The “unequal” part was obvious, and even more glaring than the “separate”.

Looking at those pictures, I remembered a section of The Race Beat, a book I read recently about journalists who covered the civil rights movement, that described the efforts of some segregationists in both the North and South who were eager to spend more on schools for children of color, especially in the lead-up to the Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Because they were willing to pay a lot to maintain the status quo.

That’s how much maintaining an oppressive system was worth.

Holding hands with my son, who started Kindergarten in public school this year, I was thinking about those brave parents, the ones whose names are on the collection of lawsuits that, together, became known as Brown v. Board. And wondering whether they were ever tempted, as I would have been, if my child had been in that rickety schoolbuilding, to take the money.

Even knowing what it cost.

Obviously, our entire country has benefitted tremendously from their refusal to be bought. They understood that separate could never be equal, and they knew that their little boys and girls deserved integrated schools and the access to power and full participation that only integration can bring, rather than a spiffed-up segregated school, with better-paid teachers and textbooks in the classrooms.

They were right, and they were patient in that impatient about injustice but amazingly able to wait for real solutions way, and their intransigence was a witness that sparked the greatest movement for social equality our country has ever seen.

And the next thing I thought, as my son’s attention moved on to the next part of the exhibit, was…

I hope we can be as brave. And as tough. And as smart.

Times are tough, these days, for social service nonprofit organizations and for many of those we serve. We’re perennially out of money, and in begging-mode, and we are confronting serious challenges in a political context that’s often impervious to our sufferings.

That’s a dangerous combination, because it can breed a desperation that can push us to accept compromises that we know take us backwards, concessions that violate our most honored principles.

I see it when private organizations join together to pay for public services that the state has abandoned–we’re reaching for a Band-Aid because the need is so urgent, but we’re excusing public abdication of responsibilities core to our social contract.

I see it when organizations scramble to align themselves with even objectionable programming opportunities (“marriage promotion“, anyone?), because they’re trying to find ways to stay afloat, and to curry favor with government officials.

I even see it in myself, when I’m reluctant to take an Administration on on one front because we’re still negotiating on another–no, it’s not money at stake, but something arguably more valuable–my integrity.

I’m sure Linda Brown’s parents wanted her to go to a nice school. They may have even been approached with offers of upgrades, if they would just “be quiet”.

We need to all be thankful that they did not.

And we must, in the words of the song to which my 3 oldest kids and I danced in the gallery of the Brown site, in what used to be a school only for children with a certain color skin, we must not be moved.

Or bought.

This is not one of those posts with any helpful lessons to impart.

I hope that sometimes you find those, and I am more grateful than you can know for those who share their reactions to what I write, particularly as to how my thoughts at least occasionally contribute to your own journeys in advocacy, learning, community work, and the pursuit of justice.

But, today, I’m just perplexed.

Not too long ago, I was copied on an email from a teacher friend of mine who was asking her contacts to get involved in the ongoing debate over budgets at our local district and, particularly, at the state level. She wrote a little about the challenges she’s facing in her own classroom and emphasized the importance of parents and other teachers including their voices in the discussion over decisions that will shape our children’s futures.

You can see why we’re friends, right?

And I was also copied on the response to her from one of the recipients.

What struck me most was the line about how wrong it is that all of “these kids” are getting free and reduced lunch. Now, the nuance here, and what I’ve been mulling over, is that she wasn’t upset about her own child NOT getting free and reduced lunch. Her apparent anger, expressed on a computer screen, was not over some injustice visited upon her own family, but on the injustice she perceived in someone else’s receipt of something.

Now, to some extent, I get this: I’m upset, for example, when corporations get huge tax breaks that undermine our nation’s financial security, and it’s not because I think I should be getting one, too, but because I object to the basis on which that entitlement is granted.

And maybe that’s where her outrage is coming from, even though her email didn’t reference anything about the costs of the free and reduced lunch program, and even though (whether she knows it or not) our district actually gets more money because of the presence of these students–federal money pays for the meals themselves, and the students receive additional weightings in our school finance formula as “at-risk” students: money that the district then uses to fund our overall educational system, including that of her own child.

But a conversation I had with my own state representative the other day made me think that maybe it’s not even this “we can’t afford it so they shouldn’t get it” rationale, at least not explicitly. She and I were talking about our state’s instate tuition policy, her support of it, and some of the communications she has received from constituents about that support. Her exact quote was something along the lines of, “I can’t understand how people can be so upset about others getting something that doesn’t affect them at all. It’s like they want to deny it just for spite.”

When undocumented immigrants, even immigrant kids, are concerned, I certainly wouldn’t rule out the influence of spite.

And certainly it could be immigrant children and those who look like them who were in the mind of the woman upset about free lunches (the literal kind), too.

Because our instate tuition policy does not cost the state. The students pay full price, and our higher educational system isn’t funded on a per-pupil basis anyway. The universities themselves, who certainly wouldn’t support a policy that harmed them, have been the strongest supporters. And the constituents that are contacting my representative are, themselves, also eligible for instate tuition, if they chose to attend one of our state schools.

So they’re not upset because they aren’t getting something, and they can’t even be upset because they’re paying for someone else to get something.

Instead, it’s more of a scarcity thinking, kind of to the extreme, what I’ve been mentally labeling a “last one in shut the door behind you” mentality, that views one’s own gains in life as so precious that denying those same tools to others seems like the only way to preserve them.

And, I’ll admit. I just don’t get it.

I think that I need to, because this kind of thinking is finding its way into our public policies, and because I need to know how to advocate with those who have adopted this “I don’t need it but no one else should have it” rationale. But I can’t quite crack the code, so to speak, to figure out where to start. Which is why this post doesn’t have answers.

Please, wise readers: help me. Where have you encountered these same reactions, and to what do you attribute them? What am I missing that would make this make sense, and where do I start in building some bridges (at least in communication) with those who approach life from this perspective?

I have a crush on Jonathan Kozol. It’s OK; my husband knows all about it, and he’s fine with it. Seriously, any man who can say to conservative members of Congress, who challenge him that “throwing money at our failing schools isn’t going to solve the problem”: “Just try! Drop it from helicopters! Throw it at them! Let’s see what happens! It works for Harvard!” is a rock star in my book.

I’ve read all of his books, and they all made me mad. Most also made me write checks. All have made me ask hard questions about my own life and how I am, in many ways conscious and unconscious, contributing to the perpetuation of our nation’s greatest injustices.

But perhaps none hit as close to home as Shame of a Nation: The Restoring of Apartheid Schooling in America.

See, I just looked up the statistics, and, while I knew that the elementary school our kids will go to is mostly white, I didn’t know it was 94% white. I feel like writing that in huge letters, because it’s shocking. Even worse, the high school, with a much larger catchment area, that we really thought was fairly diverse, is 91% white. As in NINETY-ONE PERCENT WHITE. And how, exactly, do I expect my kids to receive a truly great education–not just with chess club and Spanish classes and an elementary science lab, which they will have, but with classmates who look like the United States of America–when more than 9/10 of those classmates are white? But more importantly, how do I expect other people’s children, children of color, to receive a truly great education when there are, by demographic eventuality, so few white kids left to go to their schools with them?

Kozol’s book starts with the assertion that we must name the problem ‘segregation’ in order to solve it, and 317 pages later, he really leaves no doubt. Our schools are systematically, almost intentionally, failing students of color, preparing them only for employment, not for democracy, and oftentimes not even preparing them well for employment. We’re teaching to the test, suppressing dissent, pretending that the civil rights movement is over, and thanking our ‘lucky stars’ that our kids go to the good (read: white) schools. We’re spending the few tax dollars that legislatures are willing to appropriate to buy highly regimented, patented curricula that actually reflect very low expectations for our children of color, and that drive the best teachers farther away from those struggling schools.

And then parents, not unlike me, move to places that have ‘good’ schools, where teachers can encourage kids to ask questions, where everyone gets a textbook, where it’s safe to go out to recess…and we take our tax dollars with us. We (okay, this part is not actually me) contribute to private foundations that funnel even more money to our kids’ schools, and then we act like they’re inherently smarter, more ambitious, more ‘scholarly’ than the kids who have been taught, from a young age, that they don’t matter. We know that our housing values are artificially high, in part, because inner-city schools are struggling; we see that we could get a lot more house on the other side of the state line, and that feels yucky. We hope that our kids won’t stare when we see black people, that they’ll know how to exist in a multicultural society, that they’ll somehow learn what we say and not what we do, and we feel pretty horrible about it.

And it looks a whole lot like 1953. And now I have to figure out what to do about it, not just as a Board member of an organization that fights for equity and excellence in Kansas schools and an advocate for social justice, but also as a mom.

photo credit, The Future, by Denkyem84, via Flickr

It’s been more than a year since so many of you weighed in on my struggles around where and how to educate my kids–how I’m torn between the advantages that they may accrue in the public schools where we live now, and my growing angst over the social costs of such a racially-exclusive environment.

And, no, I haven’t reached some happy conclusion.

Really, I’m more conflicted than ever.

I read a disturbing piece of the book Blink about the conclusive psychological research demonstrating how the racial stereotypes we all hold influence even our most subconscious decisions. It’s sobering for us all.

More alarming for me, though, was the research on how we can consciously influence these internal processes, by priming our minds to approach race, and racial difference, differently.

How does such priming occur?

Through intense and sustained positive interactions with people of different races, of course.

And what, precisely, are my kids likely to be denied, at least through their schooling, given the dire demographics?

Yeah.

As a parent, I want to give my children the best.

Not the best toys, certainly (we wouldn’t even know what those are, since we don’t watch TV!), but the best chance–to learn, to grow, to experience a full and wonderful life.

That requires a good school, certainly. But don’t I also want them to have the best chance, at least the best fighting shot at it that any of us can hope for, to beat back the demons of racial prejudice that so plague much of humanity?

It has already started, certainly, the awareness of divisions. My oldest son remarked how one of his friends at ‘nature camp’ (a boy of Indian-American descent) has “darker skin than mine, but lighter skin than Hayden (an African-American friend)…it’s funny, Mommy, because his skin is kind of the same color as Grandpa George’s (my husband’s maternal grandfather is Mexican), but they don’t know each other!”

Indeed, this sophisticated classification of skin tone gradients.

At the same time, there’s a definite opening now, an innate sense of fairness that is part developmental stage and part, I suspect, a product of our influence on them.

I was preparing to go to a pro-immigrant protest, and Sam asked me where I was going.

“I need to stand up against a man who doesn’t like people who come from other countries, to show that I won’t accept that in our community.”

“Why, Mommy?” he asked. “Why am I going?” I asked.

“No,” Sam said softly. “Why would anyone not like someone from another country?”

What’s the best answer, for influencing their minds and hearts so that, in the blink of an eye, they’ll always see justice and fellowship and equality?

Science, and human instinct, tell us it’s a multiracial environment, the likes of which are rare in this highly segregated and stratified society, a search even further complicated because we also want for them a chance to learn the knowledge and skills that they’ll need to succeed.

Gladwell’s book is subtitled, The Power of Thinking without Thinking. But this is one dilemma I can’t seem to think, or unthink, my way around.

The more that I’ve learned about the workings of our public education system, and the more that I’ve experienced the connections between that education and how children succeed (or don’t) in the larger society, the more I’ve come to see school finance as a critical social justice issue.

Here in Kansas, our legislative session starts next Monday, and revising the school finance formula is expected to feature heavily in the session. There’s a real threat, in particular, that legislators from wealthier suburban districts (including, most prominently, my own) will push for more “local control” (read: local funding, as contrasted with a centralized state funding scheme) for school districts. It hasn’t made me that popular within my neighborhood, or on the Board of the PTA where I serve, but I’ve been saying often that, while that might make sense (at least temporarily, and at least if our property values don’t plummet, which seems like a lot of “maybe” to me) for our own district, it would be disastrous for much of the state.

Perhaps even more importantly, it would reflect a fundamental abdication of our responsibilities as part of a common society. And it would take us farther down a road of injustice.

Preparing for this legislative session, then, I was particularly intrigued by a recent National Report Card on school funding fairness. The methodology for this report card has key strengths that other attempts to quantify and qualify school funding have not, including the ability to measure funding equity among districts within a state, and to assess the extent to which a state’s school funding levels compensate for child poverty and other obstacles to learning.

I can’t honestly say that I think that my legislative delegation will be tremendously responsive to these data, but I do intend to use them to make the case with parents and patrons:

Yes, we all want our own children to go to “good” schools. But we also want our children to graduate into a world with other children who also went to good schools. And, like it or not, a centralized funding mechanism that attempts to account for some of the great disparities among local areas is the only way to achieve that.

Some of the key findings for my home state of Kansas:

Kansas earned a B in state effort, which is measured by education spending as a percentage of real GDP. Given our current budget struggles, though, and the vow of the new Governor not to raise any taxes, I wonder how we’ll score a few years from now.

The Report Card reiterates what should be accepted fact: Of course sufficient school funding doesn’t guarantee quality education. Of course we need to pay attention to how districts are spending dollars, and how well teachers are trained, and what efficiency measures there might be. Of course. But of course adequate funding levels, fairly distributed, are “essential preconditions” for the delivery of a high-quality education.

And until we’re guaranteeing that, the rest of those measures of “success” will remain elusive.

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So Jonathan Kozol’s The Shame of a Nation didn’t just make me question my own children’s educational futures in their very white schools. It also made me very, very, very angry at the Supreme Court.

In June 2007, the U.S. Supreme Court dealt a potentially fatal blow to one of our nation’s most foundational court decisions and to the bedrock of educational equity in modern U.S. society. The Court overturned two lower court opinions that allow local school districts to develop and implement integration plans to achieve educational equity through racial balancing. Even more perverse than the decision itself was the fact that the conservative majority of the Court opined in its opinion that this ruling was somehow in keeping with the spirit of Brown v. Topeka Board of Education and quoted from the landmark case. I hated the decision at the time, perhaps especially from my vantage point as an advocate from the home state of the Brown decision, but I grew to hate it more and more and more as I read Kozol’s forays into highly segregated schools and reflected on how the Supreme Court has, essentially, issued a ruling more in keeping with Plessy v. Ferguson, claiming that, despite all we have learned about the evils of segregation, that separate can be equal.

Segregated schools, we have to remember, are not only severe societal ills in and of themselves. They also foment division and continued injustice throughout life, both as a result of the inferior educations afforded in all-’minority’ schools, and because, without the opportunities to learn alongside each other, today’s youth are likely to perpetuate racial division as they grow. The return of ‘apartheid schooling’ is also a moral defeat for the forces of civil rights; as one of the most visible and hardest-fought victories, its erosion today takes an inevitable toll on the continued momentum for justice. As Kozol writes, “I cannot discern the slightest hint that any vestige of the legal victory embodied in Brown v. Board of Education or the moral mandate that a generation of unselfish activists and young idealists lives and sometimes died for has survived within these schools and neighborhoods.” That’s ugly. And it has serious consequences. How can we build a thriving democracy without the full contributions of our youth of color?

Kozol’s book was published in 2005, prior to these turn-back-the-clock decisions and shortly after the related court decisions that dismantled much of the Affirmative Action framework that was starting to ensure a pipeline of highly-educated leaders of color for our classrooms and central offices and statehouses. That knowledge made me cringe, wondering how much worse things may get, now that school districts have lost some of their more effective tools for achieving integration, even against public will. Kozol is honest about the political and even practical difficulties in achieving real integration, especially in light of increasing residential segregation, and we as social justice advocates have to be also. But we also have to be honest about the costs of succumbing to these difficulties, about the destruction of young lives and entire communities, and the decimation of our hopes for a recovery from racism. And, as Kozol points out, the idea that institutionalized racism could be dismantled in the South seemed quite improbable, even impossible, 60 years ago, too.

The U.S. Supreme Court is surely not solely to blame for this resegregation of American schools. By failing to provide financial incentives for integration, or even to fully fund schools populated by students of color, Congress shares some of the fault. So, too, do urban planners and real estate developers, inadequately courageous school personnel, and suburban parents like me. But the reason that we have a judicial system in the first place is so that these crucially important issues of social justice, vulnerable to political pressures, can be decided in the light of our constitutional protections rather than the whims of the electorate or the fear of the cowardly many.

And they’re not doing their job.

So, now, rather than integration, which really was working during the very few years and in the relatively few places that it was energetically pursued, we have ‘school reform’, euphemistic and cynical attempts to give students of color as equal an education possible in a segregated environment. We smile and say that ‘money isn’t everything’ when talking about underfunded, minority-heavy schools, while fighting to the death over school funding for our kids’ schools (where, apparently, money does matter?). We intervene all the time in these schools when it comes to standards and scrutiny, but then call for ‘local control’ on issues of funding equity. We administer the same standardized tests to students of color and call it accountability, without ever holding ourselves or our elected officials accountable for providing real educational opportunities to those kids before testing day. We pretend that technology, or having an African-American President, or something else makes today fundamentally different than 1953, and that, somehow, today, separate can be equal.

We, in essence, lie, to ourselves and to our children, and the U.S. Supreme Court has decided to go along with it. And, so, when social workers wonder why the judicial system matters, or how it really impacts social policy, I wish that I could speak just in vague generalities, or speak just about the past: about Brown v. Board, about welfare rights, about those cases back then. But, unfortunately, we need look no further than our classrooms, and what our nation has decided to do to children of color.

But all is not lost. If the third branch of government isn’t going to fulfill its role, then it is again going to depend on the ultimate moral watchdog: the consciences of people of good will, those of us committed to social justice and capable of mustering moral outrage at what is surely an abomination. It wouldn’t be the first time that the purportedly apolitical Supreme Court has followed, not led, the call for justice from the streets. What we need, as Kozol persuasively states, is a good battle cry. And ‘adequacy’ isn’t going to cut it. We have to call segregation racism, and call that racism wrong, and take a stand for the future of our children, and those children we are reluctant to claim. We owe it to them, and we owe it to Linda Brown, her parents, and other warriors for justice who dared to state the obvious: separate was not, is not, and can never be equal.

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