Segregation, Poverty and Inequality: What Ravitch Calls the Toxic Mix At School
In her 2013 book, Reign of Error, education historian Diane Ravitch identifies what she believes are the factors that affect academic achievement: “Segregation is most concentrated in the nation’s cities. Half of the more than sixteen hundred schools in New York City are more than 90 percent black and Hispanic. Half of the black students in Chicago and one-third of the black students in New York City attend apartheid schools. Many black students are doubly segregated, by race and by poverty.”(p. 292)
Several important articles published this week explore the issues of poverty—and the related issue, inequality—and racial segregation, the factors Ravitch calls “the toxic mix.” According to all three writers, we misunderstand our history and hence the issues that plague us today.
In a piece memorializing Nelson Mandela, Richard Rothstein of the Economic Policy Institute remembers that in South Africa, Mandela believed that deep confession—getting at the truth of the history that makes us who we are—is necessary as the path to reconciliation. Rothstein asks Americans to be more honest about the factors that have segregated our neighborhoods, our cities, and our public schools. “One of the worst examples of our historical blindness is the widespread belief that our continued residential racial segregation, North and South, is ‘de facto,’ not the result of explicit government policy but instead the consequence of private prejudice, economic inequality, and personal choice to self-segregate.” Explaining the policy choices that caused housing and transportation patterns in the half-century after World War II, Rothstein examines high school history textbooks that make it appear instead as though