Use This Tool to Find Out How Segregated Your School District Really Is.
One would like to think that decades of social progress would erase racial segregation in education, but a 2013 study by the Economic Policy Institute found America’s schools are now more segregated than they were in 1973. This is largely due to decades of discriminatory housing. policies that force white and colored people to live in different neighborhoods, but it also has to do with school district boundaries. In general, children, especially younger children, go to school next door, which means that white children go to school with their white neighbors and black children go to school with their black neighbors.
But according to Vox’s comprehensive and compelling new story by Alvin Chang , school districts don’t need to be involved to reinforce underlying housing segregation. They can be done to improve the separation, and they can be done to make the separation worse. As Chang writes, “[O] often has been designed so that white students are in classrooms that are even whiter than the communities in which they live.” This is the educational equivalent of gerrimandering.
This may now seem like an insurmountable problem – for example, it is an ongoing challenge to address the ongoing effects of decades of racist housing policies. But Chang notes that this kind of policy, which has a direct impact on recent generations, is set at the local level by the school board. This means that if you are looking to reduce racial segregation in your area, attend your local student council meetings. Run to the office yourself. (Be that as it may, Chang points to ” research [that] shows that school boards with registered Democrats tend to pursue lines that reduce segregation.”)
In the meantime, this story has a tool to see if your school district reflects, tries to eliminate, or exacerbates housing discrimination. But there is no easy solution: Parents in areas where borders have changed are more likely to move or send their children to private schools. Too many people attend the rich (mostly white) school next door to my zone, and in recent years some children have been sent to a neighboring, but less affluent and less white school. Many, many parents have responded by transferring their children to a private school until they get a place in the zone they prefer.
But ultimately changing school district boundaries may be the only solution, because school desegregation leads to housing desegregation, and vice versa: as journalist Nicole Hanna-Jones tweeted, “housing segregation is decreasing … because people can no longer guarantee access to white schools by shopping in white neighborhoods. “
Anyway, I highly recommend reading the full Vox article. The research and data are comprehensive and fascinating, and demonstrate the extent to which our country remains, in many ways, as divided as it was fifty years ago.