Keeping retirement weird. Betsy DeVos and racial education gaslighting.
I entered first grade in 1954. It was a historic year for education in the United States.
That year the U.S. Supreme court ruled that school segregation was illegal. The court found that apartheid schools could never provide equal education to children of color.
In 2016, 62 years after Brown v. Board of Education a U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) report instead found that U.S. schools are quickly becoming more racially segregated than ever.
Black, Hispanic and poor students are increasingly concentrated in what researchers for the GAO called “isolated schools.”
GAO investigators found that from the 2000-2001 to the 2013-2014 school year, both the percentage of K-12 public schools in high-poverty and the percentage comprised of mostly African-American or Hispanic students grew. During that period high poverty, segregated doubled from 7,009 schools to 15,089 schools. The percentage of all schools with so-called racial or socio-economic isolation grew from 9% to 16%.
Researchers define “isolated schools” as those in which 75% or more of students are of the same race or class.
“Isolated schools.” It sounds more benign and passive than calling them segregated. As if nobody did it.
Such schools offered disproportionately fewer math, science and college-prep courses and had higher rates of students who were held back in ninth grade, suspended or expelled.
GAO investigators found, that public charter schools, what new Education Secretary Betsy DeVos calls choice schools, take minority and poor students from larger more diverse public schools and enroll them into less diverse schools.
Investigators found, Hispanic students tended to be “triple segregated” by race, economics and language.
U.S. Rep. John Conyers, a Michigan Democrat and one of two lawmakers who requested the study, said it “confirms what has long been feared and proves Keeping retirement weird. Betsy DeVos and racial education gaslighting. | Fred Klonsky:
