Part 4—The 15 percent solution: How about it? Is it true, what that recent Vox report said about These Schools Today!
Is it true that "schools today are re-segregating?" Is it true that "schools in the South are as segregated now as they were" in 1968?
If you made us give you a yes or no answer, we'd have to go with "no." If you wanted to think about what's being said, we'd recommend that we drop the fraught term "segregation" in favor of terms like "racial imbalance."
We'd also suggest that we acknowledge an obvious point. With America's student population now less than 50 percent white, there's no way to create the liberal world's apparent Eden, in which black kids get to go to school with oodles of so-called white kids.
There's just no way to do that. And no, you can't produce majority-white public schools in districts whose frequently adorable kids present like this, so-called racially speaking:
Student population, Durham Public SchoolsThat's the current alignment in that North Carolina district. Below, we'll show you the breakdown in New York City, where every school would be "segregated," according to Vox, if its kids were evenly distributed according to their so-called race.
In theory, is "racial exposure" a good thing? In theory, it certainly is.
In theory, good journalism is desirable too, but it can't be based on semantic cons and on the practice of disappearing essential data. Except as an example of tribal cheerleading, we thought the Vox piece was grossly misleading and quite unfortunate.
Perhaps for those very reasons, Chang's piece in Vox was quickly hailed by the New York Times. We refer to this series of tweets by Nikole Hannah-Jones, an award-winning journalist who now writes for the Times.
In April 2014, Hannah-Jones wrote a valuable, detailed report for ProPublica about the modern history of the Tuscaloosa City Schools. Her 10,000-word report was also published by The Atlantic. Its headline was perhaps exciting, eye-catching:
"Segregation Now"If you care about topics like this, you should definitely read Hannah-Jones' report. Warning! We thought her detailed, nuanced history was absolutely fascinating. At the same time, we saw no sign that she has any real understanding of instructional issues for low-income kids from ow-literacy background who may be "years behind" their educationally advantaged peers.
Beyond that, we'd advise staying away from historically fraught terms like "segregation." In the present day, the term is almost guaranteed to produce more heat than light.
With those disclaimers, we strongly recommend Hannah-Jones' detailed report. That said, we thought she had both thumbs on the scale when we read her summary of that report on page A3 of last Thursday's hard-copy Times, perhaps the dumbest current page in all of American journalism.
It seemed to us that Hannah-Jones was picking and choosing from her own report as she praised Chang's effort. Below, you see the way her tweets appeared, after editing, on the Times' hard-copy A3:
HANNAH-JONES (1/11/18): This is such important work. I’ve long said that school attendance zone lines are as heavily gerrymandered as electoral districts. Someone sits down with a demographic map and draws these lines, more often than not to make schools more segregated, not less.In that way, Hannah-Jones summarized the story she told in "Segregation Now." But uh-oh! As Chang left out the most basic facts about our nation's changing student demographics, we thought Hannah-Jones left out a great deal of the information from her 2014 report.
We showed this when I wrote Segregation Now for ProPublica. Tuscaloosa officials created an enirely black feeder system of schools, and blamed the all-black high school on residential segregation.
Except we asked for the attendance zone maps and then Jeff Larson showed that the high school was in an integrated neighborhood—but its noncontiguous attendance zone was drawn entirely around the black and poorest part of the city.
In fact, the white kids who lived near Tuscaloosa’s Central High were zoned to the most heavily white high school outside of their neighborhood. Some went to Central to catch a bus to the whiter school in order to avoid their “neighborhood” school.
When segregation persists no matter the conditions on the ground—in segregated communities, in integrated communities, with busing, without busing—we must admit that schools are segregated because people with power want it that way. THIS IS INTENTIONAL.
For starters, did Tuscaloosa officials create an "all-black high school" (Central High) in a way which was INTENTIONAL?
Based on Hannah-Jones' detailed report, it seems they plainly did, and that no one is saying different. But some of those officials were black, and last week's summary omits the reasons Hannah-Jones reported for their action.
Alas! The gruesome "world the slaveholders made" continues to haunt our dreams and decisions today! In ways Hannah-Jones described in detail, Tuscaloosa officials had long been looking for a way to keep their school system from becoming all black.
Ever since court-ordered desegregation, the city had been operating a single, both-races high school (Central High), along with three single-grade, both-races middle schools. From Grade 6 through Grade 12, there had been only one public school a Tuscaloosa child could attend. In this way, the system had been thoroughly integrated, in law and in fact, from the sixth grade on.
Perhaps you can guess what happened. As time went by, "white flight" was taking students out of the district. (Presumably, so did middle-class black flight. Today, the suburban Tuscaloosa County Schools operate a bevy of high schools with admirable black-white racial balance.)
At any rate, white flight was hitting the Tuscaloosa City Schools hard. In the passage shown below, Hannah-Jones described some of the thinking which led to the creation of the attendance zones which made Central High all-black and heavily low-income:
HANNAH-JONES (4/16/14): White students once accounted for a majority of the Tuscaloosa school district's students. But by the mid-1990s, they made up less than a third. Total enrollment had dropped from 13,500 in 1969 to 10,300 in 1995. Many white parents had decided to send their children to nearly all-white private schools or to move across the city line to access the heavily white Tuscaloosa County Schools.According to Hannah-Jones' original report, school districts in cities like Richmond had become all black. For better or worse, every black child in those cities was thereby attending a school which was completely "segregated," if that's the term we like.
Tuscaloosa’s business leaders and elected officials had witnessed the transformation of other southern cities after their school districts had reached a tipping point—the point at which white parents become unsettled by the rising share of black students in a school, and pull their children from the school en masse. School districts in cities such as Birmingham and Richmond had seen their integration efforts largely mooted: just about all the white students had left. As white families had moved out to the suburbs, eroding the tax base, both the schools and the cities themselves had suffered. Many officials in Tuscaloosa obsessed about the rippling consequences of continued white flight. “Money follows kids, and the loss of white students was very, very critical,” said Shelley Jones, who is white and served as a school-board member in the 1990s, and later as the chair.
According to Hannah-Jones' original report, city officials were trying to keep that from happening in Tuscaloosa. They proceeded to make decisions which were flat-out realpolitik.
You may or may not agree with the decisions they made, but we don't think it's helpful or intelligent to omit the punishing context in which those decisions were made. You can read about those decisions in Hannah-Jones' detailed report.
Beyond that, it seemed to us that a reader might get a distorted idea from Hannah-Jones' reference last week to the way "the white kids who lived near Tuscaloosa’s Central High were zoned to the most heavily white high school outside of their neighborhood." (That refers to a zoning decision made in 2007.) In fact, Tuscaloosa created only two high schools other than Central High, and each of those schools was then, and remains today, majority black.
No white students were zoned or bused to majority-white high schools. No such schools were created. If we want to understand the actual world in which we actually live, we think that point is worth noting.
In her 2014 report, Hannah-Jones presented a detailed history of these decisions. (The successful attempt to secure a Mercedes-Benz plant for Tuscaloosa was also involved.) We think her history is highly instructive. We think her judgment is perhaps a bit faulty, in familiar ways, about various other matters, especially concerning instruction of kids from low-literacy backgrounds.
In our view, Hannah-Jones' original report was also weak in one other respect—her reliance on the word "segregation." In discussions of this type, the word produces enormous heat, perhaps not a whole lot of light.
Alas! Use of the word seems to make liberal adults feel morally pure; this seems to be one of the leading objectives of modern progressive journalism. On the down side, we think the nation's "minority" and low-income kids deserve better service from the adults who pretend to write about their interests and lives.
How silly can it sometimes get when progressive adults work from the "segregation now" mental framework? Consider the fascinating report Hannah-Jones wrote for the New York Times magazine in June 2016.
That piece was quite lengthy too; it too ran over 10,000 words. It was also semi-autobiographical. It appeared beneath this headline:
"Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated City"Hannah-Jones described the struggle she and her husband faced in picking a public school for their 4-year-old daughter to attend.
For today, consider only one part of Hannah-Jones' report. In this passage, she described the student demographics of New York City's public schools:
HANNAH-JONES (6/12/16): In a city where white children are only 15 percent of the more than one million public-school students, half of them are clustered in just 11 percent of the schools, which not coincidentally include many of the city’s top performers. Part of what makes those schools desirable to white parents, aside from the academics, is that they have some students of color, but not too many. This carefully curated integration, the kind that allows many white parents to boast that their children’s public schools look like the United Nations, comes at a steep cost for the rest of the city’s black and Latino children.Should public school students be "racially isolated?" Presumably, no—they should not. That said, this was Hannah-Jones' account of the city's student demographics:
The New York City public-school system is 41 percent Latino, 27 percent black and 16 percent Asian. Three-quarters of all students are low-income. In 2014, the Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, released a report showing that New York City public schools are among the most segregated in the country. Black and Latino children here have become increasingly isolated, with 85 percent of black students and 75 percent of Latino students attending “intensely” segregated schools—schools that are less than 10 percent white.
Student population, New York City Public SchoolsNote the craziness to which we fall prey when we adopt the conceptual framework we progressive seem to adore:
White kids: 15 percent
Black kids: 27 percent
Hispanic kids: 41 percent
Asian-American kids: 16 percent
If New York City waved a magic wand and created "racially balanced" schools, all its black kids would attend schools which were 15 percent white. (Warning! In fact, subsequent "white flight" would probably reduce that number a bit.)
Under current realities, fifteen percent would be the best we could do! But according to Hannah-Jones' lexicon, anything under ten percent would count as "intense segregation!"
(Note: Across the nation, Asian-Americans kids outperform white kids academically. But according to "segregation" jockeys, exposure to them doesn't help black kids at school! Only white kids matter. Everyone else is losing out if there aren't enough white kids around!)
Fourteen percent would be the best; ten percent would be heinous. That's the conceptual hall of mirrors we enter when progressive thought leaders feed our fantasies with traditional, street-fighting talk of "segregation now."
What should we do with our public schools? To be perfectly honest, we doubt that Chang and Hannah-Jones have even the slightest idea. That question takes us Beyond the Valley of Racial Balance into the realm of successful instruction. Modern progressives tend to churn the "segregation" numbers, then take an immediate powder.
They're boldly fighting "segregation;" beyond that, they say little else. To them, it's still 1968. Heroically, they're fighting the battle which existed when the student population was something like 90 percent white, when we didn't know how hard it would be to eliminate the achievement gaps which so gravely affect the interests of low-income kids.
Fifteen percent would be ideal. Ten percent would be awful! So it goes when progressive leaders build their lives and their careers around making us adults feel morally pure, just like it was in the day.
At any rate, you probably know what happened after that New York magazine piece, which didn't explain how to avoid "segregation" in a city with New York's demographics. Of course! After that New York magazine piece, Hannah-Jones was named a Rockefeller genius! In these slightly comical ways, our liberal elites continue to throw the nation's black kids down the drain and under the big yellow bus.
None of this will ever be mentioned on MSNBC. The corporate multimillionaire hosts on that shameless corporate channel don't give a fig about black kids. Nothing could be more clear.
A bit of irony: On the whole, we thought Hannah-Jones' history of Tuscaloosa was superb. That said, here's a bit of irony from the leading authority on her life:
Hannah-Jones grew up in Waterloo, Iowa, to father Milton Hannah, who is African-American, and mother Cheryl A. Novotny, who is of Czech and English descent...Hannah-Jones and her sister attended almost all-white schools as part of a voluntary program of desegregation busing. She wrote for the high school newspaper and graduated from West High School in 1994.First, all praise to those parents! But did Hannah-Jones "attend almost all-white schools as part of a voluntary program of desegregation busing?"
We don't know if Hannah-Jones actually gained from that approach. But in large part due to changed demographics, that approach is frequently unavailable today!
What the heck do we do instead? What do we do to make low-income kids feel happy in school? What do we do to eat away at those punishing achievement gaps?
Now that it isn't 1968, what do we do for our low-income kids? With regard to that obvious question, progressives who talk about "resegregation" rarely have much to say.