05.17.04 - 11:38 p.m.

...and, a big fat happy fiftieth anniversary to the Brown v. Board of Education decision, which was handed down - unanimously - today, fifty years ago. It's hard for me, now, to believe that it really was that long ago, even though it's equally shocking that less than a generation ago, Jim Crow laws were still in very real force.

There are many stories to tell about Brown v. Board of Education. The first story involves the history of the civil rights movement up until 1954, the NAACP's long, slow road to '54, and the individual stories of the individual who challenged the "seperate but equal" segregated school systems in the south and midwest. I've heard a number of these over the past monthish, and these are important to personalize the system. How do you grasp slavery or the holocaust? How do you grasp the cost of Jim Crow? There are statistics, of course. There are always statistics, but statistics are so disreputable, now. Tell me what you want to know, what you want to argue, what you want to say, and I will find some study or other that supports your position. So, individual stories - and not just of blacks, but of whites, and not just of the whites who fought segration, but those who supported it. History isn't just some endless iteration of heros and villains. It's all about ordinary people engaged in ordinary pursuits supporting the insupportable, in many cases. We have the luxury of distance and time: how do you shape yourself into the person you think you should be without that distance? How do you grapple with your history after you've made it?

So: those are stories, and important ones. On the anniversary of Brown v. Board of Education, though, I think those stories are self-congratulatory and self-important stories, the kind politicians tell in hopes that some of that aura of sacrifice and nobility will wear off on them, the kind of stories that allow them to ignore the real one, the one that should be staring them hard in the face, that our schools are becoming re-segragated, and have been for 20 years.

Strange, isn't it? What couldn't be accomplished via official channels can be accomplished via unofficial channels, the rise of the suburbs, the traps of the ghettos. Education is the way out, right? Except, when the schools are awful and no one around you is interested in learning...

...the most recent studies show that racial integration doesn't raise test scores and academic achievement among blacks when the economic class of the group remains the same. In other words, schools with large numbers of poor kids are bad for kids, whether black or white. The trouble is that most of the schools with high concentrations of poverty tend to be in poor minority neighborhoods. There are some high poverty schools that are mostly white, and I assume that these schools are in rural areas for the most part.

So, anyway, intergrating on an ECONOMIC basis - mixing poor and middle class students - is best for student achievement among poor students. That should be self-evidence, but one supposes it's not. In any case, some school districts are mandating, now, no more high poverty schools. In other words, schools have to have a mix of income levels. That, at least, gives the best poor students the opportunity to escape circumstances. I'm not sure, though, what can be done beyond that. I would like it if more people were concerned with the lives of very low wage earners, who are a significant portion of the population, but it's an invisible problem, or so it seems.