An array of practices in US schools is leading to an insidious form of segregation, writes STEPHANIE McCRUMMEN
DURING HER elementary school years in the Mississippi town of Tylertown, Addreal Harness, a competitive teenager with plans to be a doctor, said her classes had roughly the same numbers of white and black students. It was a fact she took little note of until the white kids began leaving.
Some left in seventh grade, even more in eighth and, by the time Harness, who is African-American, reached Tylertown High School, she became aware of talk that has slowly seeped into her 16-year-old psyche – that some white parents call Tylertown “the black school”, while Salem Attendance Centre, where many of her white classmates transferred, is known as “the white school”.
“In my class of 2012, there’s just seven white girls now,” said Harness, raising her chin slightly.
“The ones that left, they think Salem’s smarter because they have more white kids, but it’s not.”
Last week, a federal judge ruled that a school board policy in Walthall County, Mississippi, has had the effect of creating “racially identifiable” schools in violation of a 1970 federal desegregation order. More than half a century after courts dismantled the legal framework that enforced segregation, Obama administration officials are investigating an array of practices across the country that contribute to a present-day version that they say is no less insidious.
Although minority students have the legal right to attend any school, federal officials are questioning whether in practice many receive less access than white students to the best teachers, college prep courses and other resources. US department of education lawyers are also investigating whether minority students are being separated into special education classes without justification, whether they are being disciplined more harshly and whether districts are failing to provide adequate English language programmes for students not fluent in the language, among other issues.
Studies have shown schools drifting back into segregation since the 1980s, when the federal government became less aggressive in its enforcement.
In Walthall County, an area with sprawling green lawns and hot pink azaleas near the Louisiana border, the main employers are the county and small factories that make truck pallets and military uniforms.
The school district has three attendance zones serving about 2,500 students, with 64 per cent of them black and 34 per cent white. In recent years, the school board, which has three black and three white members, approved hundreds of requests from mostly white parents to transfer their children out of their zoned school, the majority-black Tylertown, to Salem, which has since the early 1990s become a majority white school. White parents sometimes defended their requests by explaining that they live closer to Salem. More frequently, though, they employed the vague reason that their kids would be “more comfortable” at Salem, whose academic record and course offerings are similar to Tylertown’s. “I didn’t realise it was getting to the point anyone should worry about it,” said Jay Boyd, the school board president, who is white.
“I just thought we need to do what’s best for students – if they’re happy, let them go to Salem. Who’s it hurting?”
A federal judge answered that question last week, ruling that the transfers created “racially identifiable” schools in the district. The judge also found that Tylertown’s elementary schools were concentrating white students into certain classrooms, a practice some school officials have defended as necessary to avoid white flight from the county.
Although the court ruling did not explicitly address the question of intent, a number of people here noted that the transfers by white families gathered speed several years ago, after Tylertown, which was the official black high school under the old segregated system, got its first African-American principal since desegregation in 1970. At Salem, which was the white school in the Jim Crow era, the principals have always been white. People here also noted that at Tylertown, white children and parents rarely attend graduation ceremonies, and that white students have often held a separate prom out of town.
Roger Ginn, a white parent whose children graduated from both Tylertown and Salem, said he had always considered the transfer issue to be a simple matter of student happiness, not race. "But if all that adds up to segregated schools?" he asked, and then paused for a while. "That wouldn't be right, no." – ( Washington Postservice)