Lessons for Corporate Education Reformers from Hamilton Township, NJ
Hamilton Township, New Jersey Schools Superintendent, James Parla, took a brave step the other day when he addressed the issue of defacto segregation in his school district. According to an article on nj.com the school leader said:
“Test scores are lagging and schools are crumbling and, more often than not, those conditions are at schools with large minority populations… [Parla] urged the school board to find ways to address "de facto segregation" in the district's 24 schools as it looks toward new school construction and redistricting.”
Good for Superintendent Parla for taking this stand publicly and good for the Hamilton Township School Board if they attempt to wrestle with the issue. Solutions will not come easily.
Hamilton Township is in many ways a microcosm of the issue of segregation in many urban areas. Hamilton is a large school district that borders the struggling city of Trenton on one side and wealthy suburbs of Robbinsville and West Windsor on the other. It will be no surprise that the relatively poor sections (with high concentrations of minorities) of Hamilton are near Trenton, while the relatively well-off (and white) sections of Hamilton border Robbinsville and West Windsor.
This geographic reality has led to segregated schools. Parla somewhat ingenuously said this was “not intentional”, but a reality. Perhaps. Certainly, it is in part a factor of socio-economics and geography. Almost certainly it is also a by-product of discriminatory real estate practices in the past. Nicholas Lippa, writing in the NCRP eJournal, summarizes the research on this topic:
“The housing market in the United States has a long history of discriminatory practices that has excluded people of color from integrating into more Russ on Reading: Lessons for Corporate Education Reformers from Hamilton Township, NJ: