Unequal Schools: The Role Of Desegregation In Schools

We have become a nation that accepts separate and unequal schools as if nothing can be done about segregation. As a nation, we expect our schools to create equal outcomes for students who leave their homes severely disadvantaged by family and community poverty, who arrive at their schools to find sometimes unqualified or inexperienced teachers, and who leave those schools as soon as they can. This double and triple segregation has become far worse since the U.S. Supreme Court began dissolving desegregation plans 16 years ago—a dissolution that continues to deepen and intensify segregation. Across 21st-century America, segregation has reached levels for millions of students once found only in the Old South. It has produced schools that require

If we don't have a plan for racial equity everywhere, and for integration where possible, we are all too likely to replicate the failures of the past. Although education policy has basically ignored the issues of racial change and integration since the Civil Rights era, no one has figured out how to make school systems separate but equal and no one has figured out how White, suburban, middle-class teachers are to work effectively with students of color and linguistic minority students in complex, changing, interracial settings without good professional training designed to support multicultural education and diversity. Doing educational reform while ignoring the fundamental cleavages in society is profoundly counterproductive. We need a new Civil Rights agenda for our

Housing policy, wages policy, health care, and day care are among the most urgent issues. A second is to demand that there be a Civil Rights agenda for our schools. A third is to develop and implement training and support plans to give the nation's teachers the skills they need to better work with students of all backgrounds and to teach with materials and practices that fully recognize the contribution of all cultures and races to the United States.

Educators are well aware of two things. First is that President George W. Bush was fundamentally right when he highlighted massive inequalities in education for minority students. Second was that he was fundamentally wrong in thinking it can be solved by high-stakes testing of children and sanctioning of schools. The NCLB law is a classic example of this latter problem, as we have shown in ten studies and two books on NCLB