One of the experts who's lived through it explains where we are and how we got here
One of the most common problems for those involved in contentious policy debates is a lack of historical perspective. For those with little or no memory of the events that led up to present-day controversies, it's often difficult to see the forest for the trees. Lacking an understanding of how the present circumstances came about, they often act as if there were no precedent for solving the problems at-hand or, worse yet, act to undo important accomplishments.
The ongoing controversy surrounding North Carolina's public schools and the headlong drive to end socioeconomic integration is one such issue. While some of the people behind that misguided effort are simply driven by a repugnant ideology, many others have gone along with the effort simply because they didn't understand how we got where we are today. These folks don't necessarily share the goals of the conservative ideologues, they're just worried about themselves and their kids and are either too young or too new to the issue (or too new to North Carolina) to understand what's really at-stake.
Fortunately, there are ways to remedy this problem. Last week, for example, North Carolinians were given a gift that will, if they accept it, help to cure the widespread amnesia and lack of knowledge that afflicts the debate over the schools. The gift was a history lesson in the form of a lecture delivered by a special man, Dean Jack Boger of the UNC School of Law.
The talk ought to be required reading for anyone who wants to take part in pubic education policy debates in our state. And happily, we've been able to post the entire transcript on the N.C. Policy Watch website. You can read it by clicking here.
In the talk, Boger explores the history of public education ("common schooling" as it was originally known) in the United States and explains how the current debates over socioeconomic integration that are causing such a hubbub in North Carolina today may well serve as bellwethers for its very survival.
Here are just some of the highlights of what you'll find in this rich and powerful document:
The commitment to "common schooling"
After tracing the history of American "common schooling" to the work of a Massachusetts reformer (and the nation's first state schools superintendent) named Horace Mann, Boger turns to North Carolina:
"In North Carolina, it was Calvin Wiley, a lawyer and legislator who was appointed this State's first state school superintendent in 1852, who traveled the Old North State tirelessly. ‘With infinite labor, by travel, speeches, and writings,' an historian wrote in the 1964 Peabody Journal of Education, ‘Wiley overcame opposition to and popularized public schools. The North Carolina system was the best in the South in 1860….' Notably, in his 1860 report to the State, Superintendent Wiley cautioned ‘that there is as much danger from prejudice between the rich and poor as between master and slave.' ‘The peace of every social system,' he wrote, ‘depends upon a just recognition of the mutual dependence of every rank on the other and of the mutual obligations which this imposes . . . . And all attempts . . . . to widen the breach between classes of citizens are just as dangerous as efforts to excite slaves to insurrection.'
That was in 1860, a year before the Civil War. One hundred and fifty years later, it seems, we are again testing, in our two largest metropolitan school districts, the wisdom, or the folly, of Superintendent Wiley's warning."
Modern applications
Most of Boger's lecture is taken up with an explanation of the 56 years that have followed the Supreme Court's landmark school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education. In it, Boger documents the tortuous history of desegregation in North Carolina, including the famous Swann case that helped integrate the Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools, as well as his own role in the work.
Perhaps most striking in this discussion, however, is Boger's description of his work in the state of Connecticut in the early 1980's where, as counsel to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, the then-young North Carolinian learned some of the hard facts about school integration. Boger explains how Connecticut, a very rich but very segregated state was failing to solve the problem of low achieving inner-city schools despite determined efforts and the infusion of huge resources.
"Thus for every State dollar sent to a suburban school where a middle-class child was doing well, Connecticut sent literally 50% more, toward schools that were educating each low-performing, lower income children. In addition, the Connecticut legislature had adopted many special grant programs-remedial assistance, dropout prevention, health services-that strongly favored either low-wealth districts or districts with poorer and low-achieving students, or both. Under these combined state aid programs, the Hartford school district regularly received nearly three times as much State funding, per pupil, as did suburban districts. Only one minor problem remained: none of it was working to improve educational performance in Connecticut's largest urban districts."
In effect, like Charlotte's re-segregated schools of today, Connecticut was attempting to "throw a lot of money over the wall" in an effort to solve the problem of low-achieving schools without taking the step of true socio-economic integration. This, of course, is what has been proposed for Wake County by some members of the new, conservative school board majority.
It was in the work to grapple with that situation that Boger and his colleagues rediscovered the research of social scientists who had found that the solution to such situations was not more money, but more integration. He quotes a 1965 Congressional study that found that:
"Attributes of other students account for far more variation in the achievement of minority group children than do any attributes of school facilities and slightly more than do attributes of staff."
When this realization dawned on Boger, he says he remembered thinking "thank goodness that southern school desegregation had already done its work." Little did he know, of course, that determined conservative advocates would continue to do their worst to roll back the progress that so many had fought to achieve.
Where we are and where we're going
At the end of the lecture, Boger ties the Connecticut experience to what's going on in North Carolina today. He quotes a meticulous 2008 study from two North Carolina academics that confirmed, yet again, the simple and undeniable truth that integration is essential:
"Even after taking into account these effects of individual student characteristics, higher concentrations of poor and minority students within a high school reduce average EOC scores. In other words, low-income students perform worse on EOC exams when they are in schools with high percentages of other low-income students. . . . The combined effects of students' individual characteristics and the overall composition of a high school's student population are extremely powerful influences on the average level of academic performance in that school…. [L]ocal school districts have the best chance for improving academic performance in North Carolina's high schools by undertaking the following actions. [first] reducing [the] concentration of students with low entering skills and from low-income families, [second] increasing spending on regular instruction, [third] improving teacher quality, and [fourth] improving principal leadership."
In short, what's going on in Wake County right now is a misguided effort to repeal the use of the one tactic that's done more than anything else to make our schools work for all children. As Boger puts it:
"In other words, Wake County committed itself self-consciously to Horace Mann's ideal of ‘common schools,' designed to bring together children from all socioeconomic backgrounds,, and they likewise assured parents that the percentage of low-performing students in their child's school would be capped, so there would be no low-performing school, no ‘academic genocide' [Judge Howard Manning's term for the state education's system's failings in many places] underway in Wake County."
Though ultimately hopeful, Boger's conclusion features a warning in the form of a 1974 quote from the late, great Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall:
"In the short run, it may seem to be the easier course to allow our great metropolitan areas to be divided up, each into two cities – one white, the other black – but it is a course, I predict, our people will ultimately regret."
Marshall was right, of course. Let's hope the people of North Carolina rediscover his and Jack Boger's wisdom on the matter before it's too late.
