Tag: segregation

The Integration Diaries: School supplies and hair bows

On August 12, we put our kids in a public school committed to socioeconomic diversity, where they are among the 6 percent of kids who look like them. It’s going very well. They are learning how to speak Spanish while half of their classmates learn English. My kindergartener is adding, subtracting, and reading up a storm. My pre-kindergartener wants to be an “astronauta” and asks for, “jugo, por favor” (pronounced, “po-faloe” because no one is going to correct something that adorable).

So what are we learning, my white husband and I? 

We are learning how to support the work of integration. We got on board with desegregation when we enrolled. Integrating is much…much harder. 

I’ve been challenged by my friends to write about this year much like I wrote about our process in choosing a school. 

That’s tougher of course, because my instinct is to protect my kiddos. I don’t want them paying for my soapboxes. However, I trust the teachers and administrators at their school enough to believe that they would not be doing this work if they didn’t already know a lot of what I’m going to say. And they are top-notch educators who already love and care for my kids very well, whether or not they like me as a person. 

So, here it goes.

The Integration Diaries, part I

My kids already stand out racially at their school. Not only are we white, but we are white. Blonde hair, blue eyes, the whole bit. We are going snow skiing over winter break…in Utah. That is the whitest vacation on the planet. If you went into the classroom and made a few blunt, statistically-based assumptions about income, parents’ professions, zip code, etc, you’d probably guess wrong for some of the kids, but not ours. 

Knowing that, I was hypersensitive to how they would see themselves in their new school. How they would fit in until they found the right way to stand out (preferably with kindness and creativity). 

This anxiety manifested in some slightly silly ways that are probably best seen as metaphors or object lessons. 

When it was time to buy school supplies, I did my best to get the most universal version of everything. On Meet the Teacher night, I was pleased to see that our supplies did not stand out. Basic in the best way. Her blue, transparent pencil box looked just like about eight others in her class. The pink handles of her round-tip safety scissors were indistinguishable from the rest.

Which was problematic when we forgot to put her name on everything. 

After the first day of school, my daughter let me know that she needed a new pencil box and scissors. She was also concerned about her hair—a mane of wild blonde curls worn loose and grown slowly. 

Her teacher apologized and explained that, essentially, Moira’s supplies, because we forgotten to write on them, had been taken as donations and given to other children. She had replaced what she could from the school’s extra-supplies closet, but there were no more pencil boxes or scissors.

So not only had Moira stood out on her first day, but it was in that stomach churning way no kid likes to stand out…she didn’t have the supplies she needed. She was conspicuously unprepared. Both her father and I would have pretty much melted on the spot as kids.

Except that Moira’s stomach didn’t churn. She wasn’t mortified or anxious. She wasn’t the only one without a pencil box or scissors. Her teacher didn’t make a thing of it, the other kids didn’t make a thing of it. She just wanted to know: did someone steal her stuff?

She was more bothered that her hair did not look like anyone else’s in her class, and she, for the first time in her five and a half years, asked to change it. She wanted dark, straight hair that she could wear in a thick braid.

These two minuscule, very inconsequential issues set the tone for our year. They could have happened anywhere, but they didn’t. They happened in the context of integration, which infused them with new meaning: We can be part of a system that works, because we belong to each other.

We learn to sort the world at an early age. Researchers have shown that kids recognize sameness and difference from their earliest days of cognition. Parents are constantly stymied by the various ways they decide to sort themselves as they grow. When I was in fourth grade we had major in-group issues over who brought Gushers vs. plain Fruit Roll-Ups. The haves and have-nots of the lunchtime economy.

We also sorted racially, economically, and by academic ability. Some of this was facilitated by the school itself, which was desegregated, but not intentionally integrated. Tracking, recommendation-based G/T testing, all those ways that schools internally segregate. The more empowered parents (whiter, wealthier) would request which teachers they wanted for their kids, and so they all ended up together. 

(Shout out to my parents who did not do that.) 

Beyond those mechanical means of separating us, we also just gravitated to what we knew.

We didn’t encounter a lot of mixed-race settings outside of school, so we didn’t recreate them in school. My anachronistically idyllic neighborhood was white. My church was white. My doctors were white and all the patients I saw in the waiting room were white. 

Despite Hispanic students making up about 40-50 percent of the school, I did not have my first sleep-over-level Hispanic friend until 7th grade, and she was constantly catching grief from her friends about being “too white.” 

Placing our kids in deliberately, doggedly diverse settings doesn’t stop them from noticing difference—their own or anyone else’s. In fact, it brings it to the foreground much faster. Like on the first day of school.

So we had a talk about what matters. 

What matters: kids having what they need. 

Getting a new pencil box and scissors was not a big deal for us. In fact, it was a pleasure. We let Moira pick this one, and she went all in, as usual. Tie-dye pencil box and scissors with a soccer print. They stand out because they reflect her personality, her gusto.

She doesn’t know who got her original box, but we were able to talk about the difference between sharing and stealing, and how we should always make sure there’s enough in that extra-supplies closet so that no one has to go without. After all, how glad had she been that it was there when she needed it?  

What matters: belonging. 

On the matter of hair, I had to break the news that she would never have lustrous, dark, straight hair like her classmates. I could not braid it into thick braids. It barely holds a clip, and I have to use orthodontic rubber bands to make pigtails. But while she can admire their lovely hair, I pointed out, she also has lovely hair, and it is very special to me.

“You know, I’m glad you have curly hair,” I said, “Because I do too.” 

She liked that. “We’re like each other,” she said with a smile. 

(Cue Mom tears.)

She has not brought up the hair issue since. She often admires other girls’ bows, braids, and shiny brown hair, but she also comments on how much she likes her own hair when it swoops over her forehead, or when the curls make complete spirals. 

She feels secure, and so she is generous with others and herself.

Integration is not ignoring our differences. It’s the opposite. By being different and staying together we can make sure everyone has a grip on what matters. Everyone has what they need. Everyone has a place to belong. Those same teachable moments are for the parents, the aspiring integrationists, as well. 

What matters: economic justice. 

We live in a world where some kids have no pencil boxes, some kids have cool pencil boxes, and some kids can run out and replace their pencil box whenever they need to. The growing gap between those who depend on the extra-supplies closet and those who stock it should not exist. But it does, and now that we know, what will we do? 

Will we just re-stock the closet with our plenty, or will we fight for enough to go around in the first place?

What matters: representation. 

I didn’t worry that Moira would never realize she is beautiful. She is damn near identical to the standard of beauty that our culture has been promoting and celebrating for centuries. She’ll figure out soon enough that her parents, grandparents, and random strangers aren’t lying to her.

But those people in the positions to define what is “beautiful,” “professional,” “classy,” and “appropriate” need to see beyond the Moiras of the world. She is one of a million ways to be beautiful. Our board rooms, marketing firms, artists, media producers, and decision makers should look like those million other ways, so that they recognize them when they see them.

Fitting in is a lot easier when you all exist in the same economic and racial America. You know the rules, you know the code. I often hear the pro-segregation argument, “people just like to be with their own.” Birds of a feather. I get that: No one likes to feel isolated or alone in the crowd. But we can build a community based on more than economic and racial likeness. We can preserve the importance of those lived experiences without perpetuating the inequities that come alone with them. We can build society on more than Gushers or Fruit Roll-ups, who has, and who does not. I want my kids to know how to build a community based on what matters, and that’s something that we are going to figure out together.

Location, segregation, and accountability: the quest for better school ratings

Parents, homebuyers, and ed reformers all love simple, clear school ratings. Can we have them without reinforcing neighborhood segregation?

Image from Zillow.com

In the old real estate adage “location, location, location,” at least one of those locations represents proximity to a good school. It seems natural that parents would want this, and real estate investment experts confirm their hunch. A 2018 Forbes article recommends first-time homebuyers consider four priorities, and the first is location. Describing a good location, the author writes, “Look into things like crime rates and the quality of the school district.” 

At some point in their hunt most homebuyers will visit at least one of the most popular search sites — Zillow, Realtor.com and Trulia — and encounter a seemingly simple measure of school quality: a color-coded GreatSchools.org ranking on a scale of 1 to 10, and a “parent rating” of 1 to 5 stars. States have followed suit with their own user-friendly report cards under the Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), but none have the market presence of Great Schools. 

“We literally chose the house that we did based on proximity to and ratings of the schools,” said Clint Ochoa, a recent homebuyer in Texas. The ratings were clear and helpful for Ochoa and his wife while he was stationed in South Korea and she was in Atlanta with their three children. The whole home search had to happen online, and they knew very little about the area. Though they would go on to make school visits and talk to a real estate agent to discuss some of their family’s unique needs, Ochoa said, “Zillow was a starting place.” He’s in good company. In 2018, Zillow reported 157.2 million unique users per month, if those users clicked on a property, they saw a Great Schools rating. 

Given the power to steer homebuyers and shape neighborhoods, it’s not surprising that the ratings used by these sites are under constant scrutiny. 

Critics—both parents and academics—  have taken aim at what goes into the 1-10 rating. The formula has grown far more sophisticated since 2003 when Great Schools launched nationwide, but it still relies in part on test scores (state assessments, ACT, and SAT), which favor schools with wealthier students.

Even assuming that the summary ratings could somehow fairly and accurately measure school quality, University of Massachusetts-Lowell Assistant Professor and director of research for the Massachusetts Consortium for Innovative Education Assessment Jack Schneider still voices concern about their effect, whether from private or state agencies. Though state ratings are intended to spur school improvement, he said, “I think we should have some very serious questions about the theory of change that putting such information out there for the public is somehow going to guarantee better education experiences for young people.”

Great Schools is not in the accountability business, but instead aims to help parents make informed choices. This function is equally problematic for Schneider. Having a facile quantifier for how “good” and “bad” schools are, he says, drives neighborhood and school segregation, two of the culprits behind the achievement gap in the first place. 

Image from Zillow.com

In search of a better measure

The accountability and rating craze began in the No Child Left Behind era and has done little more than reinforce what many already believed, Brookings Institute fellow Jon Valant said: schools serving low-income populations or large populations of black and brown students were bad and should be penalized and avoided. 

“That was preventable,” Valant said. Once it was clear that the data showed little more than centuries of social and economic disparity—something schools can do very little about— state and federal governments could have tried to find a different way to measure what schools were actually doing, and get that information to parents.

“If you are going to show a label for the school,” Valant said, “it should be about what they are learning in the school … not how much they knew when they got there.”

Image from txschools.org

There have been some steps in that direction. Under the Every Student Succeeds Act, many states incorporated “growth scores” as a component of overall scores to demonstrate the value of what is happening inside the school. Each calculates and weights them a bit differently, but in general growth scores describe how much knowledge a student gains in one year, regardless of where they started. With wealthy students starting school already ahead of their lower-income peers, growth scores, in theory, should keep schools from being penalized for where their students started.

Parents care about more than tests as well.  In the beginning, as No Child Left Behind took effect, the ratings were simple reflections of state assessment performance—something Great Schools no longer sees an adequate measures of school quality. Since 2007 Great Schools has continually expanded and honed the criteria that go into its ratings, including growth scores and other equity metrics.  

“Our goal as an organization is to provide the broadest picture of school quality,” Great Schools CEO Jon Deane said. “We’re generally looking at, how can we tell a complete story?”

Stanford University professor Sean Reardon is one of the nations’ leading proponents of using growth measures over proficiency scores to determine school quality and measure the opportunities afforded to students. “If parents were to use the learning rate data to help inform their decisions about where to live, they might make very different choices in many cases,” he said in a news article on the Stanford website.

Image from Zillow.com

A Brown University study by David Houston and Jeffery Henig seems to back that claim. In an experimental situation when parents were asked to select a school using demographic information and growth scores, they chose less white and wealthy districts than when they were given demographic information with achievement scores. 

However, a new report and data tool from Reardon’s team showed that segregated schools with concentrated poverty do not move students forward academically as well as socioeconomically diverse schools and wealthier schools. Their growth scores would be lower. The report would not say definitively what accounted for the difference in growth, but did suggest some possibilities including limited resources and teacher experience. 

So prioritizing growth scores might make a parent choose a different school…but probably not highly segregated, low-income school. Changing the way ratings are calculated hasn’t make disparities disappear, because disparities still exist in schools. The fundamental truth learned from No Child Left Behind still stands: not all kids are getting the same quality of education. We know more about the gaps—they show up in almost any measure we invent—but we haven’t been as successful in addressing them. 

Image from txschools.org

Families know this, but for many, the neighborhoods around the most highly rated schools are out of their price range. “A large percentage of our users are low-income parents,” Deane said. 

For them, finding the right school is an art. They need the more complex data available on GreatSchools.org to figure out if their children can thrive in more middling-rated schools–those in the yellow 4-7 range. Then, they can go back to Zillow, and find an affordable home to match.

Did you want a good school, or a white school? Or are those the same thing?

While deeper exploration is possible on the Great Schools site itself, the real estate websites only show the summary score. Seeing the summary dark orange “2” instead of a green “9”  can have an immediate effect on a family wanting to purchase or rent a house close to the best possible school. As long as ratings act as market drivers for certain neighborhoods, they will increase segregation, which will increase the disparities reflected in the ratings, said Schneider.

“Good schools” sell houses. Alleviating inequality does not, Schneider explained, “The market doesn’t create integration.”

However, it’s not clear whether the ratings themselves are actually changing homebuyer habits, as much as reinforcing them, and making the process more efficient. While both state agencies and Great Schools continue to make more information available to parents, that data still generally tracks with income and racial demographics. Ratings are, whether the shopper intends them to be or not, a shortcut to finding schools with more affluent, whiter students.

Some researchers and most integration advocates acknowledge that parents may explicitly prefer whiter schools. What bothers Florida mom Stephanie Ilderton is it that this desire can be laundered of its racism by the seemingly simple science of ratings. Meanwhile, families who are looking for diversity may think they are getting a more racially and economically agnostic measure, but they aren’t, she explained, “The ratings are really incredibly biased.”

When Ilderton looked around her son’s Orlando metro-area school, she saw a lot of things she liked: strong academics, engaged teachers, and classrooms with books and materials for every child. What she didn’t see were black adults. As white parents with adopted black sons, Ilderton said, she and her husband needed to find “racial mirrors” for their children.

“We’re always on the hunt for role models for our sons,” she said.

She knew that finding a new school meant moving, so she consulted Zillow. From there, she quickly realized that the school ratings were leading her away from where she wanted to be. It was easy to find schools rated 9 and 10 in suburban Orlando near the university where her husband is a professor. But if she limited herself to 9s and 10s, she said, it ruled out the most diverse schools and the neighborhoods they served. 

It bothered her that the ratings confirmed what people in her area already associated with “good schools,” she explained— whiter, wealthier students—thus rewarding decades of racial and economic segregation. “I don’t even think it’s intentional,” she said.

Ilderton is also acutely aware that disparities can continue within a highly-rated school. She needed more than a simple rating to know if her sons would be well-served academically and socially.

To find the supplemental information she wanted, Ilderton combed the Office of Civil Rights Database, visited schools, and eventually settled on a school that was rated lower than their current school, but still an 8 on the Great Schools rating system. It received a “B” on the Florida state report card, lower than the district as a whole, but the academic performance for black students was proportional to their representation in the student body—information she gleaned from Great Schools and the state report card. Both allow users to explore performance for different groups of students. Upon visiting the school, Ilderton was pleased to see black teachers around. 

She knew which school she wanted, and only then did Ilderton returned to Zillow. She used a tool on the website that allows users to search for homes within the attendance zone of their desired school.

A map is focused on a geographical area: a city, a zip code, a suburb. Alongside the map, area schools are listed next to their ratings. Location.

Users click on the school name, and a map shows up, highlighting the attendance zone. Location.

The user then clicks “houses for sale inside this attendance zone” and another map shows up, empty except for qualifying homes. Location.

The tool does not tell parents what they should be looking for in a school. It leaves the moral quandry of balancing quality and equity to the individual parent. Ilderton used the tool to find a more diverse school, but it chilled her how easy it could have been used to continue the racial and economic sorting process that troubles her so much. It was, in a sense a metaphor for how people already thought about certain areas. As Schneider put it, “All they have to do is click a button and all these neighborhoods go away.”

Summer reading list: The book that (further) sold me on reparations.

Because the ed beat slows down a little in the summer, I have to keep myself busy doing other things. Most recently that’s meant covering immigration. But I also like to use to summer to read really enriching things that my brain totally cannot handle during the school year. 

First up, one that I’ve been anxious to get to, mostly because I felt like until I did, I was just walking around making a fool of myself.

Like most people, and nearly all white people, I’ve carried around some what-I-thought-were-truths about housing segregation in the US. Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law has disabused me of some of those beliefs.

Housing is part of the education beat, because housing segregation leads to school segregation. In a city as sprawling as San Antonio, there are plenty of opportunities for those with means to escape the discomfort of being poverty-adjacent. However, when those who still have a lingering tinge of poverty move in next door to middle class families in the aging inner loop of the city, the trend continues northward. We call this de facto segregation. People are legally able to go to the same schools/live in the same places, but they choose not (i.e. white flight) to or are barred from doing so by economics (not laws).

Myth-I-believed #1: Changes in the law are the end of the story

White flight is not the whole story on how segregation works. That’s how it has worked in my life time. But everything about my lifestyle will tell you: what happened before I was born changed everything. 

I’ve never been salaried over the national average. If things keep going well this year I just miiiiight reach it. Combined with my husband’s salary, we do well. But our lifestyle way outstrips our income because of what we’ve inherited. Not just the actually inheritances, but the networks of people willing to give us a break on rent, the families who paid for college and continue to help out with camps for kids, vacations, etc. We were born into land wealth which translated into excellent dental and medical care, private schools, and summer jobs that were more about long term career goals or edifying experiences than they were about helping out with family income. We can afford maintenance on ourselves, our house, and our cars so that we do not have huge emergency costs from deferred maintenance. 

All of that is because our families have been landowners for generations. Or, as my husband put it, wryly remarking on how the deck is stacked in our favor: “The smartest thing you can do financially is to be rich.”  

Before I go on, I realize that not every white person benefits from generational wealth. Tragedy, crashing markets, changing work forces, and various forms of usury have taken their toll. However, we were never legally prohibited from advancing into middle class houses and schools. If you’re white, money is money. If you were a person of color in the 20th century, your money wasn’t always accepted currency.

I was once interviewing a city councilwoman from Austin, where they are fighting to preserve family homes of black residents on the uber-gentrified East Side. Without historical designations, many are not preserved from rezoning or demolition, and the market is now priced above entry for most young working class people. 

Councilwoman Ora Houston was born on the front end of the baby boom, just a smidge older than my own Boomer parents. She owns her home, and is trying to help others secure the same. When we were talking she said, “I’m just trying to do for my kids what your great-grandparents did for you.” 

Her parents and grandparents were not allowed to do that. They did not have access to the loans, neighborhoods, zoning protections, and housing stock that would create value over generations. 

In the two generations of buyers between government efforts to help white people own homes after the Great Depression and the Fair Housing Act (1968) you have my great-grandparents and grandparents accumulating wealth, and Ora Houston’s parents and grandparents being denied the same opportunity. 

If prosperity were a race, which capitalism has ensured that it is, my white family is two laps ahead of Ora Houston’s. We were two laps in when they fired the starting gun for her. 

Which is why housing is about more than the legal freedom to move where you want to move. It’s about the fact that we live in two different housing markets—one in which prices of our assets have inflated our prosperity, and the other where you get less for your money than ever before.  

So it’s sort of insulting when people who got a two lap head start (at least…I married into a few more bonus laps) look at the people who just started the race and say, “Why can’t you just catch up?” 

Myth-I-Believed #2 That de facto segregation is more damning than de jure segregation

I thought the fact that we had no legal excuse to divide the world into ghettos and enclaves—and yet continued— was a moral indictment. I thought that’s where we were as a society, just trying to make our final strides toward justice by winning hearts and minds. 

Rothstein, however, points out that in order to make racial disparities better on any meaningful scale, it is the de jure segregation that matters. 

That’s what the book is about. It wasn’t a bunch of racist people individually excluding black people between 1932 and 1968…it was a series of racist laws. As those discriminated against by the law, black people should be entitled to legal restitution. 

This is also a good time to point out that decrying de facto segregation is more to appease my white conscience, while confronting de jure segregation can get some stuff done. 

Not to worry, there’s plenty of cathartic self-flagellating to be done in de jure segregation. After all, who was making these laws? 

The 14th Amendment made, essentially, segregation Constitutionally untenable. It would take some time to get from segregation being mandatory to it being permissible to it being illegal. We have not quite figured out how to proactively encourage integration, but that’s the next step, and it probably involves reparations—incentives, subsidies, grants, scholarships, etc.

So the existence, however specific or local or de jure segregation is key to making good. However for justice to be complete, the will to make amends must touch the heart of de facto segregation—there’s going to have to be enforcement, which means that property owners, police forces, judges, and elected officials are going to determine the lived experience of those who would receive their legal due. For instance…Ruby Bridges got to go to school, but I’d hardly call her experience a laudable example of justice.

Myth-I-Believed-about-segregation #3 That progressives support integration 

Sometimes, as a guilty pleasure, I read the exchanges between historian Kevin Kruse and provocateur Dinesh D’Souza. One such exchange pointed out that Southern Democrats were the party of segregation, Jim Crow, etc. It was, as Kruse pointed out, a shallow, intellectually dishonest pot shot at current Democrats. 

Then, of course busing came up at the Democratic debate. 

You can be “progressive” and still uphold racist systems. You can be in favor of abortion, LGBTQIA rights, and environmental regulations and still not give a lick about brown people at all, in fact. You can even be for “the little guy” and limit that definition to just “the little white guy.” 

Right now, the deep blue cities are priced out of range for working class people. People who financially support Planned Parenthood and the ACLU won’t put their kids in schools where too many of the kids are poor. 

The examples Rothstein uses in the book aren’t all conservative strongholds like Birmingham, Atlanta, and Dallas. They are in the Bay Area and the Northeast. 

From Reconstruction to the Great Recession, the politicians trying to take care of the most people were often convinced—not saying how difficult it was to convince them—to trade the freedom of black people to live and go to school where they wanted to, for things that benefitted poor and working class white people. When they could rally support to give something to black people (i.e. public education, subsidized housing), it had to come with the promise to in no way increase white exposure to those black people. 

Integration—and any support for reparations that might lead to integration—is the ultimate test of hypocrisy. It asks not whether we believe that people of color deserve to vote, own property, or move freely throughout society—but whether we believe that they should be able to do so to the same degree that white people are, and whether we are willing to bridge the gap our laws created.