Resegregation

I read an article today about the “fast clip” at which U.S. schools have been “resegregating themselves for the past 15 years or so”. Please check out the full article here -

Young, Brown and Weird

In the article the author states that:

“Ever since the initial breakthroughs in the years following Brown v. Board, schools have been tending toward resegregation through redistricting, strategic community planning, and prohibitive housing costs. In some school counties now it’s Jim Crow in all but name, and that’s a real shame. Diversifying schools gives more minorities the resources to earn their way to college in a less symbolically violent atmosphere. It’s going to take effort on all levels – policy, institutions, community, and individual – to reintegrate neighborhoods and schools in a meaningful and lasting way.”

Coincidently, tonight I finished a chapter on education in Murray Rothbard’s book – For a New Liberty.

While the author of Young, Brown and Weird, Anna Almendrala, is content to urge unspecified changes “on all levels – policy, institutions, community, and individual”, Rothbard digs much deeper, right down to the root of the problem itself. According to Rothbard, “the very nature of the public school requires the imposition of uniformity and the stamping out of diversity and individuality in education.”

So for Rothrbard, there is something deep within the “DNA” of a public school that resists the diversity that Almendrala believes is lacking. One very influential component of this DNA would have to be the system of districting that most public schools rely upon to carve out their student body from the wider population of the city in which they are located. Rothbard states:

“bureaucratic convenience has invariably led the states to prescribe geographical public school districts, to place one school in each district, and then to force each public school child to attend school in the district closest to his residence. While in a free private school market most children would undoubtedly attend schools near their homes, the present system compels a monopoly of one school per district, and thereby coerces uniformity throughout each area. Children who, for whatever reason, would prefer to attend a school in another district are prohibited from doing so. The result is enforced geographic homogeneity, and it also means that the character of each school is completely dependent on its residential neighborhood. It is then inevita­ble that public schools, instead of being totally uniform, will be uniform within each district, and the composition of pupils, the financing of each school, and the quality of education will come to depend upon the values, the wealth, and the tax base, of each geographical area. The fact that wealthy school districts will have costlier and higher-quality teaching, higher teaching salaries, and better working conditions than the poorer districts, then becomes inevitable. Teachers will regard the better schools as the superior teaching posts, and the better teachers will gravitate to the better school districts, while the poorer ones must remain in the lower-income areas. Hence, the operation of district public schools inevi­tably results in the negation of the very egalitarian goal which is sup­posed to be a major aim of the public school system in the first place.”

There is indeed much more to the DNA of a public school than simply the districting system, and Rothbard analyzes many of the complex issues involved in a most illuminating fashion. If you’re at all concerned with the process of resegregation that Almendrala laments, I would highly suggest taking some time to read and contemplate the entire chapter – For a New Liberty – Education.