|
In
June, the Supreme Court ruled against using race as a basis for
deciding students’ school assignments. The case originated from plaintiffs
in Seattle and Louisville, where the school districts used school
assignment plans to maintain racial diversity.
Louisville
met the criteria, however limited, of being a unified school district
in 2001, but the district voluntarily adopted a school-choice system
that allowed race to be considered a factor in student assignment to
schools.
In
Seattle, the district had never been ordered to desegregate, but also
voluntarily adopted a plan in which race could be used as a factor when
there are more applicants to a school than available spaces for them.
The Court argued that such integration, even on a voluntary basis,
would amount to reverse racism against whites.
NPR
quoted Ted Shaw, counsel for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, as saying,
“There's an ideological war going on here with respect to not only the
place of race in this country, but whether we should be able to do
anything to address racial inequality on a voluntary basis."
Indeed,
it’s a war that’s been waged by the ruling class in the courts for
almost 40 years. This latest ruling, however, is the furthest the court
has gone in its attempt to fully dismantle the gains of 1954’s Brown v.
Board of Education, in which the Supreme Court unanimously concluded
that state-imposed segregated schools were inherently unequal and must
be abolished.
Brown
v. Board of Education struck down almost half a century of
separate-but-equal education established under Plessy v. Ferguson in
1896. The ruling came as a consequence of a growing mass movement of
civil rights fighters in this country, and almost half a century of
legal opposition by the NAACP and other civil rights lawyers.
It
came on the heels of an anti-colonial upsurge that swept across Africa,
Asia, and Latin America, inspiring fighters for social justice across
the world and ushering in the radicalization seen in the 1960s. The
wars against imperialism abroad had awakened the consciousness of a
whole new layer of Americans to capitalist oppression at home.
The
Brown v. Board of Education decision didn’t immediately usher in a wave
of desegregation across the U.S. For over two decades after Brown, the
court denied hearings to school desegregation cases from the North.
Indeed, a full decade after Brown, only one-fiftieth of southern Black
children attended integrated schools. It took struggles by Black
communities in places like Clinton, Tenn., and Little Rock, Ark., to
get the government to enforce desegregation.
While
Brown abolished the legality of segregated schooling, the decision set
no standard or deadline for desegregation to occur. In fact, the Court
didn’t rule on how and when desegregation would occur until a year
later, when it determined that desegregation should occur, “with all
deliberate speed.”
The
timidity of this ruling greatly delayed desegregation in the South,
where districts imposed a “freedom of choice” policy that placed the
burden of desegregation on the back of Blacks, as whites would not
voluntarily send their children to the inferior formerly “Negro”
schools that had faced decades of Jim Crow oppression. Young Blacks
faced the de facto opposition of state and local governments, school
boards, and community racism when they attempted to integrate
themselves into white schools.
The
civil rights movement of the ’60s ushered in the Courts’ next three
rulings, which served to answer the open ended question left by Brown.
The
first and most significant of those rulings was 1968’s Green v. County
School Board of New Kents County, which challenged the “freedom of
choice” plans of the South. In Green, the Supreme Court ruled that
schools must dismantle “dual,” or segregated schools, root and branch,
and that school desegregation must include the desegregation of
facilities, staff, faculty, extracurricular activities, and
transportation.
These
“Green factors” were subsequently used by the courts in crafting
desegregation plans. They became the standard in establishing whether
or not a school had achieved unitary, or integrated, status.
Later on, in the cruelest of ironies, they became the qualifiers, along
with the unitary label, in the abandonment of integration and the
gradual resegregation of our schools.
Previous
Supreme Court assaults against school desegregation include 1974’s
Milliken v. Bradley, 1986’s Riddick v. School Board of the City of
Norfolk, (Va.), 1992’s Freeman v. Pitts, and 1995’s Missouri v.
Jenkins.
Milliken came as a retreat from the previous year’s
ruling, which approved busing as a means for the integration of
minority inner-city school children into the white sections of their
respective cities, or in absence of that, into the surrounding suburbs.
Such remedies were prohibited unless the plaintiffs could demonstrate
that the suburbs or the state had taken actions that contributed to
segregation in the city.
Because
proving suburban or state liability is often extremely difficult, the
ruling essentially shut off the possibility of utilizing white suburbs
in integrating city districts with very large minority populations, barring
busing across district lines, and thus legitimizing de facto
segregation.
That
ruling would have had a monumental impact on the primarily minority
cities of the North, where residential patterns were long used as a de
facto impediment to school desegregation. The result is that today, the
North and the West are the most segregated parts of the country.
This
offensive was continued when, in 1986, in Riddick v. School Board of
the City of Norfolk, the Court ruled that schools, once declared unitary,
be permitted to dismantle their desegregation plans and return to local
government control, effectively allowing schools that had achieved the
desegregation of the factors established under 1968’s Green ruling; the
desegregation of facilities, staff, faculty, transportation, etc., to
essentially roll back the clock and resegregate themselves.
In
1992’s Freeman v. Pitts, the Court ruled that school districts could be
partially released from their desegregation responsibilities even if
they had completed only some of those factors outlined in Green. A
school district could thus dismantle its desegregation plan without
ever having provided equal access to educational programs, or without
having desegregated its faculty or facilities.
Three
years later, the Court ruled in Missouri v. Jenkins that court-ordered
inter-district, city-suburban remedies should be limited in time and
extent, and that school districts are no longer required to illustrate
any of the corrective measures made since the implementation of
integration. The Court defined the rapid restoration of local control
as being the primary goal of desegregation cases—even more important
than illustrating actual improvements in the education of minority
children. These resegregation decisions gave legitimacy to the
deliberate return to segregation. The Court no longer recognized
students’ rights to an equal education nor any right to desegregation.
Today,
America’s schools are more segregated then at any time since 1968. The
offensive taken against minority students echoes the broader decline in
the quality of education for the overwhelming majority of the children
of this nation, of the children of the working poor in particular, and
of inner-city youth especially.
The
politically moderate advocacy group Education Trust, upon reviewing
recent national trends in school funding found that “the top 25 percent
of school districts in terms of child poverty … receive less funding
than the bottom 25 percent.” Of this, the funding gap for minority children
is twice the size of the shortfall for low-income students in
California, Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, and Texas, and three times the
size of that shortfall in Wisconsin.
In
31 states, districts with the highest percentage of minority children receive
less funding per pupil than districts with the fewest minority
children.
Over
40 years of school improvement programs in inner-city areas involving
increased funding, charter and magnet schools, and school choice
programs have tended to increase, rather than decrease segregation.
School-funding programs routinely provide insufficient funding for an
inadequate amount of time.
School-choice
programs are hampered by entrance requirements for children that
frequently disqualify children based on behavior or academic
achievement. Charter and magnet schools, aiming to draw white students
in from the suburbs, more frequently draw only a layer of suburban
Black and Latino students. The voluntary nature of these programs has
proven to be the seed of their failure.
The
championing of these programs stems from the conscious abandonment of
busing as the solution to desegregating our schools. It was busing that
proved to be the method by which countless inner-city minority areas
broke the cycle of school segregation fostered by residential housing
patterns and the racist gerrymandering of school districts.
The
benefits of integration through busing have been proven to be more
effective in improving the quality of minority education than city
improvement programs aimed at raising the quality of inner-city
schools. The Supreme Court’s return to “neighborhood schools,” to “the
rapid restoration of local control,” and to “freedom of choice” school
assignment plans marks a deliberate reversal of such gains.
Today,
industry has invaded countless inner-city schools, with corporate
representatives sitting at the head of school boards, instituting
career-specific curriculums, and instituting school-to-work programs. Indeed,
such programs highlight the very purpose of public schools under
capitalism; to prepare a new layer of the working class for market
preparation and global competition.
If
the law of the land is to be neighborhood schools for whites and career
and industry schools for Blacks and Hispanics, then the educational
system of this country has been imbibed with the very intent for which
capitalism has continued to keep racism alive: First, to keep the
working class divided, and second, to maintain a permanent reserve
force of workers for low-wage jobs during market expansion and
retraction.
|