me to imagine bussing Chicago school kids to Iowa. Or Iowa school kids to Chicago. Even the academic paper cited above doesn’t tell me that putting a few percentage points of white kids into schools that are otherwise 100% black will solve those schools’ problems.
I think that problem is a cultural one and I mean that in the broadest sense. I don’t see any ready solution.
Paris is an interesting case. Paris is a county seat and is located right in the middle of Edgar County. There are two school districts, Paris Union is the “city” district, and Paris CUSD is the rural district, though the city is only about 9,000 pop., and all of the rural district schools are actually located in the city of Paris due to its central location. Several years ago a referendum to join the districts was defeated because the rural district didn’t want city kids. How are these schools different:
Paris CUSD (“Rural”)
706 students at 3 schools
65% w/ passing ISAT scores
$8,728 spending per pupil
46% ready for college
96.3% white
0% black
2% hispanic
29% low income
Paris Union (“Urban”)
1,264 students at 4 schools
58% w/ passing ISAT scores
$6,354 spending per pupil
35% Ready for College
95.6% White
0.2% Black
0.9% Hispanic
63.9% Low Income
So, the racial element isn’t relevant. The “low income” numbers might be as well as student “mobility,” which I think was about 9% versus 19%. I don’t find cost or performance metrics that significant once the student body is considered and the cost-efficiencies available with more students.
So consolidation was rejected, but a later referendum agreed to co-op the high school. Each district would send its elementary/middle school students to the same high school, and each would pay tuition to the co-op and retain some control over operations and finances. Parents tend to be more concerned about their child’s elementary/middle school education, and may appreciate a larger school’s advantages in having a wider high school curriculum.
A possible solution albeit one that will only partially ameliorate the problem is to offer open enrollment throughout the state. In Arizona any student may apply to any school for enrollment. There are no geographical boundaries. I believe a few other states utilize this method as well.
I have two siblings who teach in the Phoenix area as well as a couple good friends who are school principals. They all relate the same story. Open enrollment is popular and widely utilized by all races.
Most states have such a law. The complication is funding.
Our middle class kids compare pretty well on test scores with other kids from around the world. When kids form other countries come here and go to our schools they do well. So, we know our schools are capable to performing well. The issue is that we don’t know how to educate our poor kids. I suspect you are correct that we need cultural change, in many ways,to accomplish that.
Steve
It’s funny that even though the courts directly oversaw desegregation efforts for decades in St. Louis they never share any of the blame for the current state of the schools there. I can think of few more convincing arguments against “expertism” than the performance of the courts in this instance.
On a larger scale, the more I’ve read about urban decay/renewal patterns from the 19th century to the present the more I’ve come to question the conventional narrative of “white flight,” at least as its used to condemn every white person who moved out of working class neighborhoods in the post WWII period as racist. My grandparents, for example, lived in Pine Lawn when I was a kid. (For those who don’t know the north St. Louis County suburbs, Pine Lawn is close to Normandy, right down Natural Bridge Road, only with far more troubles…. then and now.) Their house was a small ramshackle affair (2 bedrooms, maybe 900 square feet), and when their finances allowed it they moved… they built a 1500 sq foot house in rural Jefferson County and bought a 2 pump service station that my grandpa worked until he died at the age of 60. Now, the conventional narrative tells us the biography of my grandparents is a story of evil, in a collective if not a personal sense. I’m pretty sure that is nonsense. Sure my grandparents attitudes towards blacks were far from model. They were raised in rural western Tennessee and came to St. Louis during the Depression in search of work… economic refugees in their own country, and they certainly shared in at least some of the prejudices of the place they came from. However, is their behavior evidence of “racialized” thinking? Look at any history of urban development of the 19th century and you see the same patterns. Newcomers come in and live in the older, more run down, and, consequently, cheaper parts of town. When they become more established and more financially secure they move. Yet, the conventional narrative says this isn’t so, that the “normal” state of affairs is that people would stay put even when their fortunes improve, and the only thing that could explain a deviation from the status quo is racism. Such a view veers so wildly away from the evidence that it must be rejected. It seems, instead, that the patterns of urban migration that followed WWII, which WERE different from the 19th century example, happened because of the rise of affordable automobiles and the building of the interstate highway system. (Indeed, you see the same patterns of movement in EVERY urban area where interstates were built, not just in those that experienced large influxes of blacks in the early 20th century.)
Anyway….. the fact is the way we run schools in this country will always make things difficult, if not impossible, for schools in poorer areas. Socio-economic conditions are difficult for kids to overcome, and studies show those conditions have a lot to say about the chances students will have to succeed. For various reason we have not be open to the idea of killing the concept of neighborhood schools, often for the reason that the neighborhood school is often one of the few institutions in economically distressed areas that a community can rally around.
The truth is, unless we want to create a new class of urban serf tying people to specific communities regardless of their personal desires for greener pastures, poor communities will always be with us. Either we find a better way to mitigate the negative effects of socio-economic distress, or we radically alter the way we think of education. Either way, the existence of a handful of awful people in the Francis Howell school district is not the reason why the Normandy School district is failing, though you wouldn’t guess that from reading the Pro Publica article.
Sorry I went on so long. This is my old neighborhood we are talking about after all. (One set of grandparents lived in Pine Lawn, the other in Normandy, we lived 1/4 mile away in Bel-Nor, and I still have cousins in Normandy.)
To put things in some perspective I lived around Page and Kingshighway.
Some lovely turn of the century homes around there.
Not there. The part that I lived in is surrounded by empty lots now. Our house was a tiny, one bedroom, early 20th century shack.
Ah… lots of those between Page and 70. I was thinking more about place just south of Page… like this one on Vernon. http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/5169-Vernon-Ave-Saint-Louis-MO-63113/2995913_zpid/