Resegregating Nashville: What the School Board is Afraid to Talk About
They're just as likely to take flight as whitey is.
In his cover story this week, Scene’s Jeff Woods makes a rather damning argument against Nashville’s return to neighborhood school zoning – or as opponents like to call it, the resegregation plan. Writes Woods:
“Forty years of studies, beginning with the famous Coleman Report in 1966, have shown that sending a lot of poor kids to school in the same place is a really bad idea. It's a central issue in education—how to teach poor urban children—and in all the research there's no more consistent conclusion than this: In schools where poverty is concentrated, students learn less. All the problems these children face—poor health, hunger, drugs, gangs and violence, and a culture that scorns education—it's all just too overwhelming for schools.”
But that’s exactly what our district is planning to do.
School board members have yet to come up with a sound rationale. Their financial explanation – we’ll save money on busing, but we’ll kick an extra $6 mil a year to black schools, even though we don’t actually have that loot – comes straight from the Enron accounting department. And they don’t seem to have an academic argument for the plan.
In a way, the emptiness of their rhetoric is striking. Perhaps because their real thoughts can’t be spoken out loud.
After all, Woods is right: For 40 years we’ve been trying to integrate poor kids into middle-income class rooms. And for 40 years it’s been killing urban school districts.
It’s not a topic for polite conversation, especially when the race card gets tossed about. But there’s a very simple reason why this hasn’t worked: It wholly defies human nature.
Ask any mom or dad what they want from life, and they’ll inevitably arrive at the same words: Safe, good neighborhoods to raise their families. So they bust their ass to provide, making that inch-by-inch grind up the economic ladder. This is the prize for a lifetime of work.
But then the government comes along, tells them their kids will be used for a little social engineering. Suddenly that nice, safe place they achieved will be integrated with kids from that crumbling, unsafe place they were trying to escape. And the new kids, weirdly enough, occasionally bring their not-nice, unsafe ways with them.
More often than not, those hardworking parents aren’t inclined to respond by saying, “Jeepers, sign my kid up for social engineering!” No, the wealthy and religious flee to private schools. The rest with the grip to climb move someplace else.
At this point in the argument, we must hear from the gallery. “These people are racist!” they will say. That’s the timeless rejoinder, and surely it contains a nugget of truth. But the other truth is that such flights defy race.
Larger cities with more substantial black populations have already seen the future, and it goes like this: As the school district declines, the middle class bails. Not just whitey, mind you. Go to pretty much any city, and you’ll see a proportional bolt among the black middle class. The quest to better one’s family state is age old, and it’s never been based on pigmentation.
This trend has already made itself clear in Nashville. Writes Woods: “Alarmingly, the percentage of children poor enough to qualify for subsidized lunches has jumped from 47 percent seven years ago to 71 percent today.”
Which leaves the school board with more pressing problems than the usual race talk. It must decide what it can do to keep the middle class. Because if it stays on its current path, the entire district will be one big concentration of poverty, and all talk of race will be moot.
Comments
There are a few urban systems who have overcome this elephant in the middle of the room. Has anyone called the Council of Great City Schools to ask for examples? Has anyone checked out Raleigh, NC? Has anyone seen Einstein's ghost wandering down the Nashville streets in his boxer shorts? He'd feel right at home here.
Posted 08/29/2008 at 08:19:18 AMWhy not just have open enrollment at all Metro schools? Do away with bussing children to schools outside of their neighborhood if they choose to go to school across town. Let parents decide which school(s) they want their children to attend and then make the parents responsible for getting their children to and from that chosen school, if it happens to be outside of their neighborhood. This approach will do two things - it will make parents become more involved in their kids education, and take away the argument of segregation. Simple.
Posted 08/29/2008 at 12:50:37 PMI've got a crazy idea - FREEDOM OF ASSOCIATION!
Why not ALLOW all the white people who want to live with only other whites, to have their own part of the U.S. to live in? By definition, any 'racist' whites who 'hate' blacks will move to this area, will they not? (Unless they're masochists.)
Then the only white people that blacks will EVER have to deal with will be ones who AREN'T 'racist'.
So black people will never again have to wonder if the manager interviewing them for a job is 'racist', or if the clerk serving them in the grocery store is a 'racist', or the police officer stopping them in their car, is 'racist'.
Anybody see any problems with this solution?
Posted 08/29/2008 at 01:29:05 PMThey already have that place, its called New England.
Posted 08/29/2008 at 03:52:45 PMJeff Woods story though well written, left a whole lot of information out. First of all the School Board couldn't come up with a re-zoning plan, so they appointed a task force made up mostly of members appointed by the School Board itself and after months and months of hard work came up with a plan with all the Members of the task force, both black and white, women and men signing off on the plan, and then submitted it to the board for approval. The Chamber never tried to interfere with the process, and a couple of Board Members that voted against the plan attended most of the meetings with only a few suggestions that the Task Force tried to honor. Good Journalism requires research on all sides of an issue. It Seems good Journalism was not the goal here.
Posted 08/30/2008 at 12:20:16 PMYou hit the nail on the head. It's not that middle class parents don't want their kids going to school with minorities. It's that parents see their child's education as a one shot deal, and if they think that one shot will be distracted by bad behavior, low expectations, or gang violence, they won't go for it. That included my African-American neighbor, who chooses to send her daughter to private school. Ironically, she herself grew up in N. Nashville, where she was bussed to Hillwood. And I think you are right, Pete, for saying what people can't say...this plan, with it's Enron accounting, is really just a way to try to win back the middle class, who tend to be concentrated in pockets across the city, but the largest percentage tends to be in West Nashville.
Posted 09/01/2008 at 09:08:04 PM