Fifty Years after Brown v. Board, Segregation Not Black and White
Deborah Kong, AP, sacbee.com (CA), Apr. 5
EDITOR’S NOTE—It was 50 years ago that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously decreed segregated public schools unconstitutional. The effects of that decision live on in myriad ways, and yet, in much of America, equality and integration remain ideals rather than realities. This is another in an occasional series that will look at the legacy of the Brown v. Board of Education decision, its impact on the nation today, and what the future might hold.
WATSONVILLE, Calif. (AP)—To see how integration is playing out 50 years after the Supreme Court banned school segregation, consider Pajaro Valley Unified.
A sprawling school district about 45 miles south of San Jose, Pajaro Valley extends from the quiet, oceanfront beaches of Aptos in the north to the strawberry fields of Watsonville in the south. It is a district divided not only by geography, but also by race, wealth and academic achievement.
Schools in the more affluent town of Aptos have a majority of white students, and score well on the state’s Academic Performance Index. Students in the working-class, agricultural city of Watsonville are largely Hispanic, and the schools’ performance on the index is significantly worse.
In Watsonville, some parents complain that their schools are getting short shrift in terms of top classes and experienced teachers. In Aptos, parents twice in recent years have proposed splitting off and creating two districts, but were denied by the California State Board of Education.
A third proposal by two school board members—one from Watsonville, one from Aptos—to study a split was postponed in February after officials decided it was “too divisive an issue,” superintendent Mary Anne Mays said.
Supporters maintain a split could improve student performance in both communities, but Carolyn Savino, president of the Pajaro Valley Federation of Teachers says that such a move would be “morally and ethically wrong.”
It would create “an affluent white district and an impoverished minority district,” she said. “We should have gotten past that after Brown v. Board of Education.”
As what’s happening in Pajaro Valley makes clear, the Supreme Court’s ruling doing away with “separate but equal” school segregation can still be a flashpoint for impassioned arguments a half-century later—in an increasingly diverse America where racial separation goes far beyond the black and white of 1954.
“When you go back and you understand Brown v. Board of Education and what it means to have ’separate but equal’, it just strikes a chord because it’s happening in this community,” said former Watsonville city council member Rafael Lopez.
Back in 1950, the Census Bureau did not even break out Hispanics as a group. Now they are the nation’s largest minority—39 million, according to a census report last year.
They’re also the nation’s most segregated minority in schools, according to a recent report by Harvard University’s Civil Rights Project, with the typical Latino student attending a school that is only 28 percent white. Blacks attend schools that are about 31 percent white.
Hispanic segregation has increased dramatically in the West, the report found.
“We need to invest some serious energy in understanding what are the dimensions of unequality in the West, and how do we make multiracial schools work,” said Gary Orfield, The Civil Rights Project’s co-director.
“How do we avoid Latinos becoming a ghettoized, deeply segregated population that has no real link to the opportunity system?”
Orfield is concerned that no national policies specifically address Hispanic school segregation. He suggested another court case like Brown may be necessary to call attention to the issue.
“Nobody is talking about it,” he said. “We need another movement. We need a Brown that addresses a multiracial reality.”
In Pajaro Valley, two schools provide a glimpse of the differences within the district and how wide the gap between Hispanics and whites can be.
At E.A. Hall Middle School in Watsonville, “word walls” are everywhere—vocabulary lists aimed at helping students, more than half of whom primarily speak Spanish, thrive in English. The words sprinkled around a language arts classroom include “ode,” “sonnet” and “stanza.” In a math class, “graph” and “slope.”
In the cafeteria, students dressed in the school uniform of white top and black pants line up for a piece of fruit, milk and a hot dog or club sandwich—the day’s government-subsidized lunch, which about 80 percent of children qualify for.
At Aptos Junior High School, mission statements and bar graphs charting students’ goals and progress decorate classrooms. Kids clad in jeans and surf sweat shirts buy slices of Domino’s pizza at lunch and joke around in an outdoor courtyard.
E.A. Hall eighth-grader Magge Rodriguez said she’s sometimes troubled that her school is overwhelmingly Hispanic (95 percent of the student body).
“In a way, it’s a good thing because you’re surrounded by the people you grew up with,” she said. But “you won’t really get to talk to other people. They all have your same type of living, growing up. It should be about seeing different cultures.”
There are big differences between the communities of Aptos and Watsonville, too.
Aptos, a town of about 28,000, draws tourists to its beaches, restaurants and bed-and-breakfast inns. The median price of a home is about $569,000 and many residents own small businesses or commute over a winding, redwood-lined highway to high-tech jobs in Silicon Valley.
In Watsonville, a coastal agricultural town of about 44,000, the city’s Hispanic population grew dramatically during the 1970s and 1980s as Mexican immigrants began harvesting and packing in its fields and factories. Others, the children of earlier immigrants, make up a small but growing middle class.
These days, Juanito’s Supermercado sits alongside Jalisco Restaurant downtown, cater-corner from Chavez Furniture, where a sign in Spanish urges people to send a gift of furniture or electronics to family members in Mexico.
The demographic changes shaping Watsonville also are taking place in other cities across the nation, experts say. Hispanic communities are flourishing, but often in distinct pockets, and the end result is residential segregation.
Racially isolated schools follow, said Raul Gonzalez, a legislative director specializing in education at the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy group.
“We are segregated by housing. Latinos tend to have lower incomes and so it kind of determines where they can live, the kind of schools they attend,” Gonzalez said. “It’s tough, when you have housing segregation, to promote school integration.”
Segregated minority schools often have high concentrations of poor students, according to The Civil Rights Project report.
The report also says Hispanics whose primary language is not English are more likely to attend schools with one another. That’s the case at E.A. Hall, where more than 500 of its 869 students speak Spanish as their primary language.
Some, like Yolanda Melgoza’s newcomers class, have lived in the United States for less than a year.
Others, like Vivian Vargas’ sixth-grade math class, have more advanced English skills, though they are not yet fluent. Vargas conducts most of her class in English, but slips smoothly into Spanish when necessary.
“Why do we have to change the denominator?” she asked during a lesson on adding and subtracting fractions.
In the front row, Sandra Blas hesitated. Vargas waited a few seconds, then gently prompted the girl, “Puedes decirme en Español.” (You can tell me in Spanish.) Sandra quickly answered the question.
“They’re learning two languages,” Vargas said later. “They’re learning twice as much because they’re learning the language and they’re learning the concepts.”
Teachers and administrators say that challenge, along with socioeconomic differences, accounts for the gap in test scores between north and south.
“We have the same expectations of the parents that the Aptos teachers have of their parents, but yet the parents in a college-educated community, in a high socioeconomic community, have the time to read to their kids at home, have the ability to have kids read to them,” said Ben Benavidez, an E.A. Hall teacher who conducts his eighth-grade language arts class entirely in English. “We have to take on some of the role that we would normally assign to the parents.”
Yet some Hispanic parents say the differences go beyond socioeconomics. The district isn’t providing an equal education for their kids—teachers in the north have more experience, schools offer more accelerated or advanced placement classes and the school board is more responsive to northern parents, they say.
“There’s lower expectations for our kids,” said Aurelio Gonzalez, a construction foreman whose sons go to E.A. Hall and Watsonville High School. “They’ve segregated us education-wise because they haven’t given us programs that will challenge our kids.”
Gonzalo Orozco, who lives in Watsonville and works in the fields picking mushrooms, arranged to have his daughters sent north, to Aptos High School.
Two graduated and attend the University of California, Santa Cruz, where one is preparing for a career in international business and the other in pediatrics.
“They were given an excellent education,” Orozco said. “To me, the Aptos High School seems to be better and more serious about education than the one here in Watsonville.”
Mays, the superintendent, acknowledged that the challenge is to close the achievement gap.
“One of the things we’re working on is really how to raise expectations. I think there’s some validity to what they’re saying,” Mays said of the parents’ concerns. “We need to really take a look at all of our instructional programs.”
The most recent proposal to split the Pajaro Valley school district in two would produce a northern district that’s 66 percent white and a southern one that’s 92 percent Hispanic. Overall, the 18,000-student district is 76 percent Hispanic and 21 percent white.
“It’s the antithesis of what we fought for on the Supreme Court, for equal access to education,” said Lopez, the Watsonville city council member.
Supporters say the issue is local control—not race.
“The reality is, if you reorganize and create smaller districts, smaller districts have always been shown to have better performance for the children,” said business development consultant Steve Peterson, an Aptos parent.
“For me it’s an issue of achievement and local focus and wanting a district that’s more focused on what kids need.”
White Flight Continues In Durham Schools
Loss of white students to private schools, home schooling stunts system growth
Tim Simmons And, Nikole Hannah-Jones, newsobserver.com (NC), Apr. 4
DURHAM — White enrollment in Durham Public Schools has dropped more than 30 percent in the past 12 years, even though the number of white children in the county has increased.
Many are enrolled in private schools or taught at home. Some have moved to neighboring districts such as Wake County and Chapel Hill-Carrboro. In addition to fueling the growth of other Triangle districts, the loss of white students has limited Durham to only modest enrollment gains during the past decade.
Superintendent Ann Denlinger said the departures underscore Durham’s need to keep improving, especially in areas such as test scores and school safety. If improvements cease, Durham could quickly follow the path of such cities as Atlanta or Baltimore, where the support of most white and middle-class families has been lost.
“I think if the schools are bad, it is absolutely a slam-dunk that that is what will happen here,” Denlinger said. “And if we aren’t good, we don’t deserve the students — African-American, Hispanic or white.”
But Denlinger does not believe Durham will become a district that parents shun. She notes that test scores have improved significantly, school choices have increased and the district’s classrooms are as safe as any in the region. “We expect to get better and better every single year,” she said. “That should mean that parents who are thoughtful, careful decision-makers about their children’s education ought to choose us.”
But Denlinger knows the district and the county have an image problem. Public debates at all levels of government are routinely framed along racial lines. Parents say the inability to get beyond those issues can’t help but shape their view of schools.
“It wasn’t an issue for us in elementary school, but you hear parents talk about middle school and they talk about racial issues,” said Martha Radulovich, who moved to Wake County two years ago. “They talk about gangs and bullies, and we just weren’t comfortable with that.”
For the Radulovich family, the move was a short one — just a few miles east along N.C. 98 and across the Wake County line. She followed several families who had left earlier.
One was Maria Paschall’s, which moved to Wake in 1994 before her son was old enough for kindergarten. It wasn’t a difficult decision, Paschall said. The family could either buy a larger home in Wake, where they would attend public schools, or stay put in Durham and plow their money into tuition.
“I’ve never regretted it for a day,” said Paschall, even though her son was reassigned against her wishes. “Just the other day there was a shooting on the city’s buses in Durham. Nothing has changed.”
Judging schools by the safety of the city’s bus line might not be fair, but Denlinger understands that this is how parents make decisions in real life.
“Each time a [city] bus is shot at, it affects all of us,” Denlinger said. “It all bleeds together.”
Winking at transfers
Before parents leave Durham’s schools, many try to get their children reassigned. The practice is tacitly encouraged by a school board that supports a liberal transfer policy. Dozens of white parents looking for schools with fewer poor and minority children make requests each year.
That means avoiding many of the schools within the city limits, where students are likely to be poor and minority. Without a busing program such as Wake County’s to help balance enrollments, most white students are clustered in fewer than half the district’s 43 schools.
“Most white parents I talk to think if their child goes to any inner-city school, it’s total chaos,” said Avis Hines, a black PTA member at Hillside High School. “They think their child is going to be attacked and robbed. These people are honestly afraid, they’re terrified.”
School violence and safety figures collected by the state each year don’t justify such concerns. Durham’s figures differ little from those of other Triangle districts.
A dozen years ago, when the separate school districts of the city and county merged, community leaders hoped this debate would eventually end. The newly created countywide system enrolled more than 26,000 students back then. Just under half were white.
But integration efforts met stiff resistance, and white enrollment soon started to decline. The departures have accelerated in the past few years, dropping white enrollment to less than 8,600 students — about 28 percent of the district’s total. No other urban system in the state has seen such a decline in white enrollment.
Hines does not believe the schools are worse off without white students, but she doesn’t like the message it sends to people inside and outside the county.
“It’s viewed that if white parents don’t want to send their children to the schools, there’s something wrong with the schools,” Hines said.
An obvious alternative for some parents is home schooling, which has grown from roughly 100 children to almost 1,000 since 1990. Another option is one of the 29 private schools scattered throughout Durham County, where tuition can run from $4,000 to $15,000 a year. Private school enrollment has doubled in Durham during the past decade.
But private school operators say parents motivated by fear present their own problems.
“Even though we benefit from that fear, we hate to see them come for that reason,” said Carolyn Blackburn, head of school at Duke School for Children. “We want them to come to us for who we are, not who we aren’t.”
Race does not motivate all parents. Many choose private schools that set higher academic standards, tolerate fewer behavior problems or offer smaller classes.
“When I think of academic excellence, it’s not just about passing,” said Mary Beth Matson, whose has sent five children to Cresset Christian Academy in Durham. “I want my children to impress their college professors.”
Regardless of why they leave the public system, white students have been a boon for private schools. About half of the school-age white children in Durham don’t attend public schools. Fewer than 10 percent of the county’s black children attend private schools.
“Every year we have to turn down people,” said Tony Manning, principal at Bethesda Christian Academy, where enrollment has jumped from 17 to 260 since it opened eight years ago.
Surprising departures
Although school officials don’t talk much about today’s version of white flight, many parents say the changing face of the schools is impossible to miss.
At Carrington Middle School, it still surprises PTA President Lee Gause when parents she thought she knew decide to leave.
A nuclear engineering manager for Progress Energy, the African-American mother of twin girls finds this maddening. Most parents who leave are unaware that the passing rates of white children and minority students trail those of Wake and Chapel Hill — two of the top-scoring districts in the state — by only a small amount.
So if extra effort and parent involvement work for her children, Gause believes the same approach should work for white, middle-class families.
“It’s frustrating because I’ve seen white parents pull their children from middle school even though they are attending classes with the same blacks and Mexicans who were in their elementary schools,” Gause said.
But Jan Harrison, who is white, isn’t really surprised when parents spurn the Durham schools.
Harrison pulled her oldest child from public school after the fourth grade, but returned once she thought discipline had improved. Discipline, in addition to constant bickering over racial issues, is among the biggest problems for the district, she said.
“I’m still very fortunate; my kids are at very good schools,” said Harrison, whose children attend Brogden Middle and Riverside High schools. “But I can’t blame people if they are in a school they are not comfortable with.”
Regardless of how parents feel about others who leave, most say the decline in white families has also reduced the number of children from middle-class homes — making it difficult to recruit volunteers or dip into diverse skills among parents.
“It’s a loss for Durham Public Schools if those are the students and the parents who contribute to the success of the school,” said Meg Wittman, who is white and the PTA president at Githens Middle School.
Durham won’t ’tip’
Although no urban district in the country has fully reintegrated its classrooms after whites departed, Denlinger said she doesn’t think Durham has a “tipping point” at which white families won’t return.
Instead, she sees Durham as a unique case compared to other districts in larger metropolitan areas. The wealth of the Triangle, the success of schools in Chapel Hill and Wake County, and measurable improvements in Durham reinforce her belief that a rebound is in the works.
“The people in Wake County have a very good school system and I don’t believe they would settle for anything less,” Denlinger said. “Once people here understand what a really good school system looks like, they will insist on having one, too.”
Schools in Baltimore and Atlanta that are overwhelmingly poor and minority offer Denlinger no insight into Durham’s future. She sees the future in high-scoring, diverse districts such as Montgomery County, Md., or Fairfax County, Va.
“I’m a public school person,” she said. “I want to educate all the students. Every one of them.”
Even the ones who are leaving.