Racism, Segregation, and Inequality in Urban Public Schools

Introduction: Structural Racism and Educational Inequality

Massive institutional racism and structural inequalities still exist in the United States, especially in housing, public education, and the criminal justice system in inner-city areas. In every urban area, the quality of education available to poor and minority students is demonstrably worse by any measure than that of their white peers in the suburbs. This type of institutional discrimination is not caused by genetic or cultural deprivation but by the fact that the U.S. has always been — and remains — a highly segregated and unequal society based on race and social class. Of course, this violates the liberal, egalitarian, and meritocratic ideals on which the nation was supposedly founded, but the U.S. managed to survive with slavery for almost a hundred years after its founding and with legal segregation and disenfranchisement of Black Americans for a hundred years after that.

Cities like Chicago, Detroit, East St. Louis, and Camden, New Jersey all have crumbling public school systems serving mostly Black and Hispanic students, funded at levels far below those of white suburban districts. As Jonathan Kozol documented, ghetto neighborhoods also lack banks, supermarkets, parks, and other public services, and have high levels of crime, gang activity, unemployment, and drug dealing (Kozol, 1991). Detroit serves as a particularly egregious example of structural racism, segregation, and unequal funding between urban and suburban schools, and was also ground zero for the Bradley v. Milliken case in the 1970s that effectively ended any new attempts at busing or school integration in urban America. The same problems that existed in the 1960s and 1970s remain — and are indeed worse than ever. The proposed solutions have all been attempted in the past and usually blocked by suburban whites. No one is seriously attempting to implement school integration today, or even a policy of equalized funding for minority schools, although both measures certainly should be pursued.

History of Segregation and Inequality in Urban Public Schools

Detroit is a classic Rust Belt city that has lost most of its industrial base over the last thirty years and was driven nearly into bankruptcy during the recent recession. It also has a long history of racial segregation and violence, while its public education system is among the worst in the country. In 1980–1990 alone the city lost one-sixth of its population, and over one-third of its residents lived in poverty. By contrast, the white suburbs were relatively affluent. As with all American cities, residential segregation was nearly absolute: the Detroit suburbs were 95% white while the inner city was 76% Black. Almost half of the children in the city lived in poverty compared to 10% in the suburbs, and Detroit long ago earned the reputation as the "first Third World city" in the U.S., though it was by no means the last (Farley et al., 2000, p. 4). Suburban schools have always reflected — and reinforced — the general social and economic conditions of the Detroit area, remaining as segregated as the communities themselves.

Detroit's history as the Motor City began in 1908 with the development of the assembly line. In both world wars, the motor industry expanded greatly and recruited Black workers and poor whites from the South in large numbers, although Black workers were confined to the lowest-paying unskilled jobs. Up to the 1930s, Ford and the other auto manufacturers resisted unionization with great violence until the sit-down strikes of 1937. Industrial unions like the United Auto Workers (UAW) negotiated generous pay and benefits for their members, lifting workers out of poverty and into the middle class for the first time in American history. As those jobs began to disappear in the 1970s — casualties of oil shocks and competition from Asian manufacturers — so did the factories and well-paying union positions in Detroit. Whites also moved to the suburbs after 1945, neighborhoods that remained almost completely closed to Black families, and between 1950 and 1990 the white population of Detroit fell by 85% (Farley et al., p. 10).

White flight accelerated rapidly after the 1967 riots, which left much of the inner city devastated, to the point where fewer than 10% of whites in the metropolitan area still lived in the city by 1990. White incomes doubled between 1950 and 1990 while Black incomes actually decreased; on average, family incomes in the suburbs were twice as high as those of inner-city Black families (Farley et al., p. 50). Thus the pattern of Black poverty, segregated housing and schools, and a failing public education system in the inner city was set decades ago. Short of the city annexing the suburbs — which it has not been permitted to do since 1926 — or a major influx of federal resources to reduce these inequalities, this situation is not going to change in any meaningful way. Since the 1960s, when the civil rights movement ended in urban riots and the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., there has been no political will in the United States to address these problems of poverty, racism, inequality, and segregation. At best, the minority populations of the inner cities have been treated as a problem of social control and law enforcement.

In Savage Inequalities, Jonathan Kozol offered a devastating description of public schools in inner-city ghettos. Chicago, Detroit, East St. Louis, and Camden, New Jersey all have crumbling public school systems serving mostly Black and Hispanic students, funded at levels far below those of white suburban districts. Like Detroit, they are all Rust Belt cities from which industry fled decades ago, leaving behind the poor, the disadvantaged, and minorities who were unable to escape. These ghetto neighborhoods also lack banks, supermarkets, parks, and other public services, and have high levels of crime, gang activity, unemployment, and drug dealing. Public schools in these cities represent a truly illiberal form of education in which not even a pretense of meritocracy exists. Kozol asks rhetorically whether Americans even believe in equality at all; judging from the condition of these public schools, the answer would seem to be no. Everyone even slightly familiar with these urban public schools knows that they are "closely tied to class and race" (Kozol, 1991, p. 60). Most lack adequate textbooks and equipment, and even functioning playgrounds and bathroom facilities. Almost none of their students go on to higher education, and dropout rates are often as high as 80–90%.

In absolutely every case, the quality of education available to poor and minority students is demonstrably poorer than that of their white peers in the suburbs, as researchers like Jonathan Kozol have documented repeatedly. This is not caused by genetic or cultural deprivation but by the fact that the U.S. has always been and remains a highly segregated and unequal society based on race and social class (Ryan, 1976, p. 16). This reality violates the liberal, egalitarian, and meritocratic ideals on which the nation was supposedly founded, but such hypocrisy has rarely seemed to disturb most white Americans in the middle and upper classes. Meritocracy in the United States has always been a myth in the sense that equal opportunity regardless of color or social class has never truly existed (McNamee and Miller, 2004). Students who graduate from these schools will be lucky to read at an elementary school level, and by 5th or 6th grade they realize they are being cheated and do not have nearly the same educational opportunities as white students in suburban schools. The disparities are so great that inner-city and suburban students might as well be living in separate countries. Only the threat of lawsuits or shutdowns by state and federal officials brings about even slight improvements in schools like these, because there is simply not enough money to go around.

Proposed Policies for Reform

Strong democracy in inner-city public schools requires the empowerment and mobilization of low-income, minority, youth, and other marginalized and underrepresented groups who are being poorly served by the present segregated system. Major public policy decisions that affect the poor, the marginalized, and minorities require the active participation of all sectors of society. Reform also requires changes in curriculum and pedagogy so that these reflect the values of strong democracy and maximum participation by groups that are presently ignored and marginalized. To accomplish this end, the following recommendations should be enacted:

• Renewed efforts to integrate inner-city and suburban schools through busing, exchange programs, or attracting larger numbers of white families or immigrants back to the inner city.

• Abandoning the system of property-tax-based school funding and seeking more resources from state and federal governments to equalize per-capita student spending in urban and suburban schools.

• Developing a strong democracy through a truly innovative and progressive curriculum that will empower students and help more of them advance to higher education. This curriculum would emphasize civics and active citizen participation in political and economic life, as well as the history and contemporary struggles of the poor, minorities, and the working class.

• Changes in pedagogy that move away from the teacher-centered to the student-centered classroom, encouraging more active participation by students and parents in the learning process, school administration, and curriculum development.

• Seeking more state, federal, and private funding for improved textbooks and other learning resources, computers, school supplies, and laboratory equipment.

States pay about 50% of the budgets in these inner-city schools and the federal government about 6%, but these funds are never sufficient to come close to evening out the disparities with white suburban schools. Since funding is based on property taxes and the value of property is much lower in segregated urban communities, this funding structure is "the decisive force in shaping inequality" (Kozol, p. 55). Even though property taxes tend to be higher in large cities, those cities also bear much higher costs for police, fire services, and public health care than the suburbs, so schools often get shortchanged. Since the federal government permits tax deductions for property taxes and mortgage interest payments, this arrangement has amounted to a de facto subsidy for segregation and inequality. In 1984, these federal deductions totaled $41 billion while federal aid to public schools was only $7 billion.

Kozol is correct in insisting that social inequality is the norm in the United States and will never be repaired by changes in teachers, pedagogy, tests, or classroom methods alone. He points out that "there are wonderful teachers…almost everywhere in urban schools, and sometimes a number of such teachers in a single school," but this is not the norm by any stretch of the imagination (Kozol, p. 51). Inner-city school teachers are older and badly paid compared to those in the suburbs, and cities rely heavily on poorly paid substitutes and part-time teachers. These schools have no funds for remedial classes, sports facilities, libraries, or textbooks. No parents with resources would ever send their children to schools like these if they had any other choice, and few teachers would work there unless they were unable to find employment elsewhere. Unfortunately, the majority simply pass students from one grade to the next, expecting little of poor and minority students.

In the 1960s, New Left community organizers working in inner-city ghettos used the term participatory democracy to describe their vision of a new society in which the poor, minorities, and working class would take control of the institutions that affected their lives, including public schools. This is what Benjamin R. Barber refers to as a "strong democracy" in which "every member of the community participates in self-governance" (Barber, 1989, p. 355). Obviously this is a far cry from the situation in segregated ghettos today, and indeed the vision of an activist, mobilized citizenry in these places was hardly welcome to police and government officials in the 1960s and 1970s. In a strong democracy, the people would not be passive spectators merely voting for representatives every few years and then allowing them to govern. In this broad and expansive democratic vision, public talk would not be limited to the well-off, educated, and articulate, but all would be invited into the conversation (Bauman, 2001, p. 16). Nor would elites do all the talking and force the masses simply to listen — any more than a teacher in a classroom would lecture while students sat quietly taking notes. It would go beyond a liberal theory of competing factions, parties, and self-interested individuals as "passive consumers of political services" and instead consider broader ideas about the meaning of a good society (Barber, p. 356).

Jean Anyon is correct that the purpose of public education in America is social reproduction and reinforcement of the class system that already exists. Schools perpetuate this system by teaching working-class children through rote memorization and drills to perform menial tasks under instructions from superiors, while those from the middle and professional classes are taught from an earlier age to be more creative and imaginative, to make connections, think in broader terms, and operate more independently. As for the poorest of the poor and minorities in segregated ghettos, the dysfunctional schools there hardly teach them anything at all, and simply continue the system of segregation, marginalization, and absolute inequality. Public education in the U.S. is based on "an unequal system of social classes" in which the children of the middle and upper classes are channeled to universities and the working class into service, industrial, and technical occupations (Anyon, 1981, p. 210).

Progressive educators should be aware of this social process and intervene with a transformational pedagogy, at least in schools where the administration permits it. In working-class schools, this means breaking with methods like lecture-and-copy, rote memorization, and directed activities in favor of those that encourage reflection, creativity, and imagination. These students are only being prepared for "mechanical routine work procedures," with minimal civics and social studies education that emphasizes facts and dates without context or discussion of ideologies and social systems (Anyon, p. 212). Such curricula do not teach the history of strikes, working-class movements, or slave revolts, nor do they assume that most students will ever attend college, where they might encounter these subjects. Unlike their middle- and upper-class peers, working-class students receive almost no information about other civilizations, cultures, or religions, or even about capitalist institutions like banks and corporations, and their teachers had little enthusiasm for offering them anything beyond the basics in a heavily dumbed-down form. At some point these students become vaguely aware of exactly what their future place in society is likely to be; even though they may dislike this and rebel against it, their resistance is ultimately ineffective.

Students from middle-class and professional backgrounds are more likely to be taught through creative writing, essays, special projects, and individual and group activities. Depending on the school and the desires of parents and administrators, this type of schooling may also be constrained by the need to pass standardized tests and gain admission to selective colleges (Anyon, p. 214). Social studies classes in these settings placed more emphasis on comparative cultures and civilizations, as well as explaining systems and ideologies like capitalism, communism, and socialism. In contrast to the physical rebellion, withdrawal, and apathy found in working-class schools, opposition in these more privileged environments tended toward "extreme individualism or narcissism" (Anyon, p. 217). These students were more adept at finding ways to play or manipulate the system to their advantage — itself an important part of their socially reproductive education.

Conclusion

Racism today is not as strong a force as it was 50 or 100 years ago in the United States or the rest of the world, whether defined as personal prejudices, feelings of group superiority and entitlement to power, or a formal ideology. In history, Nazi Germany represented the most extreme and genocidal form of racist oppression, and its defeat in 1945 opened the door to antiracist and anticolonial movements around the world. Structural and institutional racism still exist in the United States, particularly against Black Americans, although racist attitudes are no longer expressed as openly as they once were. In academic and professional fields such as law, sociology, political science, and anthropology — where racist ideas were once the norm — they have long since lost all public respectability. Even so, the course of both cultural and structural assimilation has been highly uneven in the U.S., with even culturally assimilated groups like Black and Native Americans still facing high levels of discrimination and inequality. Integration of these groups has not yet occurred in public education, or in the larger economy and society.

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