Education Apartheid by Design
Put forth on November 1, 2007 by XicanoPwr
Posted in Civil Rights, Education, Segregation, Texas
In the United States today, under a distorted capitalistic system, our education system has worsened. In Texas, 185 high schools can be considered “dropout factories” according to a national report from Johns Hopkins University, who conducted the study for The Associated Press.
The study found that half or more of high school students do not graduate, let alone leave high school prepared to participate in civic life. For many, the only real and lasting pipeline out of poverty in modern America is cracked and broken. To a greater or lesser degree, the wretched facilities and lack of ability to receive a basic education is the bitter reality for millions of other working-class students and their parents around the country. The study found that the highest concentration of dropout factories happened in large cities or high-poverty rural areas in the South and Southwest with Florida and South Carolina having the highest percentages.
Nationally, about 70% of US students graduate on time with a regular diploma, but for Latinas/os and African Americans students, graduation rates drops to about half. In Texas, according to a report from the Intercultural Development Research Association, Latinos/as have the highest dropout rate at 45 percent.
The attrition rates of Hispanic students and Black students have either remained unchanged or have worsened since 1985-86. Hispanic students and Black students historically have had much higher attrition rates than White students. In 1985-86 and 2006-07, attrition rates of Hispanic students were the same (45 percent in both 1985-86 and 2006-07). During this same period, the attrition rates of Black students increased by 18 percent (from 34 percent to 40 percent). Attrition rates of White students declined by 26 percent (from 27 percent to 20 percent). Hispanic students have higher attrition rates than either White students or Black students.
To understand how education apartheid came about, one must understand the racist belief system that has prevailed on the American landscape since its inception. Segregation has happened for various reasons throughout this country. At first, isolationist views were used based on white superiority and white supremacy. Later, the filth and deterioration of the inner city caused by caustic racial practices served only to separate people of color from the mainstream. Today, apartheid type practices have intensified in the wake of changing demographic patterns on as white parents feel that their children can be fair better in schools that are homogeneous in character.
The public school system in the United States, like the country as a whole, is plagued by vast inequalities - all too frequently defined along lines of race and class. A common question that many white Americans are asking: why have so many Latinos/as, unlike the European immigrants, been unable to escape from the barrios and from poverty. One might seek answer within the Kerner Report that was written 40 years ago as of next year.
In 1967, following the Detroit Rebellion in which thousands of citizens rose up against racism, joblessness, the police, and an apartheid education system, the Kerner Commission was established and issued an interesting report, which clearly laid the blame for the uprising on racism and oppression. The Kerner Report found:
In this chapter, we address ourselves to a fundamental question that many white Americans are asking: why have so many Negroes, unlike the European immigrants, been unable to escape from the ghetto and from poverty. We believe the following factors play a part:
The Maturing Economy: When the European immigrants arrived, they gained an economic foothold by providing the unskilled labor needed by industry. Unlike the immigrant, the Negro migrant found little opportunity in the city. The economy, by then matured, had little use for the unskilled labor he had to offer.
*The Disability of Race: The structure of discrimination has stringently narrowed opportunities for the Negro and restricted his prospects. European immigrants suffered from discrimination, but never so pervasively.
* Entry into the Political System: The immigrants usually settled in rapidly growing cities with powerful and expanding political machines, which traded economic advantages for political support. Ward-level grievance machinery, as well as personal representation, enabled the immigrant to make his voice heard and his power felt.
By the time the Negro arrived, these political machines were no longer so powerful or so well equipped to provide jobs or other favors, and in many cases were unwilling to share their influence with Negroes.
* Cultural Factors: Coming from societies with a low standard of living and at a time when job aspirations were low, the immigrants sensed little deprivation in being forced to take the less desirable and poorer-paying jobs. Their large and cohesive families contributed to total income. Their vision of the future–one that led to a life outside of the ghetto–provided the incentive necessary to endure the present.
Although Negro men worked as hard as the immigrants, they were unable to support their families. The entrepreneurial opportunities had vanished. As a result of slavery and long periods of unemployment, the Negro family structure had become matriarchal; the males played a secondary and marginal family role–one which offered little compensation for their hard and unrewarding labor. Above all, segregation denied Negroes access to good jobs and the opportunity to leave the ghetto. For them, the future seemed to lead only to a dead end.
Nothing has changed since then. Students in high poverty, high minority schools are continue to be provided with fewer resources, fewer qualified teachers, and fewer advanced level courses than their more affluent white peers. Not surprisingly, they experience lower rates of high school graduation, academic achievement and college attrition rates.
Recent policy trends have intensified the current inequalities that are occurring in our public education. With the end of court-ordered and voluntary school desegregation plans in many jurisdictions, there has been a steady increase of resegregation over the past fifteen years of Black and Latino students in our nation’s public schools.
As is true in society, the other side of racial inequality is racial privilege. Prior to the Civil Rights movement, racism was easily recognized because it was more overt. However, like a virus that has mutated, racism has evolved into different forms that are not only more difficult to recognize but also to combat. Aversive racism is the inherent contradiction that exists when the denial of personal prejudice co-exists with underlying unconscious negative feelings and beliefs. Unfortunately, the negative feelings and beliefs that underlie aversive racism are rooted in normal, often adaptive, psychological processes. Because of their negative feelings, although unintentional, acts of discrimination are often justified because of some factor other than race.
Even after the Supreme Court’s decision on Brown, few communities in the US have demonstrated a full faith commitment to achieve racial integration in public schools. The fact that these patterns of racial separation remained and will remain intact for years with the recent ruling by the Supreme Court, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District No. 1, is an indication of the paralysis that has beset our community on matters related to race and schooling.
In a society where Black and Brown people are over represented in the prisons and slums, and frequently portrayed negatively in the mass media, the failure of Black and Brown children in school would hardly appear abnormal. Low test scores, poor grades, and high drop-out and expulsion rates, easily blend into the litany of negative attributes associated with African Americans and Latinos/as in America. Such trends exist in alignment with images and indicators of poverty and criminality, drug abuse and teen pregnancy, violence and welfare dependency, to create a portrait of America’s underclass that is profoundly associated with Latina/o and African Americans.
As is true with other social ills that affect the poor, the cause of academic failure is most often blamed on the individual and the family. The society in which the school is located is absolved from responsibility or culpability because educational issues tend to be seen in isolation and are generally responded to without consideration to the overall social context. The extent that any connection is made between education and the broader social and economic forces is generally limited to a moral appeal for something to be done to address the plight of the less fortunate. Moral appeals can be successful in generating sympathy, however, they do not address the political and economic roots of the social problems that plague the community. The fact that there is a lack of urgency associated with addressing the needs of urban public schools is evident to which poor performance among African American and Latino/a students in school is embedded into the American conscience as a naturally occurring phenomenon.
We can no longer be passive bystanders to our faltering education system. Abstaining from wrongdoing that is immediately obvious to us is not enough. There needs to be a spiritual and social revolution which can catapult us beyond the racists walls and permanently change our current conditions.
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Tags: African Americans, Education, Latinos-as, oppression, Racism, Segregation, Texas | 
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This is the blog of Edmundo "XicanoPwr" Rocha, a social worker, an activist, freelance writer and founder and editor of The Sanctuary. My interests include: immigration reform, critical race theory and it's interaction with equality/inequality and freedom/oppression as they relate to the experiences of people of color in the Americas.
Para Justicia y Libertad is a Latino-centered political blog focusing on the humanistic perspective of politics, history, and society as they relate to the Latina/o community throughout Texas and the United States.
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Public schools have already adopted many of the policy recommendations that address racism - there is now more minority public school teachers and greater funding for education, and yet the results have been the same or worse. So racist causes cannot be the primary problem.
I place the primary problem, at least the primary fixable problem, at the public schools themselves. Our current education system is one of the last monopolies around, and a monopoly of the worse kind - government monopoly. And like all monopolies, it is going to significantly under perform and there is nothing anybody could do about it.
The solution is not to tweak the system, we have tried that for many years with little to no results. The problem is to reform the system at its core - remove the monopoly power it has and privatize it. This is why I am a strong supporter of educational vouchers. They directly address the problem at its core and the ones who would reap the most benefits of such a system are precisely the people that need it most - the poor and minority.
Take a look at what charter schools, what I call ‘vouchers lite’, have already done. They have revolutionized education and are quickly narrowing in on a few education models that work extremely well, like KIPP or Green Dot. Many public schools in San Diego and Los Angeles have already crossed over and become charter schools.
But then of course you get to the real barriers to change (and maybe here is where the racism card fits in) - the teachers union. No matter how promising the solution, no matter how good the track record is, and no matter how much it benefits those at the bottom of the economic ladder, teachers unions have always and will continue to always be against any system that threatens their monopoly power. And because teachers unions are such an overwhelming force behind the Democratic party, you will get practically no support from them. All Democrats will do is harp on the same themes they have always harped on, themes that benefit the teachers union tremendously but that do little to nothing to increase public school education.
Solutions like more teachers (more union membership), smaller classrooms (more teachers, more membership), education credentials (limit entry), and more funding for education all sound great on paper but have no record of actually improving education outcomes - they do though, greatly benefit the teachers unions, and thats what primarily interests politicians. For a recent article on this battle, go here.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2007/11/liberal_or_progressive_same_ol.html
Hopefully Cindylu can give her 2 cents on this topic.
Wondering, HP, if you’ve been following the dust-up over vouchers between McMegan and Ezra Klein, Yglesias, etc. McMegan’s opponents point out that even if you provide vouchers, that won’t permit poor people to magically move to the suburbs. Also, I don’t understand the argument that the government has a monopoly on education given widespread use of private schools. At any rate, the voucher idea is not the knockout punch to liberals that some imagine, and there’s only so much that can be blamed on the teachers’ union. This comparative review of the subject seemed helpful. I’m generally a supporter of NCLB, however–but as with everything else, Bush fucked it up in execution.
XP, I feel your post belies the title. It seems the apartheid system persists due primarily to aversive, rather than overt, racism. Very nice post, and I found the ‘aversive racism’ link helpful. I feel that one of the problems with the current discourse on race and immigration is that one side points out persistent aversive racism, and the other side hears accusations of overt racism. This is played out almost comically with every single LatinaLista post. No one–and I mean no one–sees him or herself as a racist. Even genuine Aryan nation bona fide racists won’t self identify as such. So using the term against someone else in a discussion or argument blows up the discussion instantaneously, and often engenders accusations of reverse racism.
There’s got to be a way to address aversive racism without blowing up the conversation. Part of it must involve acknowledgment of the phenomenon by the majority, with all the shame and discomfort that involves. Part of it must be establishing a baseline of common humanity that transcends race without ignoring it. Part of it should be betting on the good faith of others–if you expect that another person will act in good faith and proceed accordingly, they often live up to your expectations.
I have, and I must say, Megan McArdle laid the much needed smack down. I am going to be quoting much of her arguments next week on my blog - feel free to chime in.
You write, McMegan’s opponents point out that even if you provide vouchers, that won’t permit poor people to magically move to the suburbs.
I don’t see why this is important. A voucher doesn’t need to be used in the suburbs for it to be effective, it can be used in the very same city the voucher recipient lives in, on a quality private school for example. Alot of times no quality private schools are available, you say? Well that is precisely what vouchers are designed to address. In every other part of the economy when you have customers willing to pay for a good, entrepreneurs move in to provide that need and I don’t see why vouchers would be any different. Vouchers may result in private schools expanding, charter schools (like the highly successful KIPP or Green Dot) expanding or even some new combination of the two - either way, when that market for quality schools is created, I expect the market will respond.
You write, Also, I don’t understand the argument that the government has a monopoly on education given widespread use of private schools.
This is a perfect illustration of why I believe the voucher debate is debated in two different worlds - the rich and the poor world. Of course if you live in rich white neighborhoods like Ezra Klein and Mathew Yglesias (and John Kerry, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards - other super rich white liberals who have no contact with the real world) the education system does not seem like a monopoly - after all, if you are dissatisfied with it you can easily send your kids to an elite private school or move to a better neighborhood.
However, those options are not available to the poor. If you live in a bad neighborhood and you are dissatisfied with the public schools, guess what? You are SOL! Ever wonder why wealthier neighborhoods tend to have better public schools than poorer neighborhoods even when the public schools in the poor neighborhoods receive significantly more funding? One of the reasons (though certainly not the only reason) is because the wealthier the neighborhood the more competition it faces because residents of that neighborhood can pull their kids out of that school (which reduces funding to the school) and put them in a private school - poor neighborhoods face no such competition, resulting in a virtual monopoly, that is precisely the inequality vouchers are meant to fix.
Voucher opponents will also argue about cultural unity and national cohesion and the importance of supporting public schools on such grounds, and that’s all fine when you have your kids getting quality education but try making that argument to some poor parent in the ghetto who worries everyday about their kids safety and basic education - such concerns come across as highly elitist and unconnected to the problems of the ghetto.
I also want to clarify that I don’t place the failure of public schools solely or primarily on the shoulders of the teachers union. Though I believe that the teachers union has certainly contributed to the failure (mainly by its refusal to accept merit pay, firing of teachers, greater autonomy for the principle, and levels of red tape) the overwhelming blame should fall on the monopoly system itself. Nothing enforces greater accountability on public schools like the possibility of them to go bankrupt, and nothing leads to more innovation like the markets ability of trial and error. So as long as that does not change, I expect only minor blips in the quality of education - with our education system remaining overall the stagnant, outdated highly inefficient giant that all monopolies are.
What I do place squarely on the shoulders of teachers unions (and by extension Democrats), is standing in the way of progress. Whether it is vouchers or Charter schools, teachers unions have fought tooth and nail to prevent either from coming to fruition. Even in the face of unprecedented success, like with Charter schools Green Dot and KIPP, the teachers unions have been unrelenting - being the strongest and sometimes sole barrier to Charter school and voucher expansion. Luckily for children in the ghetto though, Charter schools and vouchers proponents have found allies in those on the right and some bipartisan supporters who care about education first and politics second and because of such support have been able to progress slowly.
And the more they have progressed, the harder it is for teachers unions and limousine liberals to ignore their success and continue to oppose them (though many still do). Ten years ago we would have been debating about the theoretical ability of Charter schools to improve public education, today that debate is pretty much settled. Give vouchers more time and I expect the same - to the greater benefit of those who need it the most, the poor and minority.
yave i understand what you are saying, however, considering Texas was the model for President Bush’s education agenda, I already knew this was going to happen.
NCLB was built on the bedrock of “what’s good for business is good for schools,” that schools’ productivity would improve significantly if business principles were applied, and nothing proved it better than the “education miracle” built in Texas by then-governor George W. Bush and in Houston by Superintendent Rod Paige.
Since this has to do with dropouts, in 2000, when the current President was Governor of Texas and the former Secretary of Education was Superintendent of the Houston ISD, the TEA (Texas Educational Agency) issued a report warning that the Texas system for recording dropouts when combined with various incentive programs would lead to serious under-reporting and under-counting. The report stated that some schools and districts might sweep the dropout problem under some magic carpet. Instead of taking care of these troubled students, the system might erase them.
The heart of this education policy is a social doctrine near and dear to conservatives like HP - Social Darwinism. NCLB fails to address the root causes of poor school performance such as poverty, low nutrition and weak starts in life. NCLB fails to bring Head-Start to full funding. It simply imposes high standards without developing capacities.
The problem many states are having with their schools, here in Texas were already experienced. Recently, TEA passed another rule stating that if schools are not able to straighten up, they will be taken over by a non-profit or some corporate educational company.
The hidden agenda of NCLB is to do what HP was complaining about, it is suppose to shut down the so-called monopolies of urban public schools. They will no longer be seen as students but clients because they will be taught in the new world of corporate schooling. And here in Texas, we are way ahead of the game.
In a way, it is an apartheid by design.
For the record, I am no fan of NCLB and neither are most conservatives. NCLB was always a liberal agenda and received a higher percentage of Democrat votes than Republican. It is one of the many grievances conservatives have with Bush…some argue he has always been a closet liberal.
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