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Missing Pages Part One
A Sound Basic Education Is Neither Enough
Nor Was It Intended for Everybody’s Children
North Carolina’s system of public education was based on racial discrimination and white supremacy. It
was right there in the State Constitution for a century, from 1868 until 1971. There were actually two
centuries of opportunities along the way for it to be otherwise, as the original State Constitution of 1776
was silent on the matter of race and education, simply requiring the State to provide for publicly funded
schools. Following the Civil War, conditions were optimal for the establishment of a unified system of
public education. The attendees at the State Constitutional Convention of 1868 were both Black and
white. The document they produced called not for two but one statewide system of education.
Nevertheless,the system the State created required separate schools for Black and white children.
Another century passed, and finally, the State dropped the separate but equal provision in 1971,
seventeen years after The U.S. Supreme Court ruled it a violation of the U.S. Constitution.
Throughout its history, State education policies and funding schemes perpetuated separate and unequal
education for Black and white children. Even after the Civil War and abolition of slavery, legal
suppression of Black voting sustained those policies through the exclusion of Black representatives at all
levels of government. Ann McColl has written extensively about these “intentional disparities” attributing
one especially telling and repulsive quotation to State Superintendent James Joyner in his message to
local superintendents:
The negro schools can be run for much less expense and should be. In most places it does
not take more than one fourth as much to run the negro schoolsas it doesto run the
white schoolsforabout the same numberof children. The salariespaid teachers are very
properly much smaller,the houses are cheaper,the numberof teachers smaller …. If
quietly managed, the negroes will give no trouble about it.
Funding for the separate systems reflected Joyner’s directives:
In 1915 the Negro school population was 32.6 percent of the total and Negro
schools received 13.0 percent of the school funds. (Ayscue & Woodward,2014, p. 2).
As long as the State was permitted to maintain separate systems,it was possible to maintain disparities.
But a challenge came in 1954 when the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the end of separate but equal. North
Carolina’s response was to create the appearance of compliance (ironically, given the State’s motto -
seeming to be - in compliance). Its Pupil Assignment Act (1955) and Constitutional Amendment (also
known as the PearsallPlan, 1956) were two prongs of a thinly disguised strategy to maintain separate
schools through (1) a maze of local- and state-level applications required of Black pupils requesting to
transfer to predominantly white schools, and (2) tuition assistance made available to white parents who
could have elected private schools for their children as a way to escape integration. The ultimate escape
option was the authority granted to local districts to close any school that was at risk of undesirable levels
of racial integration (Batchelor, 2015). The effect of these two State policies, as well as the multiple
incidents of violence (e.g., assaults on Black students by peers as well as adults; the burning of crosses,
including one on the lawn of Greensboro’s Superintendent) was the nearly undetectable pace of
desegregation following the 1954 Brown decision:
In general,Greensboro was maintaining a parallel pace with North Carolina as whole whose
“programof public school integration continue[d] to proceed at something less than a snail’s pace.”
(Integration May Spread in State’s Schools Soon, News and Observer,August 16, 1959)](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/themissingpagesfinaljune9-200609162307/85/WestEd-s-Leandro-report-The-Missing-Pages-4-320.jpg)
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We conclude that Article I, Section 15 and Article IX, Section 2 of the North Carolina
Constitution combine to guarantee every child of this state an opportunity to receive a
sound basic education in ourpublic schools. For purposesof our Constitution,a "sound
basic education" is one that will provide the student with at least: (1) sufficient ability to
read, write, and speak the English language and a sufficient knowledge of fundamental
mathematics and physical science to enable the student to function in a complex and
rapidly changing society; (2) sufficient fundamental knowledge of geography, history,
and basic economic and political systems to enable the student to make informed choices
with regard to issues that affect the student personally oraffect the student's community,
state, and nation; (3) sufficient academic and vocational skills to enable the student to
successfully engage in post-secondary education or vocational training; and (4) sufficient
academic and vocational skills to enable the student to compete on an equal basiswith
others in further formal education orgainful employment in contemporary society. (p. 6-
7)
Note the repetition of the term sufficient. And the pedestrian verbs chosen to signal what graduates of the
State’s system would be enabled to do: function,make informed choices, engage in [further] education
and training, and compete on an equal basis.
Fine as far as they go, but are these actions the most we can anticipate for a great and progressive
people? Are these the accomplishments we can expect from investing to the full extent that our means
could afford and intelligent direction accomplish? Or are these the signs of a state educational system that
aims only for sound and basic, in other words de minimus, as the lowest constitutionally permissible
standard? The answer came just a few months ago.
Having received and reviewed WestEd’s report, and eager to bring the long-running Leandro litigation to
a close, the Court issued on January 21, 2020 a consent decree intended to do just that. Having stipulated
to failure to meet its Constitutional obligations, the State agreed to implement the Court’s order by
committing to seven specific outcomes:
1. A systemof teacher development and recruitment that ensures each classroomis staffed with a
high-quality teacherwho is supported with early and ongoing professional learning and provided
competitive pay.
2. A systemof principal development and recruitment that ensures each school is led by a high-
quality principal who is supported with early and ongoing professional learning and provided
competitive pay.
3. A finance systemthat provides adequate, equitable, and predictable funding to school districts
and, importantly,adequate resources to address the needs of all North Carolina schools and
students, especially at-risk-students as defined by the Leandro decisions.
4. An assessment and accountability systemthat reliably assess multiple measures of student
performance against the Leandro standard and provides accountability consistent with the
Leandro standard.
5. An assistance and turnaround function that provides necessary support to low-performing
schools and districts.
6. A systemof early education that provides access to high-quality pre-kindergarten and other
early childhood learning opportunities to ensure that all students at-risk of educational failure,
regardless of where they live in the State, enter kindergarten on track for school success.
7. An alignment of high school to postsecondary and careerexpectations, as well as the provision
of early postsecondary and workforce learning opportunities, to ensure student readinessto all
students in the state.](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/themissingpagesfinaljune9-200609162307/85/WestEd-s-Leandro-report-The-Missing-Pages-6-320.jpg)
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Missing Pages Part Two
Desegregation, Then Resegregation
What began in the State Constitution of 1776 as a single system of public education that was intentionally
split into two divisions, one for white, one for Black, remained for two centuries a single system but
divided de facto (i.e., by the facts on the ground). The split was affirmed and mandated in the1868
Constitution. But as a result of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), along with the Court orders that
followed Brown,and ultimately a 1971 Constitutional Amendment, North Carolina’s schools enjoyed a
brief period of desegregation. In recent decades,the Federal government’s retreat from enforcing the
Brown and related rulings has resulted in the State inexorably slipping backwards. Racialresegregation of
North Carolina’s public school students is occurring. Part Two will present evidence of that resegregation,
along with a review of analytical studies of the correlates and lasting effects of segregation on the
outcomes for North Carolina’s students.
DESEGREGATION
The 1960s and 1970s were a period of desegregation both nationally and especially in the southern states
most directly affected by the 1954 Brown decision.
In 1964 [ten years post-Brown], 99 percent of black studentsin the South attended all-
black schools
But that situation rapidly gave way to desegregation:
by 1971, only about 20 percent attended such schools, and schools in the South were
more integrated than elsewhere in the country (Reardon,et al., 2011).
North Carolina actually led the way. A large proportion of the State’s 1971 status may be attributed to the
data from one district, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, which responded not only to the Brown and related rulings
(i.e., Swann v. CMS),but also to the wishes of its citizens who voted to approve desegregation by means
of district consolidation, joining the urban to the suburban:
By 1980, the [Charlotte-Mecklenburg] school district had reached an unprecedented
level of integration.In 1984, the Charlotte Observer editorial board stated, “Charlotte-
Mecklenburg’s proudest achievement of the past 20 years is not the city’s impressive new
skyline orits strong, growing economy. Its proudest achievement is its fully integrated
schools.” (Smith, 2016).
The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) provided a case study of the segregation-desegregation-
resegregation cycle. (Wake County and Winston-Salem/Forsyth County could just as easily have served
to illustrate the pattern.) Beginning in the 1970s and continuing for nearly two decades,CMS pupils rode
busses for considerable distances and in great numbers which allowed the district to achieve targeted
racial composition in its schools and to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Swann v. Charlotte-
Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971).
The Court’s unanimous decision in Swann held that (a) a race-neutraldesegregation plan was not
sufficient as it may fail to achieve the desired remedy; (b) transporting students by bus to achieve
desegregation was not only permissible but required; and (c) in a stunning indictment of governments:
segregated education in the post-Brown era was not a mere accident of citizen’s residential preferences,](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/themissingpagesfinaljune9-200609162307/85/WestEd-s-Leandro-report-The-Missing-Pages-8-320.jpg)
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but arose as a direct result of racially discriminatory housing and educational actions at all levels of
government.
RESEGREGATION
The era of judicial and political support for desegregation did not last long. The decade of the 1990s
opened with Supreme Court decisions dealing blows to the hard-earned gains in achieving compliance
with Brown. In Dowell (1991) Chief Justice Rehnquist essentially brought down Brown’s curtain:
federal supervision of local school systems [has always] been intended as a temporary measure to
remedy past discrimination.
Like the cases of the Dowell type, Belk v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (2001) arrived at
the courts’ typical finding of unitary status,meaning that if de jure segregation had not actually been
eliminated, at least the district had tried. In other words, after two centuries of Constitutionally-based and
legislatively-affirmed discrimination, a good faith effort for a few years was sufficient to relieve a district
from accountability for its results.
The resulting segregation was predictable:
Between 1993 and 2001, the number of African Americansin North Carolina who attended
schools with enrollments that were more that 80% black doubled (Raleigh News and Observer,
February 18,2001).
But the courts did not stop there. The highly effective decision in Swann was eclipsed by the Court of
Appeals for the 4th
Circuit when it ruled in Capacchione v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (2001) that
race-conscious pupil assignment was not permissible:
CMS is enjoined fromassigning children to schools orallocating educational opportunitiesand
benefits through race-based lotteries, preferences, set-asides, or othermeans that deny students
an equal footing based on race (p. 82).
The federal courts were not operating in a vacuum; the politics of the nation were changing as well.
In a campaign stop in Charlotte, North Carolina on the eve of the 1984 election, [President]
Reagan denounced busing as a ‘failed” experiment’ (Charlotte Observer,October 9, 1984).In
1985, federal courts approved the return to segregated schoolsin Norfolk, Virginia, a decision
[Riddick v. School Board] that Reagan officials called a model for otherdistricts (Orfield &
Eaton 1996, p. 17, cited in Baker et al., 2014)). In the years after the Norfolk decision, schools in
the South began to resegregate (Baker, et al., 2014).
In response, Charlotte-Mecklenburg established an array of magnet schools designed to replace
mandatory pupil assignment with enticement of the children of suburban white parents to attend urban
schools. Clotfelter et al. (2008) describe what happened next:
In the fall of 2002 the district dramatically revamped its student assignment policy by
adopting a school choice plan guaranteeing that all children—including the children of
suburban parents living in predominantly white neighborhoods—could attend their
neighborhood schools. Although the plan allowed studentsfromCharlotte’s
predominantly black downtown neighborhoods to request suburban schools, capacity
limits rendered many of these requests infeasible (p.6).](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/themissingpagesfinaljune9-200609162307/85/WestEd-s-Leandro-report-The-Missing-Pages-9-320.jpg)
WestEd's Leandro report: The Missing Pages
- 1. WestEd’s Leandro Report The Missing Pages David Cooper Preface How is it even possible to describe the current situation in North Carolina’s public schools and propose remedies for the problems identified without considering the racial resegregation of the schools? It is a well-documented resegregation. It follows a brief period of desegregation that itself followed two centuries of legally segregated schools. In 2018 Judge David Lee of the Wake County Superior Court (i.e., the court overseeing the case known as Leandro) ordered that an independent agency be engaged to report to the Court on the status of the State’s compliance in assuring that all children have access to the Constitutionally required sound basic education. That report was prepared by consultant WestEd and submitted to the Court in October 2019, then to the public in December,2019. While thorough in many respects,the issues of race and segregation in public schools are largely missing from the report. The paper that you are about to read is a commentary on the text of WestEd’s Leandro report:Sound Basic Education forAll (WestEd et al., 2019). The format for this commentary is unusual. I will suggest that WestEd’s report is missing entire chapters; chapters that would have been included had the issues of race and segregation been a focus of the various Leandro court orders. So, what follows is an effort to suggest answers to the question of what was missing, to suggest how WestEd’s report might have read had it focused on race,and what action plans might have resulted from viewing the State’s public schools through the lens of segregation. I offer these pages with respect. They are not intended as a critique of the WestEd research,which was thoughtfully designed, nor its report which was extensively researched,and clearly presented. I believe the many contributors to that report were motivated by (1) a sincere and well-informed desire to improve North Carolina’s schools, and (2) the Court’s rulings which focused on inequitable distribution of state resources in support of public schools. Racial segregation was not the subject of the original lawsuit nor did it figure prominently in any of the Court’s decisions. The charge given to WestEd by the Court did not explicitly name race as one of the focal topics of the inquiry, so it is not surprising that consideration of race is minimal. THE MISSING PAGES: PRESENTED IN FOUR PARTS Part One will lay a foundation for consideration of race as a critical factor in understanding and repairing North Carolina’s current situation with respect to sound basic education,the uneven distribution of access to that education, and the consequences of racially segregated schools. The foundation can be viewed through the lenses of history and public policy. I am grateful to Ann McColl for the careful documentation she has assembled in this regard, and upon which I have drawn. Part Two will shift the focus from the past to the present. In recent years we have been able to read a number of objective accounts based on the extensive demography and statistical analyses of severalteams of North Carolina scholars including Charles Clotfelter, Helen Ladd, and the team of Nicholas Triplett and James Ford. Appreciation is offered to these and other investigators too numerous to mention here.
- 2. 2 Part Three recounts the efforts here and across America that have been made to end segregation. It is a story of optimism followed by inevitable disappointment. The Supreme Court victory in 1954 was an occasion that launched two decades of hopeful efforts demonstrating slow but steady progress, only to be undone when the Federal courts ceased to issue desegregation orders and the executive branch was no longer empowered by Congress, the Courts and the President to aggressively enforce Brown and its progeny. Nevertheless, some progress was made,and lessons were learned, so a revitalized attempt to end segregation will not have to start with a blank slate. Part Three will summarize the factors that contributed to success and will set the stage for attempts in the future to accomplish what has so far been so difficult to sustain. Part Four will propose a way forward guided by foundational principles reasonably calculated to assure establishment of a statewide system of public schools as that system might have looked had Black educators, policy makers, and parents been included and engaged from the outset. This part will also make the case for a higher standard than the one the Leandro court found in the Constitution. Rather than sound basic education,a target that assures the attainment of nothing beyond mediocrity, I will argue for the highest possible standard of excellence in public education, a standard that every caring parent would choose for their own child, and one that civic-minded parents would choose for everybody’s children. Part Four concludes with a summary of lessons learned from previous efforts to achieve integrated public schools. The State of North Carolina had a number of chances to design its system of public education with everybody’s children in mind, but at every opportunity the State’s leaders failed to take the bold steps necessary. At least for fifteen years following Brown the majority of the State’s voters only demanded boldness in opposition to integration. The State has paid dearly for these failures as significant segments of each generation of children have grown older but not necessarily wiser. The Leandro case and the WestEd report are steps in the right direction. But even if the Court eventually releases the State from any remedial obligations engendered by Leandro, and even if the WestEd report were to be fully implemented, the children of North Carolina are likely to be once again short-changed by the adults who have the political power, and who should be acting more aggressively on behalf of those who lack it. Before concluding this Preface, mostly written prior to the arrival of the coronavirus and the global pandemic and seismic upheaval it has caused,it is necessary to explain why a paper on racial desegregation is being offered now. A number of commentators have already addressed the inequities in public education exposed by the closure of schools and the transition to remote schooling, so they will not be repeated here. What may not be self-evident, however, is the wisdom of returning Leandro to the forefront of the educational policy conversation and merging it with the State’s plans to rebuild public education in the aftermath of the pandemic. If not for the Covid-19 pandemic, North Carolina’s educators and policy-makers would be devoting much of their attention to Leandro and the consent agreement that requires the State to assure a Leandro- compliant education to every student. The public health and economic disasters occasioned by the virus have added enormous complications to that already foreboding challenge. If and when the State succeeds in meeting the Leandro vision, it will still have to face the reality of racial inequity and segregation, so what better time to take that on, too? If public schools are to emerge from the crisis stronger than before they will have to be stronger for everybody’s children. In the coming times of scarce financial resources, wise investment of state funds must include a direct and forceful assault on the opportunity gap. The subsequent parts of this paper will make the case that only by finally confronting NC’s shameful history, substituting racial equity for racial discrimination, can the State comply with the Leandro rulings, recover from the pandemic, and attain its place as a national leader in education, a place it once it held, and can hold again.
- 3. 3 The Leandro Courts have found in the NC Constitution a right to a sound basic education. The Constitution that set such a low bar is now over a century old, and while not entirely obsolete, it is nevertheless in need of an update. The outlines of that update are to be found in the Court’s definition of sound basic education, which is a legal standard, not an educational vision. Judge Manning in the first Leandro ruling (1997) could not have said it more clearly: the definition we have given of a "sound basic education" is that which we conclude is the minimumconstitutionally permissible. Why not aim higher? Why not establish the right of everybody’s children to the best possible public education that a state can provide? Why allow the State’s legal apparatus, and not its educators to take North Carolina to a position of leadership in providing all its children with an excellent education? In Good to Great,professor of business Jim Collins (2001) made a compelling case for how companies that had decided to achieve greatness were able to attain it by making certain empirically determined decisions. This Preface will give Jim Collins the last word. When asked why anyone should bother to strive for great when good was,well, good enough, Collins replied: I believe that it is no harder to build something great than to build something good…It does not require more suffering than perpetuating mediocrity… There is great solace in the simple clarity of what is vital and what is not… Simple. Clean.Straightforward. Elegant. And a heckuva lot of fun. If it’s no harder, the resultsbetter, and the process so much more fun, why wouldn't you try for greatness? Those who strive to turn good into great find the processno more painful or exhausting than those who settle for just letting things wallow along in mind-numbing mediocrity. If you're doing something that you care so much about and you believe deeply in its purpose, then it's impossible to imagine not trying to make it great. If you're engaged in work that you love and care about for whateverreason, then the question needs no answer. The question is not why, but how. If you have to ask the question 'why should we try to make it great? Isn't successenough?' then you might be engaged in the wrong line of work.
- 4. 4 Missing Pages Part One A Sound Basic Education Is Neither Enough Nor Was It Intended for Everybody’s Children North Carolina’s system of public education was based on racial discrimination and white supremacy. It was right there in the State Constitution for a century, from 1868 until 1971. There were actually two centuries of opportunities along the way for it to be otherwise, as the original State Constitution of 1776 was silent on the matter of race and education, simply requiring the State to provide for publicly funded schools. Following the Civil War, conditions were optimal for the establishment of a unified system of public education. The attendees at the State Constitutional Convention of 1868 were both Black and white. The document they produced called not for two but one statewide system of education. Nevertheless,the system the State created required separate schools for Black and white children. Another century passed, and finally, the State dropped the separate but equal provision in 1971, seventeen years after The U.S. Supreme Court ruled it a violation of the U.S. Constitution. Throughout its history, State education policies and funding schemes perpetuated separate and unequal education for Black and white children. Even after the Civil War and abolition of slavery, legal suppression of Black voting sustained those policies through the exclusion of Black representatives at all levels of government. Ann McColl has written extensively about these “intentional disparities” attributing one especially telling and repulsive quotation to State Superintendent James Joyner in his message to local superintendents: The negro schools can be run for much less expense and should be. In most places it does not take more than one fourth as much to run the negro schoolsas it doesto run the white schoolsforabout the same numberof children. The salariespaid teachers are very properly much smaller,the houses are cheaper,the numberof teachers smaller …. If quietly managed, the negroes will give no trouble about it. Funding for the separate systems reflected Joyner’s directives: In 1915 the Negro school population was 32.6 percent of the total and Negro schools received 13.0 percent of the school funds. (Ayscue & Woodward,2014, p. 2). As long as the State was permitted to maintain separate systems,it was possible to maintain disparities. But a challenge came in 1954 when the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the end of separate but equal. North Carolina’s response was to create the appearance of compliance (ironically, given the State’s motto - seeming to be - in compliance). Its Pupil Assignment Act (1955) and Constitutional Amendment (also known as the PearsallPlan, 1956) were two prongs of a thinly disguised strategy to maintain separate schools through (1) a maze of local- and state-level applications required of Black pupils requesting to transfer to predominantly white schools, and (2) tuition assistance made available to white parents who could have elected private schools for their children as a way to escape integration. The ultimate escape option was the authority granted to local districts to close any school that was at risk of undesirable levels of racial integration (Batchelor, 2015). The effect of these two State policies, as well as the multiple incidents of violence (e.g., assaults on Black students by peers as well as adults; the burning of crosses, including one on the lawn of Greensboro’s Superintendent) was the nearly undetectable pace of desegregation following the 1954 Brown decision: In general,Greensboro was maintaining a parallel pace with North Carolina as whole whose “programof public school integration continue[d] to proceed at something less than a snail’s pace.” (Integration May Spread in State’s Schools Soon, News and Observer,August 16, 1959)
- 5. 5 That snail continued to serve as desegregation’s mascot for about two decades. Progress may have been slow, but it was gradually evident that a series of hard-fought legal battles were producing court orders having the effect of redistributing Black and white students among schools that had previously been fully segregated. That progress was first halted then reversed in the 1980s as the nation’s political winds shifted (a shift that will be further explored in Part Two). As the focus on desegregation began to subside, the State’s educational policy battlegrounds moved to struggles over accountability for results. Disappointing data on students’ achievement revealed an overall mediocrity in school quality, and disturbing gaps between Black and white students began to appear. Political and popular movements coalesced around differing views of educational standards and testing. Disparities in funding across the state’s school districts were exposed. Political fights over school funding simmered for years, then boiled over in 1994 when five school districts filed suit in State Court alleging that their local schools were under-resourced compared to others, in violation of the State’s Constitution. The case we now know as Leandro (named for one parent and student among the plaintiffs) soon migrated from a dispute over funding to the larger and substantive question: what is the State’s Constitutional obligation with respect to education? In its 1997 Leandro decision, the NC Supreme Court sought to explicate the Constitution’s intent with respect to the purpose of public education, while struggling with the sparse Constitutional language. The principal question presented by this argument is whether the people's constitutional right to education has any qualitative content, that is, whetherthe state is required to provide children with an education that meets some minimumstandard of quality (p. 5). The search for a minimum standard was successful in identifying sound basic education asa right guaranteed to the State’s children. The Court could have opted for an ambitious reading of the Constitution and might have done so had the majority heeded the advice of Justice Orr in his dissent. In his discussion of equal educational opportunity, Justice Orr quoted from the 1868 Constitutional Convention: Even our constitutional framers addressed this issue. They commented that the Constitution was designed to "level upwards, to every child, as far as the State can, an opportunity to develop to the fullest extent, all his intellectual gifts. So noble an effort, needs no vindication." Despite missing the opportunity to seize the noble effort envisioned in 1868, nevertheless, citing its own precedent from a case decided in 1917, the 1997 Leandro Court described the standard in lofty terms, setting the bar high: It is manifest that these constitutional provisionswere intended to establish a systemof public education adequate to the needs of a great and progressive people, affording school facilities of recognized and ever-increasing merit to all the children of the State,and to the full extent that our means could afford and intelligent direction accomplish. (p. 6) Note the reference to a great and progressive people. Marvelat the expectation of ever-increasing merit. And wonder: Whatever happened to requiring school facilities to the full extent that ourmeans could afford and intelligent direction accomplish? This is not language of a de minimus public education. So, it is curious that the Court reversed itself less than one page later. The majority opinion defined sound basic education in language that is far from an opportunity to develop to the fullest extent,all his intellectual gifts:
- 6. 6 We conclude that Article I, Section 15 and Article IX, Section 2 of the North Carolina Constitution combine to guarantee every child of this state an opportunity to receive a sound basic education in ourpublic schools. For purposesof our Constitution,a "sound basic education" is one that will provide the student with at least: (1) sufficient ability to read, write, and speak the English language and a sufficient knowledge of fundamental mathematics and physical science to enable the student to function in a complex and rapidly changing society; (2) sufficient fundamental knowledge of geography, history, and basic economic and political systems to enable the student to make informed choices with regard to issues that affect the student personally oraffect the student's community, state, and nation; (3) sufficient academic and vocational skills to enable the student to successfully engage in post-secondary education or vocational training; and (4) sufficient academic and vocational skills to enable the student to compete on an equal basiswith others in further formal education orgainful employment in contemporary society. (p. 6- 7) Note the repetition of the term sufficient. And the pedestrian verbs chosen to signal what graduates of the State’s system would be enabled to do: function,make informed choices, engage in [further] education and training, and compete on an equal basis. Fine as far as they go, but are these actions the most we can anticipate for a great and progressive people? Are these the accomplishments we can expect from investing to the full extent that our means could afford and intelligent direction accomplish? Or are these the signs of a state educational system that aims only for sound and basic, in other words de minimus, as the lowest constitutionally permissible standard? The answer came just a few months ago. Having received and reviewed WestEd’s report, and eager to bring the long-running Leandro litigation to a close, the Court issued on January 21, 2020 a consent decree intended to do just that. Having stipulated to failure to meet its Constitutional obligations, the State agreed to implement the Court’s order by committing to seven specific outcomes: 1. A systemof teacher development and recruitment that ensures each classroomis staffed with a high-quality teacherwho is supported with early and ongoing professional learning and provided competitive pay. 2. A systemof principal development and recruitment that ensures each school is led by a high- quality principal who is supported with early and ongoing professional learning and provided competitive pay. 3. A finance systemthat provides adequate, equitable, and predictable funding to school districts and, importantly,adequate resources to address the needs of all North Carolina schools and students, especially at-risk-students as defined by the Leandro decisions. 4. An assessment and accountability systemthat reliably assess multiple measures of student performance against the Leandro standard and provides accountability consistent with the Leandro standard. 5. An assistance and turnaround function that provides necessary support to low-performing schools and districts. 6. A systemof early education that provides access to high-quality pre-kindergarten and other early childhood learning opportunities to ensure that all students at-risk of educational failure, regardless of where they live in the State, enter kindergarten on track for school success. 7. An alignment of high school to postsecondary and careerexpectations, as well as the provision of early postsecondary and workforce learning opportunities, to ensure student readinessto all students in the state.
- 7. 7 As this paper is being written, that is the legal situation in which the State of North Carolina finds itself. The Court has ordered North Carolina to provide its children with public schools that are (a) staffed by high-quality teachersand principals, (b) supported and equipped with resources (c) adequate for students to performance at the Leandro standard,(d) assisted when failing, (e) populated by kindergarteners ready to learn, and (f) aligned properly with post-secondary and career outcomes for students. The State of North Carolina should be able to accomplish this to-do list with one hand tied behind its back. The schools the Court has ordered up are indeed basic in that anything less would have to be construed as unrecognizable as a system of public education. Entirely missing from this menu is anything beyond boiled meat and potatoes; nothing even remotely inspiring; nothing close to approaching the aspirations of a great and progressive people; and nothing that acknowledges much less attempts to remedy the lasting effects of over 200 years of state-sponsored racial discrimination which is the subject of Part Two.
- 8. 8 Missing Pages Part Two Desegregation, Then Resegregation What began in the State Constitution of 1776 as a single system of public education that was intentionally split into two divisions, one for white, one for Black, remained for two centuries a single system but divided de facto (i.e., by the facts on the ground). The split was affirmed and mandated in the1868 Constitution. But as a result of Brown v. Board of Education (1954), along with the Court orders that followed Brown,and ultimately a 1971 Constitutional Amendment, North Carolina’s schools enjoyed a brief period of desegregation. In recent decades,the Federal government’s retreat from enforcing the Brown and related rulings has resulted in the State inexorably slipping backwards. Racialresegregation of North Carolina’s public school students is occurring. Part Two will present evidence of that resegregation, along with a review of analytical studies of the correlates and lasting effects of segregation on the outcomes for North Carolina’s students. DESEGREGATION The 1960s and 1970s were a period of desegregation both nationally and especially in the southern states most directly affected by the 1954 Brown decision. In 1964 [ten years post-Brown], 99 percent of black studentsin the South attended all- black schools But that situation rapidly gave way to desegregation: by 1971, only about 20 percent attended such schools, and schools in the South were more integrated than elsewhere in the country (Reardon,et al., 2011). North Carolina actually led the way. A large proportion of the State’s 1971 status may be attributed to the data from one district, Charlotte-Mecklenburg, which responded not only to the Brown and related rulings (i.e., Swann v. CMS),but also to the wishes of its citizens who voted to approve desegregation by means of district consolidation, joining the urban to the suburban: By 1980, the [Charlotte-Mecklenburg] school district had reached an unprecedented level of integration.In 1984, the Charlotte Observer editorial board stated, “Charlotte- Mecklenburg’s proudest achievement of the past 20 years is not the city’s impressive new skyline orits strong, growing economy. Its proudest achievement is its fully integrated schools.” (Smith, 2016). The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (CMS) provided a case study of the segregation-desegregation- resegregation cycle. (Wake County and Winston-Salem/Forsyth County could just as easily have served to illustrate the pattern.) Beginning in the 1970s and continuing for nearly two decades,CMS pupils rode busses for considerable distances and in great numbers which allowed the district to achieve targeted racial composition in its schools and to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Swann v. Charlotte- Mecklenburg Board of Education (1971). The Court’s unanimous decision in Swann held that (a) a race-neutraldesegregation plan was not sufficient as it may fail to achieve the desired remedy; (b) transporting students by bus to achieve desegregation was not only permissible but required; and (c) in a stunning indictment of governments: segregated education in the post-Brown era was not a mere accident of citizen’s residential preferences,
- 9. 9 but arose as a direct result of racially discriminatory housing and educational actions at all levels of government. RESEGREGATION The era of judicial and political support for desegregation did not last long. The decade of the 1990s opened with Supreme Court decisions dealing blows to the hard-earned gains in achieving compliance with Brown. In Dowell (1991) Chief Justice Rehnquist essentially brought down Brown’s curtain: federal supervision of local school systems [has always] been intended as a temporary measure to remedy past discrimination. Like the cases of the Dowell type, Belk v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education (2001) arrived at the courts’ typical finding of unitary status,meaning that if de jure segregation had not actually been eliminated, at least the district had tried. In other words, after two centuries of Constitutionally-based and legislatively-affirmed discrimination, a good faith effort for a few years was sufficient to relieve a district from accountability for its results. The resulting segregation was predictable: Between 1993 and 2001, the number of African Americansin North Carolina who attended schools with enrollments that were more that 80% black doubled (Raleigh News and Observer, February 18,2001). But the courts did not stop there. The highly effective decision in Swann was eclipsed by the Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit when it ruled in Capacchione v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools (2001) that race-conscious pupil assignment was not permissible: CMS is enjoined fromassigning children to schools orallocating educational opportunitiesand benefits through race-based lotteries, preferences, set-asides, or othermeans that deny students an equal footing based on race (p. 82). The federal courts were not operating in a vacuum; the politics of the nation were changing as well. In a campaign stop in Charlotte, North Carolina on the eve of the 1984 election, [President] Reagan denounced busing as a ‘failed” experiment’ (Charlotte Observer,October 9, 1984).In 1985, federal courts approved the return to segregated schoolsin Norfolk, Virginia, a decision [Riddick v. School Board] that Reagan officials called a model for otherdistricts (Orfield & Eaton 1996, p. 17, cited in Baker et al., 2014)). In the years after the Norfolk decision, schools in the South began to resegregate (Baker, et al., 2014). In response, Charlotte-Mecklenburg established an array of magnet schools designed to replace mandatory pupil assignment with enticement of the children of suburban white parents to attend urban schools. Clotfelter et al. (2008) describe what happened next: In the fall of 2002 the district dramatically revamped its student assignment policy by adopting a school choice plan guaranteeing that all children—including the children of suburban parents living in predominantly white neighborhoods—could attend their neighborhood schools. Although the plan allowed studentsfromCharlotte’s predominantly black downtown neighborhoods to request suburban schools, capacity limits rendered many of these requests infeasible (p.6).
- 10. 10 And that resegregation, the inevitable outcome, has been documented by several investigators. Clotfelter et al. (2008) reported: “… the district’s choice plan introduced in 2002 appearsto have markedly increased segregation. No other large district or district group experienced a change as dramatic as Charlotte’s” (p. 12). Ayscue & Woodward (2014) concur and elaborate on the findings: The share of majority minority schools—those in which 50-100% of the student enrollment is comprised of minority students—has more than doubled since 1989. In intensely segregated schools—those that are 90-100% minority—there was an even larger and substantial increase from0.1% in 1989 to 20.2% in 2010. In fact, since 1999, close to the time when CMS’s desegregation plan ended, there has been an increase of 405% in the metro’sshare of intensely segregated schools (p. 43). Clotfelter et al. (2018) recently updated the earlier results from 2008 and reported the racial composition of districts and schools through the 2016 school year. The degree of segregation in the primarily rural districts was relatively constant across the years analyzed. But urban districts presented another story: … the biggest increase occurred in Mecklenburg County, home of the Charlotte- Mecklenburg school district.… In proportional terms the increase in Wake County (home to Raleigh) waseven larger…. Other substantial levels of segregation characterized in Guilford (principal city, Greensboro) and Forsyth (Winston-Salem) (p. 9). As a result of school boundary placement and white flight to suburban districts, racial segregation between districts now approaches that within districts which arises from intra-district flight to private and charter schools. Various explanations for such flight have been advanced. But regardless of the cause, whether it be racial prejudice or the search for schools of higher quality, the net effect on racial composition is the same. Regardless of whether its roots are traced to the Constitution, judicial rulings, state laws, or popular preference,North Carolina has launched its third century with public schools divided along racial lines. In the next section we will review the cumulative and devastating effects. CORRELATES AND CONSEQUENCES OF SEGREGATION What might we hope to gain by ending the racial segregation of North Carolina’s public schools? What would be lost by allowing the State’s discriminatory past to extend into the future?1 The literature on correlates and consequences of segregation can be organized into three main themes: (1) instructional resources,(2) social environment,and (3) student development. Educationalresearchers consistently find support for the conclusion that ending racial segregation once and for all would be beneficial in each and every respect. The evidence in support of such benefits within the three themes will be summarized. 1 Clear and convincing evidence, the kind that results from well-designed and carefully replicated experiments, is not available to help us draw conclusions with a high degree of confidence. But what we do have is convergent evidence from a substantial number of studies, conducted on a variety of student populations, in many states as well as in North Carolina, and using a host of measurement instruments and analytic strategies. An exhaustive and methodologically critical review of the research will have to wait for another time; for the present time we can consider a body of evidence selected to be representativeand informative. In order to signal the uncertainty of findings, the concepts of correlation and sequelae will be employed in an effort to avoid the assertion of causal relationships except when such assertions find support in thedata. As is generally the case in social science, the best we can achieve in most cases is reliable measurement, consistent findings, made comprehensible and replicable by careful description, and explainable by logical reasoning.
- 11. 11 Instructional resources. Teachersand curriculum are the essential elements of public schools. In schools segregated by race,the most relevant attributes of the teaching faculty are disadvantageous in comparison to desegregated schools. Triplett and Ford (2019) have referred to this complex of disadvantage as an opportunity gap to distinguish it from the term achievement gap, now widely viewed as incorrectly placing responsibility on the students themselves. Irrespective of their own racial identification, teachers in predominantly Black schools are less likely to hold a state license, more likely to be new to the profession or discipline they teach, are generally less experienced, are less likely to be evaluated as highly effective and more likely to be assessed as needing improvement than teachers in predominantly white schools. The academic curriculum in schools attended mostly by Black students is depleted relative to schools primarily attended by white students. There are fewer courses at the advanced levels (Advanced Placement,honors, International Baccalaureate,gifted & talented.) and fewer seats available in such courses as do exist. In segregated schools, Black students are likely to receive more instruction in the basic skills and less in the more complex processes of thinking and learning. Social environment. A schoolis a micro-community embedded in a larger neighborhood, town or rural area. Each of these social-residential units takes on identifiable social attributes that affect the experience of students in a school. Segregated schools serving predominantly Black students have been shown to have social environments that distinguish them from predominantly white schools. Within the Black schools, disciplinary consequences for students are more likely to be of an exclusionary nature, including suspension and expulsion. Black students in such schools are less likely to be in social networks with students of diverse socio-economic classifications, especially toward the more affluent end of the continuum. This limits the so-called social capital of Black students, which matters when they are either learning about or are actually seeking enriching experiences such as internships, employment, and international study. And because the predominantly Black schools tend to be situated in under-resourced communities, financial support, both official (from government sources) and unofficial (from private citizens and institutions), is limited relative to schools in whiter communities. Student development. So,just how do the children turn out? Is it possible to describe the effects on students of all that public schools offer? And of critical and particular importance to this paper, has North Carolina’s repeated and continuing failure to integrate its system of public schools left some schools and students behind as a consequence of racial segregation? For answers we turn now to the literature on students and their development as measured along academic,social and vocational dimensions. And the conclusions are disturbing: In all subjects, at all grade levels, independent of gender and socio- economic status,students in racially segregated schools where the predominant racial designation is Black achieve at lower levels than students in predominantly white schools. It is also the case that during the period of most rapid desegregation, the 1970s and 1980s, Black achievement and high school graduation rates increased while white achievement held essentially steady. These generalfindings of differences between averages hold true for the State’s summative assessments (End-of-Grade and End- of-Year tests),as well as nationally standardized academic assessments (SAT and NAEP). Each factor - SES, gender, and race - contributes unique variance to education outcomes. The salience of this fact arises from and counters the often-stated misperception that achievement deficits among students of color are all about poverty. Not so; racial segregation matters. Black students in segregated schools are more likely to be classified as cognitively disabled and tracked into the lowest achievement levels, while they are less likely to be classified as academically gifted and talented. These findings are not limited to students’ achievement while in school. The educational attainments of Black students, both positive and negative, continue into their adult years and are manifest in career attainment as well as difficulties with the criminal justice system. On the positive side,
- 12. 12 achievement gains made by Black students attending desegregated schools not only benefit these students themselves, but also their children and grandchildren. Looking beyond scores on achievement tests2 ,the underlying learning processes of students also benefit from desegregation: Integrated classrooms encourage critical thinking, problemsolving,and creativity. Diverse classrooms, in which students learn cooperatively alongside those whose perspectivesand backgrounds are different fromtheir own, are beneficial to all students,including middle-class white students,because they promote creativity, motivation, deeperlearning,critical thinking, and problem-solving skills (Kahlenberg,et al., 2019). Along the social dimension of development, desegregation has been shown to have positive effects on the racial attitudesand sociability of Black and white students, as well as on their understanding of ethnicity and their practice of inter-ethnic socialization. None of the academic consequences of segregation should be surprising given what has previously been summarized about the instructional resources and social environment in the segregated and predominantly Black schools. I will end Part Two with the most damning conclusion, attributable to Triplett & Ford (2019): Were all students, regardless of racial background,to enterthe North Carolina public school systemwith similar levels of readiness, ability, and educational resources, our results suggest that the current systemwould function to constrain the educational success of non-Asian student groups of colorin such a way that upon exiting the system, these same groups would be less prepared for college,career, and adult life (p. 92). 2 The measurement of academic achievement is a highly contested endeavor.The prevailing tests and their interpretation as demonstrations of racial achievement gaps have been challenged as inherently racist, in part due to what is being measured. Kendi (2016) asks What if different environments actually cause different kinds of achievement rather than different levels of achievement? What if the intellect of a poor, low testing Black child in a poor Black school is different—and not inferior—to the intellect of a rich, high-testing White child in a rich White school? What if the way we measure intelligence shows not only our racism but our elitism? Gathering knowledge of abstract items, from words to equations,that have no relation to our everyday lives has long been the amusement of the leisured elite.Relegating the non-elite to the basement of intellect because they do not know as many abstractionshasbeen the conceit of the elite. What if we measured literacy by how knowledgeable individuals are about their own environment: how much individualsknew all those complex equations and verbal and nonverbal vocabularies of their everyday life? What if we measured intellect by an individual’s desire to know? What if we measured intellect by how open an individual’smind is to self-critique and new ideas?
- 13. 13 Missing Pages Part Three Ending Segregation: It’s Not Like We Haven’t Tried In order to make substantial and sustainable progress on desegregation it is essential to know what has been attempted and with what effect. Resistance,sometimes correctly described as massive,to the Supreme Court’s order to end desegregation, got most of the attention. But it’s important to note that enormous effort also went into attempts to comply; some of these efforts were successful,at least for a time. It is these efforts that should be analyzed and built upon because there are some valuable lessons to be learned. In Part Three of the Missing Pages I will extract these lessons, offering them as starting points for North Carolina’s renewal of public education; trying to catch the Leandro wave and the momentum it may generate. A detailed review of all the reports on desegregation will not be attempted as the literature is extensive. (The google search of “Charlotte and desegregation” alone generates over 300,000 hits.) Rather,Part Three is a summary of the elements leading to success when it occurred. If the tone of Part Three seems excessively positive, it is intentional, as the purpose is to illuminate what worked. Desegregation is a complex process, comprising a tangle of law, politics, economics, sociology, psychology, education, and social institutions, each of which exerts an effect on who goes to school where and with whom. An initial overview suggests that desegregation efforts that attempted to account for severalof the essential elements were more likely to have been successfulthan those that placed all their hopes in one basket, such as a federalcourt order, or a magnet school program. Contributing to the complexity of desegregation is that, like most systems involving human behavior, it’s dynamic. People and institutions, as well as demographics, politics, and law are interactive and subject to change: a court order is reversed; white people move to the suburbs; tax revenues shrink, as does funding for schools. A critical reality is the inertial effect of severalcenturies of the racial discrimination and white supremacy that got us into this mess from the beginning and linger, exerting a weakened but persistent pressure in the direction of racial segregation; maybe not the same kind of overt pre-Brown and immediately post-Brown segregation, but thinly disguised versions, such as legislatively approved secession of mostly white communities from more diverse jurisdictions (North Carolina’s Session Law 2018-3), in the name of “local control.” But despite the complexity, and the long historical drag on progress, Black activists and their white allies have provided us with demonstrations of the possible. Discussion of how they did it will be organized around three themes representing the conditions and processes that,singly or in combination, advanced the desegregation agenda. These themes are (1) community context which expresses the idea that public education takes place in and is a manifestation of the community’s values; (2) school administration and human resources,which are the mechanisms by which the community expresses and implements its values; and (3) educational programs,which are how and where teaching and learning take place. The themes and what each comprises are discussed below. When possible, the successes that occurred in North Carolina will be featured, but because some of the lessons of integration are to be found in other states,these will also be described. COMMUNITY CONTEXT As was discussed earlier, the North Carolina Constitution, as interpreted by the courts, provides the ultimate legal context in which public education occurs. But laws and court orders also exist in social and community contexts that include the people and the institutions they created,such as government and business, to organize their common endeavors. All of these levels in the ecology of humans exert
- 14. 14 influence over the educational experience of children, and their relative quality has contributed to instances of successfuldesegregation. Court orders. A southern superintendent tells the story of his second or third day on the job when his assistant announced that there was a man waiting to see him. It was 1968, 14 years had passed since the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown,but not much had changed in this particular town. The district was in compliance with the Supreme Court, just not the current version; it maintained “separate but equal” schools as authorized by the Court in Plessy v. Ferguson back in 1896. The man in the outer office was a marshal from the federal district court with a message for the new superintendent from the federaldistrict judge: “Integrate the schools now.” The superintendent got the message. Two years later, the job was completed. That story, true or stretched,illustrates a common fact of southern history: court-ordered desegregation tended to work, at least in terms of fundamental reorganization of school districts’ pupil assignment schemes. The students and teachers from previously all-Black schools were distributed among the formerly white schools. The courts were satisfied that even if the results were not entirely agreeable,at least the southern schools were replacing compliance with Plessy with adherence to Brown. Black community support. Many of the Black schools had earned high status in the community and were seen as strong and proud symbols of the community’s identity. Therefore,closing these schools engendered resentment which could have become a speed bump if not a brick wall on the road to racial integration. Support of the Black community had to be gained and maintained for the reorganization of the previously segregated districts to work. That support when it was obtained came as result of Black parents and community leaders achieving at least a minimum level of trust in the white leaders of the community; trust that the Black children would receive an excellent education and that they and their teachers would be treated with respect – not an easy sell given the two centuries of legalized discrimination that preceded Brown and continued during the legal limbo of its aftermath. White parents. Reassigning the Black students to the previously white schools was often not enough to achieve the goals of desegregation; white parents also had to accept that their children could either be assigned to attend previously Black schools at some distance from their home and neighborhood, or that the family could voluntarily choose a distant school because it offered an exceptionally attractive program, the so-called magnet. There are also cases in the literature that demonstrate white parents choosing a distant school and/or supporting desegregation based on moral principles, economic benefits to the community, or other forms of civic-mindedness. Regardless of how and to what extent they were motivated, white parents who got on board and remained there clearly contributed to desegregation efforts that were successfuland sustained even if for a limited time. Business. Generally, the leaders of a business community tend to avoid taking a stand on a controversial social issue. But when they do, the effect is evident. The desegregation efforts of the city of Hartford got off the ground because of a lawsuit against the State of Connecticut (Sheff v. O’Neill, 1996) brought by families who were represented by attorneys from the Connecticut Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP. The efforts were sustained for as long as they were because of widespread support among the city’s powerful constituencies, including business, both for the initial lawsuit as well as for the continuation of the magnet program at the core of the Hartford plan. The Charlotte-Mecklenburg story is similar to the extent that enthusiasm for desegregation among business leaders was a factor in that district’s success. Public funding & state-level support. Structuralchanges to a school system require substantial investments of public dollars that are not generally to be found in local budgets. Therefore,an infusion of the state’s funds is required, and typically dwarfs both local and federalexpenditures on desegregation
- 15. 15 efforts. However,states that choose to make such investments can point to returns on those investments, providing another argument in support of desegregation in addition to the legal and moral cases that are often made. State-level political processes also matter, perhaps as much as funding. Although most of the action on desegregation has taken place at the level of local school districts, the Louisville, Kentucky example demonstrates how a district that wanted to continue the use of bus transportation to achieve desegregation was protected by the action of the State’s legislative majority from those who wanted to put an end to bus transportation. SCHOOL ADMINISTRATION & HUMAN RESOURCES State constitutions and legislation authorize school boards and administrative structures that enable education to take place. For most of its history, North Carolina law forbade the teaching of Black and white children together, and local boards and administrations here and elsewhere in the American south were obligated to comply. Brown and the subsequent judicial rulings changed the legal landscape but did not alter the administrative structures to implement the courts’ decisions. All that was left up to the local school districts, and like any policy that is non-prescriptive as to details of implementation, the national policy of desegregation gave rise to a wide variety of strategies, some of which were successful,at least for a time. Pupil assignment. During the first two decades post-Brown,the district map was the most important tool in the administrative process of desegregation. Census data on the residential distribution of children by their race were depicted in maps linking place of residence to a particular school building. Placement of Black and white children in buildings together was just that simple and had the desired effect in literally desegregating the schools, at least as long as the white residents stayed put. Moveable and permeable boundaries. To achieve the desired racial composition of every school in a district as well as to sustain it over the subsequent years,required additional actions at the local district level, many of which involved modifications to the original maps, or the enactment of exceptions to the assignment policies. These may have been accomplished by a form of gerrymandering or making the boundaries permeable, with case-by-case consideration of parental requests for re-assignment of their children. Bus transportation. Well into the 20th century, racial segregation of residential neighborhoods has been the result of official government policies. Because the patterns of racial distribution of residence made the neighborhood school option largely unworkable, complicated and expensive systems of bus transportation became standard features of school districts’ administrative organization. Bus became a verb as well as a symbol of the new reality in education. Human resources. The teaching and support staffs before Brown were as racially segregated as were the student bodies. Post-Brown, to the list of topics for staff development were added workshops on diversity, teaching from a multicultural perspective, and revisions to curriculum. Preparing, recruiting, hiring, evaluating, retaining, and promoting racially diverse faculty, administrators, and staff became a priority, with human resources (HR) personnel and guidelines developed for non-discriminatory procedures in those districts that embraced the diversification of faculties and administrations. Public relations. The kinds of legal, cultural, and educational changes that desegregation required did not enjoy popular support. So, persuasion of a reluctant public was necessary,and proved to be an invaluable asset in the successfullaunching and sustaining of some desegregation efforts.
- 16. 16 EDUCATIONAL PROGRAM Once the community has arrived at a set of educational values, and an administrative structure has been established and staffed to implement those values, it’s up to the practitioners to design and execute educational programs in the schools. It is the countless series of programming decisions that in many cases were responsible for a large part of desegregation’s successes,and which deserve to be studied and to the extent appropriate, incorporated into future efforts to end racial segregation. High quality. There is simply no substitute for an educational program that is carefully designed to promote a high degree of growth and development of all learners in every grade and subject. If there is one pre-eminent lesson to be learned from successfuldesegregation efforts it is that excellence in teaching and learning matter above all else. Although a full description of excellence is beyond the scope of this paper, a few of the key ingredients will be offered here. Curriculumanalysis. The instructional materials, texts and course-offerings that evolved during the decades of racial segregation were at best incomplete, at worst false or misleading. The learning environments of Black and white students were enriched when the curriculum was modified to include realistic perspectives on Black history, literature, geography, social and laboratory sciences,the fine and performing arts. Cooperative learning. Originally conceived as a way to bring students together across racial lines, small- group learning with evidence-based techniques for reinforcing cooperation and collaboration also proved to be effective in the development of the so-called “soft skills” including teamwork and communication. A related and critical component of grouping for instruction was the concept of flexibility in group composition to avoid the rigid ability-grouping (tracking) that actually contributes to resegregation of students by race within schools. Schoolwide behavioral support. Racialdisparities in exclusionary discipline (i.e., suspension and expulsion) are less likely to occur when schools adopt and vigorously apply behavioral development plans that substitute positive and restorative consequences for punishments. Student support services. Black and white students benefit from having great teachers who are supported by dedicated and skilled professionals to assist children in their development both inside and outside the classroom. The specializations represented in the successfully desegregated schools include counseling, health, social work, disability and therapeutic supports. Integrated preschool. By the time children arrive at kindergarten, racial issues have already begun to surface in the domains of social and academic development. Desegregated preschools have shown the potential to support cognitive development as well as young children’s healthy attitudes regarding race. Academic success broadly defined. The benefits of racially integrated schools go well beyond the standardized measurements of academic achievement. States and districts that do not rely solely on high- stakes summative assessment of children’s achievement have the opportunity to see important results of their desegregation efforts in many critical domains of development. Here are some examples from Semuels (2019): … children who grow up in multiracial surroundings tend to be less anxiousabout racial differences, more empathetic and caring about others, and more likely to get involved in social change. They also express more interest in living in more ethnically diverse environments when they become adults.
- 17. 17 Next, I will propose how to build on the results of the previously successfuldesegregation efforts briefly presented above. Part Four will offer ideas for how North Carolina might proceed in establishing a system of excellent public schools for everybody’s children.
- 18. 18 Missing Pages Part Four Reimagining Public Schools The Leandro Court’s decisions have challenged the State to rethink its approach to public education. This offers North Carolina a rare opportunity to undo the damage caused by the State’s having founded its system of public schools on racial discrimination and white supremacy. Part Four of The Missing Pages will be an attempt to chart a course in the direction of educational excellence for everybody’s children, a destination at which the State is long overdue. The people versus integration. The people of North Carolina consistently supported leaders who created and repeatedly affirmed a broken system of public education; leaders who based it on the flawed and failed principle of racial segregation. The people of North Carolina elected and re-elected governors and legislators who promoted the self-serving proposition of white supremacy and enacted state laws intended to sustain the political power that comes from suppression of an entire class of citizens while simultaneously denying equal education to the children of that same class. Two centuries of the people’s endorsement of this nonsense have left the State’s Black children on the wrong side of a gap in opportunity for achievement. It will be up to the people to repair the damage. Is this the best we can do? North Carolina is about to make a fundamental error by accepting the Leandro Court’s requirement for statewide access to sound basic education asthe State’s official aspiration for its children. While it may be constitutionally defensible, it fails to inspire, and risks missing yet another opportunity to wisely invest precious resources. In Judge Manning’s 1997 opinion (and affirmed in every Leandro decision since): the definition we have given of a "sound basic education" is that which we conclude is the minimum constitutionally permissible. THE WAY FORWARD What is necessary is what the lawyers call a de novo review,that is, starting over from the very beginning, as if given a fresh start. While this approach may appear to be impractical and burdensome given that so much of the State’s educational apparatus is already in place, I want to argue that it is really the only way forward because it gives us an opportunity to imagine what public education might have looked like had it been conceived by and for all the State’s residents, not just the white ones. The result – an excellent system of public education for everybody’s children – should be the essential goal, but the process by which the details of that goal are determined is also essential. A popular consensus will be required, which can only be achieved if representatives of every stake-holding group are in the room, physically, virtually, or both. Such a consensus-seeking process cannot be rushed, nor can it hope to succeed if it begins with a set of pre-determined outcomes. It should be built to last,with an eye to the future. Before the State sets off on the journey of discovering a great new excellent and all-inclusive educational system, the people will need to accept a small number of principles so foundational and fundamental as to be non-negotiable once they are established. I offer these with fear and arrogance (the reference is to the baseball film, Bull Durham); fear that these principles are not the right ones and may fail not only to achieve the desired results, but worse, engender a backlash against the entire effort; arrogance because I recognize these principles challenge the wisdom of the Leandro Court as wellas that of the parties to the lawsuit, all of whom have agreed to the Court’s consent decree. With these caveats,I offer the following:
- 19. 19 FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES Separate educational facilitiesare inherently unequal. The words of Chief Justice Earl Warren are a good starting place. Whether by law (de jure) or by circumstance (de facto),racially segregated schools and school systems will not be acceptable. Children are owed the very best education the State can provide. They are not here voluntarily; the grown-ups are responsible for their being here and for their nurturance as people and citizens, and it to these children that the State entrusts its future. We cannot really know what they would choose for themselves, but if we have to guess, the best chance of getting it right is to assume that the children would prefer the best as opposed to the merely adequate. If the system’s aim is only for the minimum acceptable then in times of scarce resources and in all times of poverty, the minimum necessary will become the maximum available (Campaign for Fiscal Equity v. State of New York, 2003). Evident in the redesign of public education must be respect forthe educational traditions,leadership, values, and educational institutions of communities of color. Because Black people were excluded from the original and continuing design of public education, and because the effects of centuries of racist policies and practices have and continue to disadvantage Black children, the State must strive to eliminate the accumulated disadvantage. Going forward,the educational traditions of pre-colonial African societies and of post-slavery African America, must be studied and honored. “If you’re not at the table then you’re on the menu.” The composition of the group charged with redesigning the State’s system of public education must engage the widest possible and most representative sampling of stakeholders in the communities to be affected,centering the voices of parents, teachers,and students, while also giving due respect to experts as well as public officials provided that they can leave partisanship and personal ambition at the door. Evaluation is necessary, complex,and impossible to accomplish with a single test. The science of educational measurement has had a century to evolve, but its accumulated knowledge has been largely ignored. If the results of any test or method of measurement cannot be demonstrated to produce better decisions by adults on behalf of children, then the test or method cannot be considered valid and should be improved or scrapped. LESSONS LEARNED As I learned in preparing to write Part Three of this paper, there exists a large body of literature documenting the efforts to desegregate public schools, both here and across the nation. These efforts yielded valuable lessons, and while not necessarily rising to the level of essential and fundamental, the accumulated knowledge from past efforts deserves to be acknowledged, respected,and judiciously applied going forward. Neighborhood schools. Americans prefer to have their children attending a school across the street rather than across the county. Desegregation efforts place their success at risk if they fail to acknowledge this reality, or if they are held captive by it, so creative reconciliation of these extremes will be required. Planners would do well to consider the possibility that, in the era of digital learning and online social networking, the school building as a self-contained, structural unit where pupils are permanently assigned and public education is situated may have outlived its usefulness. Curriculumanalysis. Because it initially evolved during the many decades of white hegemony and racial segregation, the modern curriculum has its roots in a predominantly European and white American perspective on most academic scholarship as well as children’s development. The education of
- 20. 20 everybody’s children with an eye toward excellence will necessitate an open-minded examination of the foundations upon which the public school curriculum is built, and a careful reconstruction that (a) preserves that which is essential, (b) adds what is more inclusive, and (c) can be shown by longitudinal studies to be effective in preparing children for greatness in their further education, career,and participation in the life of their family and community. Segregation within school. A considerable fraction of the resegregation of previously desegregated schools has occurred inside the school building itself. What was previously called tracking,now typically referred to as ability grouping has been shown to account for much of this internal segregation. Organization of students into classes and groups within classes must be flexible, based on valid criteria fairly applied, and continually examined to eliminate racial segregation. Practice makes perfect. Excellent schools for everybody’s children are made possible when schools employ and nurture racially and culturally diverse practitioners, the front-line staff in schools, who (a) base their practices on strong pedagogical content knowledge, (b) are afforded the time and resources to reflect and collaborate, (c) bring and express their diverse cultural traditions, (d) are supported by specialized professional staff, (e) are evaluated and led by wise, diverse, and compassionate leaders, and (f) are fairly and adequately compensated as professionals. The social and behavioral curriculum. An ever-increasing body of evidence indicates that Black students experience exclusionary discipline (suspension and expulsion) at rates both far out of proportion to their representation in schools and more severe than white students who exhibit the same behaviors. The social, behavioral, and emotional domains of child development, when treated as part of the school’s curriculum and therefore are taught rather than merely expected,support academic success as wellas the climate in schools. Success and equitable results have been demonstrated by schoolwide behavioral support plans that rely more on positive than punitive consequences. And finally: Process. Mindful of the enormity and complexity of the challenge, and remembering that the goal of ending segregation is probably not one that enjoys popular consensus,the work ahead must follow a carefully detailed and principled plan to set in motion a process that: draws on technical expertise from without and from within the community; places confidence, authority, and resources in the hands of visionary, optimistic, impatient, articulate, and determined leaders who are bound only by their commitment to fairness of process and equity of outcome; recognizes the necessity of slow but steady cultural change; commits to prioritizing the work for multiple years.
- 21. 21 The Missing Pages Afterword After completing the previous four parts of this paper, I realized that there were a few thoughts, some of a personal nature, that I had not included. In this afterword,I will offer one additional reflection. Why redesign? In Part Four I argued for the redesign of North Carolina’s system of public education; a radical proposition whose rationale is not self-evident. Is it really necessary,or might the aim of excellent schools for everybody’s children be reached by incremental modifications to the current system? As I read American history, it appears to be the case that when any racially segregated organization has made an attempt at integration, the basic premises, rules, and norms of that organization were never re- negotiated. The functions and standard practices of the organization remained as they were,as they had been determined from the inception, when the only people participating in the organization were white. So, when Black participants after a long period of exclusion, were finally invited in, they were expected to conform their participatory style to that of an organizational culture (a) to which their Black elders had been prohibited from contributing and (b) in which they are essentially aliens. When they inevitably and innocently challenged or violated some norm or rule of the previously all-white culture, they were at risk of being marginalized, punished, and ejected. An example from athletic competition may be useful here. Streetball. Most of us in North Carolina have at least some familiarity with the game of basketball as it is played by teams at the colleges and universities in our State. But how many of us have any familiarity with streetball,the game as it is played on the courts in predominantly Black, urban neighborhoods and towns? Streetball is the game that many of the most talented Black players grew up with. If they were good enough and fortunate enough to make it onto a school team,they had to leave their street game and culture at the door of the gym. The official white game evolved without key elements of the street game: dunking, music, nicknames, trash-talk and other methods to gain psychological advantage. The streetball example is intended not as an endorsement of either variation on the game, rather as an illustration of how desegregation has typically proceeded. Black participants have always been required to adjust and conform; white participants could continue as before, insulated from change by the all-purpose defense of the status quo: this is how it’s always been done. Therefore,in Part Four I argued for a process that would imagine public education as it might have looked had Black people been full participants in it from its beginning. A renegotiation of the premises, rules and norms of the State’s system of public education could be a way to avoid the kinds of severe discrepancies in educational opportunities that currently exist between white and Black students, and which have substantial impacts on each group’s achievement. Rethinking the goals and purposes of public schools with Black people in the room would allow for the possibility that some of the educational traditions from pre-colonial Africa and the culture of African Americans that evolved since 1619 might find their way into the methods of teaching, learning, and curriculum of the future. It’s even possible to think of such a process as a form of reparations; looking to the triumphs that await us in the future as a way of repairing the damage done in the past.
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