Schools for Tomorrow Blog

Last week, for the first time in recent memory, a high-profile politician took on issues of race and class that are usually confined to university classrooms and barber shops.  Barack Obama’s speech was notable for a number of reasons, not least of which was its even, thoughtful tone.  Perhaps Obama’s greatest moment of righteous indignation came when he addressed the relationship between racial inequality and education:

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Obama’s speech provides an opportunity for us to ponder the relationship between race and schooling in our own backyard.  Here in Colorado, for example, fewer than half of all students of color graduate high school, and the number of black students who score at the highest levels on the CSAP in our urban schools is embarrassingly small. 

We’re right to hold schools and districts accountable for those things within their control, such as refusing to accept low expectations for certain groups of kids, and providing the means to assess the progress of different subgroups of children.  But some of the most effective means of achieving educational equality lie beyond schools. 

Consider, for example, housing integration, which can have a variety of positive effects on the achievement gap.  We know that kids of color perform better in more integrated schools than in more homogenous ones, and there are other advantages, too.  The Rev. Jeremiah Wright hullabaloo reminded us once again how differently blacks and whites perceive the American experience.  Sharing fences, parks, and schools with neighbors who look different from you is perhaps the single best way to promote mutual understanding.

How to integrate neighborhoods?  Well, that’s a different post for a different blog.  But we should keep in mind that achieving educational equality is a task that goes well beyond teachers, schools, and districts.  Only visionary thinking at the broadest level, combined with good old fashioned perspiration at the smallest, will get us there.

 

This entry was posted on Monday, March 24th, 2008 at 6:17 am and is filed under Integration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.