The Return of Segregated Schools
There’s nothing like coming home for the holidays to news that your high school is in the midst of being resegregated.
Despite what spell check may think, I didn’t mean to type ‘desegregated.’ I say resegregation, and I mean resegregation, because that’s precisely what many teachers, students, and parents at my North Miami Beach, Florida alma mater say—with good reason—will happen when a controversial public high school is built within short distance of our school, the 2,700-seat Michael Krop Senior High (or Krop for short).
Many anticipated the new school, though its segregating effect wasn’t immediately apparent. For more than a decade, parents and officials in Aventura, an affluent, overwhelmingly white suburb of Miami, have expressed their concerns about the “safety” and urban location of the school their children are zoned to—Krop. It was never a secret that the ‘A’-school’s demographic makeup, 42 percent black and 56 percent economically disadvantaged, stands in sharp contrast to Aventura’s: 90.4 percent white (including of Latino descent) and a median household income of $60,150, a figure much higher than the state and national averages. For years, however, the school board largely ignored requests by Aventura’s elite that the county open a high school in their own community.
Recently, though, a swing of high-profile cases tainted Krop’s exceptional academic reputation (not least of these was the nationally-covered story of Trayvon Martin, a black Krop junior who in 2012 was shot and killed by a white community watchman.) So when the district superintendent, the 2014 winner of the National Superintendent of the Year award, took the podium at a town hall meeting on December 3, few were surprised when they heard his big news: citizens of the self-proclaimed “City of Excellence” succeeded in their demands, and a new school is currently on its way.
But many of Krop’s students and teachers grew concerned once a school board member listed the school’s entrance requirements. It became clear to them that Aventura’s residents would easily meet the conditions for enrollment, but Krop’s poor minority students would have more difficulty doing so. Much of the Krop community now feels their school is being divided along racial lines.
The superintendent and others in the community disagree. They argue the new school will ease overcrowding at Krop and allow its existing students to choose an alternative, technology-centered education. They assure that resegregation is not the objective. That a district like ours, one that has been nationally recognized for its minority student success rate, is all for diversity.
But even though the school may be built with good intentions, and the objective allegedly isn’t resegregation, this inherent side effect can’t be ignored.
In fact, it would make Krop just another school among the thousands that have already been resegregated nationwide. Yes, the Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education (1954) that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal,” and that classrooms must be integrated. And for some time after that, schools saw record enrollment of minority (and particularly black) students.
But that’s the extent of what high school history textbooks cover.
The Civil Rights Project at Harvard University explains that since at least 1990, the Supreme Court and other courts have ruled in case after case that the integration programs introduced after Brown v. Board were intended to be only “temporary.” Judges for these cases reasoned that since schools are integrated now, officials can be trusted to keep them that way. So they proceeded to strike down mandatory integration programs in several districts— including in Miami-Dade County, where Krop is located, in 2001.
Since then, time has proven that the trust judges placed in officials’ morals was misguided and repercussive.
Studies and statistics compiled by ProPublica investigative reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones point to the indisputable fact that segregation is ripping through classrooms in Miami, St. Louis, New York, and nationwide at an alarming rate.
The numbers speak for themselves. By 1988, years of federally mandated integration programs lowered the number of “apartheid schools”—those with a white population of 1 percent or less—to 2,762. But by 2011, that number shot back up to 6,727. More stomachcringing statistics from the ProPublica report include that 53 percent of black students in districts freed from desegregation mandates attend schools where 9 out of 10 students are minorities. Even worse, more black children attend majority-black high schools in the South now than at any point in the past four decades. Branching out to other minorities, nearly 75 to 80 percent of black and Latino students go to schools that are more than half minority.
The disconcerting evidence goes on, but Hannah-Jones summed it up: many “black students attend a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened.”
The same conservative politicians and lawmakers responsible for modern segregation are doing something else to dishonor the historic 62-year-old ruling: they’re playing the separate but- equal card to justify racially divided schools. Not surprisingly, this reasoning is just as flawed and untruthful today as it was in 1954.
Segregated schools with high levels of poverty are anything but “equal.” In fact, these schools too often see half of their students not graduate. Though lower funding and more inexperienced teachers (compared to heavily white campuses) are partially to blame for this, the shortcomings of schools serving minority students are more deeply rooted.
Contrary to the racist fallacy misinforming some of today’s populace, black, Latino, and other non-white students don’t have lower scores and less-advanced coursework because they are “dumb,” “lazy,” or “sluggish.” What isn’t considered enough when making that assumption is that in many oppressed families and communities, education tends to take a backseat to the pressures of the volatile, low-income life. This is why the children of minority families often perform worse in school — it’s not that success for them is undesirable, but rather that it is harder to come by when so many obstacles stand in the way.
This reality highlights the importance of a school’s socioeconomic composition (SEC), which serves as a crucial determining factor of students’ future success. When children from low-income families are placed in high-SEC schools, which tend to be academically conducive environments, their chances of attending college increase. The paper which reported this trend, published in the American Education Research Journal, explains the importance of this early success window: “Because educational attainment is associated with several important life outcomes—access to careers, income, and even health—this finding suggests that attending a low-SEC high school may have lifelong negative consequences.”
For poor minority students who are zoned to underfunded and academically unstimulating schools their whole lives, these consequences include having their potential capped at a near-ground level, which essentially stymies them through adulthood.
This is why many of Krop’s progressive students, teachers, and parents are frustrated about the technology-rich, $11.8 million, 500- seat iPrep Academy—its curriculum, facilities, and potential are promising, but they will be more accessible to Aventura’s population than to the rest of Krop’s demographic.
True, nowhere have officials in Florida, or anywhere in the U.S., expressly segregated entrance to school to any race. That would bring swarms of civil rights advocates and lawyers to their towns, schools, and white havens, demanding justice. No, instead, to avoid legal trouble, orchestrators of modern school segregation in the United States rely on zoning laws and entrance requirements that favor high-achieving students with the resources and tradition of excellence needed to succeed.
These requirements, which often come after school officials have already gerrymandered their districts into white and black communities, vary county by county. In Miami-Dade, for example, students who want to attend thenew iPrep must have passed Algebra 1 and Physical Science during middle school. Though the school board argues that these advanced courses are being taken before high school in record numbers, a look at the freshmen enrolled in either of those subjects at Krop today reveals mostly blacks and Latinos. Another stipulation holds students to no more than five absences or five tardies per semester—a disqualifying blow to low-income students who have difficulty getting to school for a variety of reasons, such as when they must take a day off to care for a sibling since a single parent had to stay home sick from work.
The students within Krop’s attendance boundary who meet these and other discriminatory requirements are disproportionately white and affluent—and often residents of Aventura.
Facilitating access for mostly higher-income white students to attend institutions that “produce students who have acquired the necessary skills and knowledge to become responsible, successful citizens,” as the new iPrep Academy promises to do, is propagating the racist tactics that set some races behind others for most of this country’s history. It is undoing the achievements of generations of activists, lawmakers, and school officials who wanted to reverse the damage done by these very tactics.
The next time I visit my high school, I’ll be smiling. I’ll walk past the lunch patios and remember smelling and sometimes sampling ethnic foods from Haiti, Colombia, and Mexico. I’ll sit in on current meetings of academic and social organizations I was part of, and witness students sharing a spectrum of experiences, stories, and opinions. I’ll visit my old newspaper staff, and reminisce about articles that addressed Krop’s success despite its students’ low socioeconomic status. I’ll recall a high school experience that in many ways epitomized Maya Angelou’s message: “In diversity there is beauty and there is strength.”
But soon enough I’ll remember that all those experiences will no longer be, that segregation is not a thing of the past. I’ll remember that my graduating class was one of the last to attend a truly integrated, mixed, and multicolor Krop. And at that point, my smile, much like diversity in classrooms across the country, will fade.