The end of public school desegregation?
U.S. public schools are more segregated today than they have been for decades, and many believe the country’s policymakers have abandoned efforts to re-integrate schools. Here is a TedX Talk that looks at the issue, by Leslie Hinkson, an assistant professor of sociology at Georgetown University. Hinkson focuses on two questions:
Have we really seen the end of meaningful efforts to desegregate most of our public schools? 2) And in those schools where desegregation has taken place, how do they understand what integration means?
Here’s the video of the speech, and the transcript follows.
The transcript:
Academia is not populated by many people like me, people who grew up in post-Jim Crow America relegated to highly segregated, high poverty neighborhoods. We’re like the unicorns of the academy, quite rare, except we do exist.For people like us, regardless of whether we choose to make this our official area of research, the question of, “Why me?” persists. People like us who attended racially segregated schools where more than 75 percent of the students qualified for free lunch. Who were given a chance to excel beyond the bounds of such schools simply because a teacher pulled aside our mother or father and said, “Your child doesn’t belong here.” Every year, in a school like the one I described, a handful of students or fewer are plucked out and placed in institutions far removed from their communities so that they can thrive academically, leaving behind the vast majority of their classmates. I started asking that question, “Why me?” around 7th grade. It wouldn’t be until college that I started to ask the question, “Why not them?”Today, the average black student scores below 75 percent of whites on most standardized assessments. Black students score lower than their White counterparts on standardized exams in reading, science, mathematics, and a host of other assessments said to measure scholastic aptitude. I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in sociology with the intention of answering one little question – What explains this black-white test score gap – my grown-up version of, “Why not them?”This gap has remained steady since the late 1980s and showed no signs of diminishing, with the exception of a slight reduction in the early 2000s. Where we have seen steady declines in the gap are in the years between 1971 and 1988. During this time, shite student test scores remained steady on the National AssessmentThe end of public school desegregation? - The Washington Post:
