Divided we Fail (31 page)

When busing programs began to end in the 1990s, desegregation was shrugged off as an education reform that didn't work.
³
Could school districts learn something from desegregation's successes? Could something be learned from its failures? Few asked.

Charter schools, which on average perform about the same as regular public schools, haven't necessarily empowered black parents.
⁴
In some cases, charters have promoted grassroots activism and participation, but at the same time, they are also remote from the democratic process.
⁵
Charters are typically run by private organizations, and usually exempt from rules and oversight that regular public schools have to follow. (As of 2012, Kentucky—where parent and community involvement in school governance had been a major piece of the KERA reforms—was one of the few holdouts that still banned charters.)

As the first decade of the twenty-first century came to a close, education reformers went from looking at whole-school achievement to crafting accountability systems for individual teachers. A large body of research showed that teacher quality has a strong effect on student achievement.
⁶
The Obama administration embraced these findings, and launched a $4 billion “Race to the Top” competition in 2009 to drive states to create new teacher-evaluation systems based in part on test scores, so that good teachers could be rewarded and bad ones weeded out. Yet in many cases, the reforms focused in particular on cities with high percentages of minority teachers, putting their jobs, once again, on the line.

In New Orleans, where charter schools replaced much of the public education system in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the percentage of black teachers dropped from 75 percent of the workforce before the storm to 57 percent in 2009.
⁷
Similar shifts in faculty demographics happened else
where. In New York, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his schools chancellor, Joel Klein, were implementing a slate of similar accountability-focused reforms, the percentage of minorities among new teacher hires dropped precipitously. In 1990, less than half of new teachers were white; in 2007, white teachers made up two-thirds of the city's new hires.
⁸
In Washington, DC, more than two hundred teachers and administrators lost their jobs under the reforms of former schools chancellor Michelle Rhee. Rhee cast herself as a hard-nosed reformer and said she was ridding the system of deadwood. A group of black and Hispanic principals sued the district, saying it was discrimination.
⁹
In Chicago, the teachers' union filed a federal complaint in 2012 after the district let go a disproportionate number of black teachers. They argued that the layoffs were a “systematic effort” to rid the school system of black teachers.
¹⁰

Accountability reforms have also led to more school closings. The Obama administration awarded more than $1 billion to reform failing schools, most of them in inner cities, most of them dominated by black and Hispanic students and teachers. The federal Department of Education laid out four options for reform that districts could choose from if they wanted the money. Two of the options called for closing down a school completely. A third required firing the principal and half of the teaching staff.

In 2009, districts closed more than 1,515 schools, compared to 149 the year before, according to a report published by the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
¹¹
Districts cited different reasons for closing schools: falling enrollments, security problems, poor performance, to save money. Angry parents launched protests just as passionate as the fight for Central High School in Louisville.
¹²
In a few cases, they sued to save their schools. District administrators were flummoxed. Thomas Payzant, who ran the Boston public schools for a decade, was shocked by the outcry when he suggested closing a traditionally black school in Roxbury because of a falling student population: “I thought my logic was impeccable,” he said. “I realized it was a mistake.”
¹³

In the era of choice and accountability, the dominant narrative is still one of escape, just as it was during desegregation: Minority children are “trapped in failing schools,” according to the rhetoric of reformers.
¹⁴
The mission is to get the students out. Once again, it seems that those in power are treating black schools as they did black neighborhoods during urban renewal—with an imperious sense of what is good for the community, regardless
of what the people who lived there want. The focus is on tearing out dysfunction and blight, instead of finding existing strengths and building on what people value and what is working well.

For many black community members, helping black children “escape” is not the outcome they have been fighting for all these years. It's essential that black youth achieve high test scores and other markers of success on par with white students, but it is not the only goal.

The achievement of black children leapt upward in the wake of desegregation, and more slightly as the accountability and school choice movements took over. And yet along the way, activists like Carman Weathers argued, black communities lost something precious. The all-black schools that communities built and nurtured under segregation were about more than climbing the rungs of American society and fitting in at white-dominated colleges and white workplaces. They were about nurturing identity, pride, and a sense of history in black children. No one wanted Jim Crow to return, but it seemed shortsighted to summarily discard the efforts that had driven many of the students and teachers in those schools to beat enormous odds.

Is there another way forward that does not rely on escape, but that instead acknowledges and values both sides of black consciousness and, as Du Bois had written a century earlier, allows for “a man to be both a Negro and an American . . . without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face”?

Finding a way to create harmony between separate and often conflicting identities has not been just a black problem. The struggle with twoness that Du Bois described as tearing apart the African American soul has also pulled at the seams of the nation.
¹⁵
Is America a white, Christian nation, where individuals either succeed against any odds stacked against them or are allowed to fail? Or is it a melting pot, where anyone is welcome and where opportunities are made available to all—especially those who start out behind? The explosive and rancorous partisan politics that erupted after Barack Obama's election to the presidency suggest that this question still deeply divides the nation. The racial and socioeconomic disparities in the nation's schools make it unlikely that the country will become more prepared to work together and value its differences anytime soon.

Soon, America's Silent Majority will no longer be middle class and white. Demographers have predicted that by 2050 or earlier, whites will for
the first time shrink to less than 50 percent of the American population.
¹⁶
As the country has grown more diverse, the nation's schools have become more segregated. The number of schools with a minority student population of more than 90 percent doubled in the 1990s, according to the Pew Research Center.
¹⁷
“Racial isolation remains far too common in America's classrooms today and it is increasing,” Arne Duncan, the US education secretary, declared in a 2011 press release urging school districts to push for racial integration in schools. Rising segregation “breeds educational inequity, which is inconsistent with America's core values,” he said.
¹⁸

Reviving forced busing is unrealistic. But other ideas have emerged about how to take advantage of the country's increasing diversity. Suburban districts are being transformed by an influx of minorities even as gentrification brings wealthy whites back to the inner cities.
¹⁹
Some researchers have pointed to provisions in No Child Left Behind that could be expanded to encourage wealthy white districts to open their doors to poor, minority students.
²⁰
Others educators have reimagined the role of charter schools, which have generally fed racial separation, as sites that could bring students from different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds together.
²¹
And efforts focused on integrating housing in order to create diverse communities and schools have made headway in a handful of cities, including Atlanta and Indianapolis.
²²

During the first years of his administration, President Obama spent billions of federal taxpayer dollars to improve schools and to lift the performance of poor, minority children. School districts across the country funneled money into new accountability and data systems to track student performance in the hopes that measuring student achievement would help improve it. They dismantled bureaucracies in efforts to jump-start academic achievement. They opened more and more charter schools and other experimental models, spurred on by No Child Left Behind and the very real threat that future generations of Americans will lag far behind students in other countries. The Obama administration promised an army of new teachers and new standards.

All of these steps may help improve test scores. But American schools are about more than test scores, and the protests against school closures are not just sentimental gestures. Just as many black activists have seen schools as more than a place where black children should learn to fill in the right bubbles and apply to college, America's schools have always had a larger mission.
As Justice Kennedy wrote in his opinion in the Louisville-Seattle case, the nation's schools have a “historic commitment” to creating an integrated society. They are responsible for “teaching that our strength comes from people of different races, creeds, and cultures uniting in a commitment to the freedom of all.”

The fights against the increased importance of tests and the closure of schools in minority neighborhoods are about preserving the other mission of public schooling: to build and sustain community, a concept that encompasses more than the local neighborhood. Public schools are the place where American society is constructed and rejuvenated.
²³
Their success must be judged not only by academic achievement, but on how well the system teaches students to adapt to the values of pluralism and inclusiveness that undergird American society, and by how much their graduates are able to expand the notion of community and identity beyond the limits of neighborhood and caste, to the diverse group of people that make up the nation.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The Hopson and Stoner families graciously opened their doors and allowed me into their lives. I thank them for their time and willingness to tell me their stories, even when the memories were difficult. I could not have written this book without the participation of Fran Thomas, Robert Douglas, Carman Weathers, Joyce Spond, Judge John Heyburn, and Riccardo X, who spent hours with me, sharing their stories and making sure I got the facts straight.

Thank you also to Teddy Gordon, Don Ingwerson, Pat Todd, Loueva Moss, Deborah Stallworth, John Whiting, Aubrey Williams, David McFarland, June Embers, Bernard Minnis, Raul Cunningham, Susie Guess, Sandra Hampton, Norbert Logsdon, Beverly Goodwin, Byron Leet, Frank Mellen, Steve Porter, Blaine Hudson, Georgia Powers, Steve Daeschner, Sheldon Berman, Daniel Withers, Mike Daniels, Hiram and Barbara Moss, Suzy Post, Yolanda Green, Anita Smith, the Hilliard family, Daryll Owens, Joseph McMillan, David Johnson, Carol Haddad, Nelson Fitts, the Easton family, Joe Hardesty, Ken Stites, Houston Barber, Amy Cubbage, Dan McCubbin, Traci Foster, and Gary Orfield. All were generous with their time, sharing stories and ideas that were critical in shaping my reporting. A special thank you to Walter and Imar Hutchins, who helped me fill out the story of Lyman Johnson.

This project would not have been possible without the vision, support, and enthusiasm of Samuel Freedman. My year as a Spencer Foundation fellow
in education journalism at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism was indispensable. It gave me the time, resources and, especially, access to people and ideas that reshaped my thinking and approach to this project. Thank you especially to Bette Weneck, Amy Stuart Wells, LynNell Hancock, Elizabeth Green, Peg Tyre, and Nicholas Lemann.

Robert Rodosky and the research and archives staff in the Jefferson County Public Schools provided a wealth of documents. I am also very grateful to everyone at the University of Louisville archives, in particular Carrie Daniels and Tom Owens; to Mark Taflinger of the
Louisville Courier-Journal
; to Alan Wernecke and the staff at the Western District, who helped me access a suitcase full of court transcripts; and to Khristopher Brooks, who tracked down the last elusive facts. For many parts of the book, I relied extensively on the outstanding reporting of journalists at the
Courier-Journal
.

Thanks to my agent, Robert Guinsler, for believing in this book and finding it the right home. I'm incredibly grateful for the enthusiasm and guidance of my editor, Gayatri Patnaik, and to Rachael Marks and Robin DuBlanc.

My grandmother Dorsie Richmond shared her own experiences of desegregation, and helped spark my interest in its history. I am very lucky to have as a model her curiosity about the world and her dedication to making it a better place. Thanks to my parents, for teaching me the discipline and love of writing as a child, and for cheering me on as an adult. Margaret and David Graves have always provided me a second home in Louisville, and I am so thankful for them. They listened and encouraged me throughout the years I spent researching this book, and their experiences and insights were invaluable.

I am grateful every day for the love, patience, and tough editing of my husband, Matthew Sweeney.

NOTES

In some citations of newspaper articles the author's name is absent because some archives and collections did not include reporter bylines.