It was, however, based on a belief that the dominant group would keep control of the most successful schools and that the only way to get full range of opportunities for a minority child was to get access to those schools.” On the push for desegregation, Gary Orfield, the co-director of the Harvard Civil Rights Project,writes “ did not arise because anyone believed that there was something magical about sitting next to whites in a classroom. Many white students attend primarily all-white schools today. The best schools were the ones attended by whites - a truth that holds mostly holds true today. Integration was important for leaders of the civil rights movement because it was an avenue toward opportunity for children of color. The Civil Rights Project at UCLA notes in their report, Brown at 60, that for Hispanic children residing in the West in particular, segregation from white and middle income peers has become a pressing issue. Through interacting factors, including the repeal of court-ordered integration and residential segregation, America has created two school systems: Poor, black and Hispanic students attend one school system, while middle-class white and Asian students attend another. However, it is not just disciplinary systems that harm children of color America’s complacency around schools segregated by race (and socioeconomic status) does as well. The re-segregation of the American public school system In fact, of those students who have been suspended in middle school three times, 49 percent go on to drop out in high school. There is rising urgency surrounding the use of suspensions in schools because students who are suspended are at increased risk for school dropout (and then later poverty and criminal activity). Not only does this take a toll on a school’s larger culture, according to the American Psychological Association, but frequent use of school-based arrests contributes to a negative learning climate and poor student development. And, when nonviolent misbehavior is met with prison, schools fail to respond to their students in a developmentally appropriate way. The degree to which some schools are now using police to arrest misbehaving students is a relatively recent phenomenon, and positions the school to become a literal entryway to the justice system. These arrests are not occurring for violent offenses, either - but for behaviors that fall under the category of “ disruptive.” Some schools are contributing to the school-to-prison pipeline because of disparities in how they discipline black students. There’s no denying that these procedures often have racial undertones - Hispanic or black children accounted for 70 percent of school-related arrests nationally in 2010. Suspension and expulsion are precipitating factors that disconnect students from the stability of school, increasing the likelihood they will enter the prison system. In Part Two, I’m going to talk about the impact of all this and what we can do about it. These contribute to the systemic problem known as the “school-to-prison pipeline” and lack of success for many students of color. In Part One, I examined some troubling outcomes of the re-segregation of our nation’s schools, including the disproportionality of discipline that results in suspensions, expulsions and dropping out. It is not something created by the PC police designed to make white people feel bad about themselves. Implicit racism matters, and its effects show up in schools. Real people are struggling with inequality right now - and not in some distant place. Stories like these are important because they bring something that can feel opaque and far away down to reality. The advocate shared with me that the black students she was supporting were referred to the office far more than the white students on her caseload for the same behavior. Or to put it more directly, she was working with the district because it had become clear that the teachers were struggling with implicit racism and classism. Written by Perry Firth, project coordinator, Seattle University’s Project on Family Homelessness and school psychology graduate studentĪ few months ago I was talking to an advocate working with a Seattle-area school district, one where teachers were struggling with issues of race and class. This is the second part of the two-part series, “Separate and Unequal: Poverty, Race and America’s Education System.” Read the first part here.
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