In case you’ve missed it, the Baltimore Sun has run an excellent series on segregated schools in Baltimore County: Bridging the Divide
Part 1: The struggle to move past segregated schools
- “You are potentially causing our property values in Academy Heights to plummet!”
Part 2: Struggles of new East Baltimore school show challenges of integration
- “Schools filled with students living in high concentrations of poverty are like boats going against a strong tide.”
Part 3: Within integrated schools, de facto segregation persists
- “Victoria Howard said being in classes with black students made her feel more at ease, but she believes “nothing changes if everyone’s just too comfortable.”
- “Exposing people to being around different kinds of people is how we acclimate and how we change,” she said. “And that’s important when we leave high school. Because out in the world, you don’t get to pick who you’re around.”
And The Grade has a behind-the-scenes take on the creation of the series.
“If I had covered it with someone who thought the same way as I did, it probably wouldn’t have been as strong,” says Green.
And here’s another comprehensive piece on integrating schools from City Limits
To increase diversity Goldsmith says, “You need middle class families that have some commitment to public education and are willing to vote with their child.” You can attract such families, he says, with schools that offer a quality education, have inspired leadership and can “create an environment that is welcoming and inclusive to all.”
This is from an older piece about the Upper West Side squabbles over rezoning. Worth bringing back up here.
“It’ll take thousands, maybe a hundred thousand dollars off the value of my apartment”. . .
. . .”We moved here basically for that school, and that school is kind of like our right.”
Because apparently “public” is now synonymous with “private.”
Public service over property value: Ann Holton suggests how white parents can make integration a value
“My parents did a good job of helping us feel like we were part of something bigger than ourselves, something that really mattered. That influenced me in all kinds of ways.
“It influenced me toward a career in public service, and more immediately, the experience of going to school with people who were from different backgrounds. My background was not only white, but homogenous: Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, upper middle class. I didn’t know much of anybody who came from different backgrounds, and that experience of being with folks who were different, and yet discovering how much similarity we had across differences, it was a very important part of my education, and I have valued that throughout and including in my role as secretary of education.”
Anne Holton, in an interview with the74
Nikole Hannah-Jones argues that democracy depends upon individual parents thinking more about the common good
“If there is hope for a renewal of our belief in public institutions and a common good, it may reside in the public schools.”
Derrell Bradford responds to Hannah-Jones’s piece, suggesting that individuals should have equal power to public institutions
“Our relationship with public institutions — and schools in particular — is only in balance when the individual can wield equivalent force against them. Achieving a state of balance with the nation’s public schools rests not in the constant altruistic acquiescence to them, but the strategic self-interested defiance of them. . . .
“In the school districts of the rich and the ruling, this equilibrium between voluntary participation and the ability to exit is the essential tension that drives performance. It’s a game for the privileged, but it’s a game they win.”
Bradford’s assertion here is interesting. But should individuals be able to wield “equivalent force” against public institutions? The “public” is by definition an aggregate of individuals—the people as a whole—and an institution that is a “public” institution therefore serves the interests of the many, rather than that of the individual.
Yes, it is true that those with wealth and power are not reliant upon public institutions. But however much those institutions have failed over the years, as Bradford rightly points to, I’m highly skeptical that in the absence of those institutions things would be better.
Public institutions, however problematic, get better through greater civic engagement, not the reverse. I would propose that if those that are better off chose to get more involved in those institutions–as Nikole Hannah Jones has suggested we do–than maybe we’d all be better off.
Schools & Ecosystems 