Learning Curve: Crossing the color line

By Maureen Downey

Black and Latino families in search of more affordable housing and backyard decks are flocking to the suburbs. White families in quest of crown molding and vintage claw-foot tubs are relocating to the cities.

A national snapshot of metro migration shows that the moving vans of white and minority families are heading in different directions.

So are their children.

As America’s metropolitan areas embrace new residential patterns, one variable isn’t changing: Racial segregation in neighborhoods and schools.

While the South once led the nation in integrating its schools, it now has become the pace setter in the resegregation of classrooms, largely as a result of housing trends.

“Some of these districts maintained a very high level of integration for a quarter-century or more until the desegregation policies were reversed,” concludes a 2002 Harvard Civil Rights Project study of school resegregation.

Today, prevailing public policy insists that it doesn’t matter whether black, white and Hispanic students attend the same schools, only whether they attend good schools.

But it’s a daunting challenge to create a “good” school in a racially isolated learning environment where many children are dealing with poverty, a lack of health care, poor nutrition, housing evictions and job losses. As Southern schools resegregate, they become more entrenched in their poverty.

According to 2009 Kids Count Data, 35 percent of African-American children and 27 percent of Latino children live in poverty, compared to 11 percent of white children. Many of those low-income children now live in suburbs; in 2006, there were 1 million more poor people living in suburbs than cities.

Few people, outside of researchers, fret about the increasing resegregation. One is sociologist Amy Stuart Wells, director of the Center for Understanding Race and Education at Columbia University.

Wells spoke Thursday at Georgia State University about her research and her new book “Both Sides Now,” in which she interviewed students in six states who experienced school desegregation. Now adults, they told Wells that they thought they were being prepared for the real world, which they saw as an “ever-more-integrated society.”

But they graduated high school in 1980 to discover that while they were extolled to be color-blind, much of the country still saw the world in black and white. They moved onto college campuses with little racial diversity and eventually settled in largely segregated neighborhoods. And, despite telling Wells that they valued their experiences on the desegregation front lines, many send their own children to less-diverse schools.

Consumed with giving their children an edge, these middle-class parents are willing to suspend their belief that diversity matters in order to send their kids to the “best” schools.

“Parents value diversity but also feel more anxiety around education and more competition within it,” says Wells. “For white parents, academics trumps diversity.”

With test scores now the most important measure of quality, the “best” schools are often those filled with children predisposed by socioeconomics to score well, children who look and live very much alike.

Most middle-class parents understand how low-income students benefit by transferring to higher-achieving schools than they would otherwise encounter in their neighborhoods. They realize that there are cultures in more affluent schools that enhance the quality of the education, from involved PTAs to parent-led chess clubs. As U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall noted a half-century ago: “If the majority is educating its children and making sure every benefit is available, then minority children can also get those benefits if they can attend those schools.”

However, middle-class parents remain leery of the research that shows their children don’t pay an academic price for sitting alongside less-affluent peers.

Wells says the solution may come from the past. Many school choice programs — such as those in DeKalb County — initially began to spur diversity. By creating attractive magnet and theme schools, systems hoped to entice students to leave their segregated neighborhoods to take advantage of these innovative offerings.

Expanded school choice could serve the same purpose now, says Wells, including transfer programs that permit students to go outside their districts since much of the segregation today is across districts rather than within single districts.

But color lines remain hard to cross. As one of the graduates of a desegregated high school comments in Wells’ book: “I have such warm feelings and memories of being with all these people, and we didn’t save any of it. ... I’m not friends with them now. ... I think I went off with my white world. ... People live lives for the most part along color.”