Ruby Bridges, 6, integrated a previously all-white New Orleans school in 1960.
White liberals perpetuate segregation, charged journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones in a lecture at Yale, reports Christopher Peak in the New Haven Independent. White parents don’t send their children to predominantly black or brown schools, she said.
Desegregation peaked in 1988, Hannah-Jones said. That year, the national achievement gap on reading scores was half of what it was in 1971 — the smallest it ever was and has been since. Studies showed the effects of desegregation lasted for a generation, with the black children who went to diverse schools more likely to graduate from college, rise out of poverty, move to integrated neighborhoods and live longer, said Hannah-Jones, who herself rode a bus for two hours every day to go to a predominantly white high school in Iowa.
No education reform has closed the racial achievement gap has much as desegregating schools, Hannah-Jones said.
She challenged white, left-leaning parents to stop sending their children to exclusive schools, where racial minorities are kept out.
As a black parent, she “chose to send her daughter to a segregated school in Brooklyn rather than the magnet schools, gifted-and-talented programs and private institutions that her friends (and even the experts studying segregation) picked for their own kids,” writes Peak.
Across the country, U.S. schools are almost as segregated as they were in 1954, writes Alexander Nazaryan in Newsweek.
Charlotte, North Carolina, once “the city that made desegregation work,” now has low-poverty, mostly white schools and high-poverty, mostly black and Hispanic schools, concluded a district report, Breaking the Link. “If you are born poor in Charlotte, you are likely to stay that way.”