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April 29, 2004

Beyond race

May 17 will be the fiftieth anniversary of The U.S. Supreme Court decision in Brown v. Board of Education. The Court held that racial discrimination in public schools was inherently discriminatory even if the facilities and resources were “separate but equal.” With a stroke of the pen the Court overruled the decision in Plessy v. Ferguson which had been the law since 1896.

There has been some confusion since the Brown decision because many people have believed, quite erroneously, that the ruling required racial integration of the schools. In fact, the ruling was more narrow than that. It simply made it unconstitutional to segregate children in public schools as a matter of policy.

Supporters of school integration made several efforts over the years to merge school districts. They understood that white flight from cities to the more affluent suburbs was the only way to maintain a pale complexion in the schools.

The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University has monitored the racial integration of public schools over the years. They have just released two reports which assess the impact of race in the Boston metropolitan school districts. One by Chungmei Lee is entitled “Racial Segregation and Educational Outcomes in Metropolitan Boston.” The other by Joseph Berger, Suzanne Smith and Stephen Coelen is entitled “Race and the Metropolitan Origins of Postsecondary Access to Four Year Colleges: The Case of Greater Boston.”

The first report makes it clear that when the students in a school are overwhelmingly white, then that school is as segregated as an urban school that is all black and Latino. According to demographic projections, the population of this country will be predominantly African American, Latino and Asian by mid-century. Whites who are uncomfortable with that will be at a decided disadvantage.

Unlike most capital cities, Boston is a small part of the metropolitan area. Of the 767,601 students in the metropolitan area, 76 percent are white, 10 percent are Latino and nine percent are black. Only eight percent of the public school students in the metropolitan area are in Boston and only two percent of the white students.

It is highly likely then than the white school age population of Boston will continue to decline. According to the 2000 Census, only 10 percent of the city’s white population is younger than 18 years of age. Thirty-one percent of the African Americans and 33 percent of the Latinos are younger than 18.

The most disturbing statistic is that 97 percent of schools that are 90 percent minority have a majority of students who are poor enough to be eligible for free or reduced price lunch. However, only one percent of the students in schools which are 90 percent or more white are poor enough for free lunch. The poor educational outcomes correlate as well to the poverty of the students as to their race.

The second report shows how low educational performance leads to low SAT scores and diminished opportunities for admission to four-year colleges. The lack of a Bachelor’s degree will usually result in average wages of $32,000 per year compared with $53,600 for college graduates, so the cycle continues.

It appears that there is a policy to under educate the poor, a policy as debilitating as racial discrimination. Perhaps a legal attack based upon discrimination against the poor offers a more fruitful line of legal attack for the future.

 

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